WATCH: Former DHS official says if Biden wanted to fix border, ‘it’s not that hard’
Steff Thomas
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President Joe Biden has shown frustration behind closed doors at the southern border crisis, but he could easily solve the problem if he desired, said a former Department of Homeland Security official.
“He’s the commander in chief. If he wants to fix this problem, it’s not that hard to do,” Ron Vitiello, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the Trump administration, said Friday on Fox Business‘s The Evening Edit.
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As Biden administration officials, from Vice President Kamala Harris all the way to White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, maintain that the border is “secure,” Vitiello said that record immigrant surges experienced at the border over the last two years appear to signal otherwise.
Biden “inherited 40-year lows on activity on our Southwest border. When he took over, that border was more secure than it had been in decades,” he said.
“And within one day of being the president, he ripped down all of the tools that were being used by the front line to help secure the border. … And now we’re seeing the worst surge on the southwest border that we’ve ever seen,” Vitiello added.
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Diving into numbers, the former ICE chief said the administration is on pace to apprehend even more illegal immigrants than in 2021, when it stopped a record 2.3 million.
“We’ve never seen that kind of activity across the border illegally in years. And now we’re gonna do more this year,” he said.
“And if they really want to fix this, all we got to do is go back to what they inherited. But they refuse to do it. And so if he’s not in charge, who is?”
Biden placed Harris in charge of addressing the initial uptick in illegal immigrants in March 2021. In April 2022, the White House said it continued to back the vice president as border czar despite the record surges.
Vitiello said, “There’s no evidence of her working on it.”
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Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) has sent multiple buses of illegal immigrants to be dropped off in front of Harris’s residence in Washington, D.C., as recently as Christmas Eve.
Criticism of the border also continues as the fate of Title 42, a pandemic policy of returning illegal immigrants to Mexico to be processed and prevent the spread of the coronavirus, hangs in the balance.
The expiration of Title 42, requested by Biden, was placed on hold by the Supreme Court on Tuesday while legal challenges continue to play out.