Is Joe Biden admin 'twisting itself' over migrant crisis? GOP aims to use border trouble to win House in 2022
One of the Joe Biden administration’s biggest headaches could be handling the brewing immigration trouble at the southern border and the Republicans have already sensed an opportunity in that, believing that they could flip the House in the 2022 midterm polls by playing up the crisis. The House GOP leadership, along with many of their members, assembled outside the Capitol Building for a press meet about ‘Biden’s Border Crisis’ and even put signage pertaining to the same on Thursday, March 11.
New York Representative and a ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee John Katko spoke at the press conference where he said: “It’s disorder at the border by executive order, to channel Dr Seuss.” He also accused the Biden administration with “twisting itself into a pretzel to avoid saying the dreaded word “crisis”.”
RELATED ARTICLES
'Migrant President' Joe Biden's asylum policies worry Mexico over boom in human trafficking cartels
'Noncitizens not aliens': Joe Biden administration asks officials to avoid ‘dehumanizing terms’ for immigrants
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who had a harrowing time this year over reining in some extreme voices in the party and dealing with the Democrats’ criticism, said on the occasion that Biden’s policies were responsible for the said crisis. “Because on his very first day of this administration there wasn't a plan to open up American business or American schools, President Biden announced it was his priority to offer citizenship to 11 million undocumented immigrants,” the California representative said. “What did he think would happen?” McCarthy mocked and said more than 100,000 migrants crossed the US-Mexico border in the month of February. “That’s a larger population than President Biden’s hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania,” he said.
Biden's immigration policy faces more disapproval
One report said that Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton had spoken at the Republican Study Committee’s lunch on Wednesday, March 10, where he said the situation at the southern border will help the GOP take over the House next year. He appealed to his party colleagues to convince the people of America that the current Democratic administration created a “crisis” at the border.
While White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki recently said in a press conference that the situation at the border was nothing like a crisis, a new CNN poll shows Biden has scored the lowest in the area of immigration, with 49 percent disapproving of his handling of the situation, as against 43 percent who approved. The incumbent president did much better when it came to handling the Covid-19 pandemic with 60 percent approving of his work and 34 percent not.
Biden has taken a number of steps over the border situation in less than two months since he took office and that includes signing an executive order to cancel construction of portions of the border wall, something his predecessor Donald Trump had always aimed for. The current president has reversed Trump’s ‘Wait in Mexico’ asylum policy, which has seen immigrants thronging the borders in huge numbers. The Biden administration has faced a backlash over the growing influx of unaccompanied minors and was accused of disallowing the media to visit the child detention centers.
Trump also criticized his successor’s immigration policy during his recent speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida saying: “It took the new administration only a few weeks to turn this unprecedented accomplishment into a self-inflicted humanitarian and national security disaster.” He also reiterated his trust on the border wall saying it helped America “a lot”.
House Minority Whip Steve Scalise also slammed the situation on Thursday, March 11, saying there were “superspreader caravans” coming to the US. Trump and Republicans used a similar scaring tactic in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections but without much success. That year, the Democrats took the House from the GOP for the first time in eight years and the red party failed to do the same in the general election last year.