EL PASO (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 09th January, 2023) US President Joe Biden, while visiting the US southern border for the first time as US president, told reporters that he learned more resources are needed to address the recording-breaking levels of arriving migrants over the last two years, according to the White House press pool.
"They need a lot of resources. We're going to get if for them," Biden said on Sunday, as quoted by the press pool.
Upon landing in El Paso, Biden visited a US port of entry on the US-Mexico border and walked along a portion of the US border wall with several Border Patrol agents, according to the press pool.
After assessing US Customs and Border Protection operations, Biden met with social workers who assist migrants in El Paso. They informed him that on an average day about 300 to 500 migrants come to their shelter, but they also have peaks of about 1,000 migrants per day sometimes.
The local officials at the El Paso County Migrant Services Center told Biden they urgently needed more funding to cope with the influx of migrants receiving their services, the press pool said.
However, it did not appear Biden got a glimpse of the hundreds of migrants who were left out in downtown El Paso in freezing temperatures in December or the massive number of migrants nestled right on the US-Mexico border waiting to cross from Ciudad Juarez to El Paso. These areas were cleared prior to Biden's visit, according to media reports.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott was in El Paso to greet Biden on the airport tarmac when he arrived on Sunday afternoon. Abbott told reporters, after he greeted Biden, that he handed the US president a letter criticizing him for avoiding sites where mass illegal immigration occurs and for inducing irregular migration on the southern border through his lax immigration policies.
Moreover, the Republican governor called Biden's visit a photo-op in a carefully stage-managed version of the city of El Paso, which has been "sanitized" of the migrant camps that overran downtown El Paso in order to hide it from the president's view.
In December, National Border Patrol Council vice president Chris Cabrera told Sputnik that morale among US Border Patrol agents was extremely low as they brace for the border crisis to intensify once Title 42 is lifted (a final decision is expected to be made by the Supreme Court this summer).
The Biden administration claims it has been surging resources to the US southern border to prepare for the lifting of the Title 42 policy. However, Cabrera said there isn't enough manpower to deal with the current crisis.
Cabrera, who works in one of the busiest sectors for illegal migration on the southern border known as the Rio Grande Valley, emphasized that the only way to address the crisis on the southern border is through legislative action, but Democrats and Republicans for the most part have failed to make any substantial progress on the issue.
The United States has seen two consecutive record breaking years of illegal crossings into its territory since Biden assumed office in January 2021. Well over two million illegal crossings into the United States were recorded in fiscal year 2022, according to Customs and Border Protection data.
