President Joe Biden said Tuesday the border is doing “much better” since the lifting of Title 42, a Trump-era policy used to expel migrants.
Reporters asked the president about the border situation before his talks with Congressional leaders on the best ceiling.
“Much better. You see it,” Biden responded.
The president also expressed optimism on Sunday.
“Much better than you all expected,” he said, adding that he has no plans to visit the border “in the near term.”
“It would just be disruptive, not anything else,” Biden continued.
Biden has visited the border once during his administration. He said he would not visit while in Arizona “because they’re [were] more important things going on.”
The Biden administration went back to using the immigration policy known as Title 8 after Title 42 was lifted Thursday. Title 8 allows authorities to remove illegal immigrants “in a matter of days.” Illegal crossers face a five-year ban from re-entry into the U.S.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) recorded a record-breaking number of daily migrant encounters in the days leading up to the end of Title 42, with over 10,000 migrants apprehended for three days straight, Fox News reported. The number has gone down to fewer than 5,000 a day, according to the Washington Post. (RELATED: The White House Blew Off Border For Years. Biden Just Admitted It Was ‘Chaos’ All This Time)
The administration has experienced record-breaking numbers of migrant encounters, with the number of CBP encounters rising from 450,000 in 2020 to over 1.7 million in 2021 and over 2.3 million in FY 2022, according to government statistics. For FY 2023, the number currently stands at over 1.2 million encounters.
Prior to the end of Title 42, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas warned that the administration expected a “surge in the number of encounters at our southern border.”
NEW: Remarkable video from our Fox drone team shows an enormous line of hundreds of migrants who just crossed illegally into Brownsville, TX this evening. A large majority of them are single adults. The RGV continues to see a massive surge of illegal crossings ahead of T42 drop. pic.twitter.com/xHDV8sc8PD
— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) May 8, 2023
Videos showed lines of migrants waiting to cross the border ahead of the end of the Trump-era policy.