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President Joe Biden's policies on immigration, following the expiration of Title 42, have been attacked by immigrants rights' advocates suing over the replacement asylum ban and Republicans urging him to keep the expired removal authority in place.
Unauthorized crossings have been a focal issue of Biden's presidency, with federal and local authorities saying that they expected to see numbers surge as Title 42 ran out.
Amid this, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy took to social media on May 11 claiming that Biden had not visited the U.S.-Mexico border beyond one trip this year.
The Claim
A Facebook post by Kevin McCarthy, posted on May 11, 2023, which was liked 2,000 times, stated: "President Biden has only been to the border one time in 50 years. Maybe if he visited more often he would understand the chaos he has created."
The Facts
Biden first visited the border as president in January 2023, in response to growing concern over security risks and illegal crossings during his administration.
He traveled to the Bridge of Americas border crossing, next to El Paso, Texas, accompanied by border patrol staff.
Asked what he had learned about the situation at the border, Biden replied: "They need a lot of resources, and we're going to get it for them."
The visit was decried by Republicans, including Texas Representative Chip Roy, who called the trip a "box-checking exercise."
Although it was Biden's most significant journey to the border, he has visited before, albeit briefly.
As reported by FactCheck.org and The Washington Post, Biden made a drive-by trip to the border in 2008 as part of a campaign rally in Mesilla, New Mexico.
The Post wrote that according to a press officer on the trip, his motorcade took a one-hour drive to the suburb of Las Cruces that took Biden along a route that hugged the border.
The Las Cruces Sun News, reporting directly on October 17, 2008, covered a speech Biden made at Mesilla Plaza.
"In 2004, early voting was over 50 percent of the total voting here in New Mexico," he said. "If we get that over 60 percent this year in early voting, it will bode incredibly well for us. So please, vote early."
Speaking at a CNN town hall in Baltimore on October 21, 2021, Biden was asked if he had plans to visit the Southern border. He replied: "I've been there before, and I haven't—I mean, I know it well. I guess I should go down.
"But the—but the whole point of it is: I haven't had a whole hell of lot of time to get down. I've been spending time going around looking at the $900 billion worth of damage done by—by hurricanes and floods and—and weather, and traveling around the world.
"But I plan on—now, my wife, Jill, has been down. She's been on both sides of the river. She's seen the circumstances there. She's looked into those places."
Asked to elaborate on those remarks at an October 22, 2021, press briefing, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said: "There's been reporting that he did drive through the border when he was on the campaign trail in 2008, and he is certainly familiar with the fact, and it stuck with him, with the fact that in El Paso, the border goes right through the center of town."
Biden has made other trips to Central America separately. In 2012, he visited Mexico and Honduras. A National Archives summary of the trip said that he discussed with then-Mexican President Felipe Calderón "a wide range of economic and security issues related to a shared border that sees more than a million legal crossings and more than $1 billion in trade every day."
The White House and the National Archives have not yet replied to Newsweek's request for a response to McCarthy's claim.
Whether one might agree that the visit in 2008 counted as a trip to the border—which appears to have been substantively different from the journey he made in January 2023—is debatable.
McCarthy's comments clearly suggest that he may have considered the 2008 visit to be insubstantial and it would perhaps be pedantic to be counted as such. Nonetheless, the speaker's comments should be viewed with some context.
Newsweek has reached out to McCarthy for comment.
The Ruling
Needs Context.
There appears to have been only one major publicized visit by Joe Biden to the U.S.-Mexico border, in January 2023. He has visited Mexico and other Central American nations separately.
One other brief, drive-by visit in 2008 was reported. Whether to others, including McCarthy, that truly counts as a visit is debatable.
FACT CHECK BY Newsweek's Fact Check team
About the writer
Tom Norton is Newsweek's Fact Check reporter, based in London. His focus is reporting on misinformation and misleading information in ... Read more