“Does anyone suggest that there was a 31% increase under Trump because he was a nice guy and he was doing good things at the border?” he asked, standing before thirty masked, socially distant reporters in the East Wing of the White House. Pointing to federal data showing that crossings spiked 31% in 2019 under Trump, he attributed the increase in arrivals to a cyclical surge from devastating storms and rising violence in the migrants’ home countries. He defended his decision to stop expelling children arriving without parents. Biden pushed back on this narrative Thursday, saying the increase follows an annual pattern. Customs and Border Protection said it encountered 100,441 individuals attempting to cross the southern border in February 2021, a 28% increase from January- Republicans argue that Biden reversed former President Donald Trump’s immigration policies without considering the implications. With border crossings spiking since Biden took office- U.S. border with Mexico is creating difficulties for the Biden Administration as they struggle to control the situation while trying to take a more humane approach than the Trump Administration did. In particular, the surge of migrants to the U.S. But once Biden formally faced reporters, he was forced to answer questions with responses that stretched well outside the confines of his staffers’ calibrated talking points and wade into difficult territory on multiple looming challenges for his presidency. The Biden Administration has so far been a model of coordinated message discipline. The focus on Biden’s problems rather than his victories was a reminder that, in the highest office in the land, reality intrudes on even the best laid plans. Instead, reporters pressed Biden on things his Administration hasn’t done- like taking a position against the Senate filibuster rule, implementing executive action on gun control in the wake of two mass shootings, and stopping the flow of unaccompanied children coming to the U.S. But he didn’t get asked any questions about the coronavirus. Joe Biden held his first formal news conference as president 65 days into this presidency, after making a series of consequential moves in the early weeks of his Administration to help curb the COVID-19 pandemic and ease the economic pain in the country.
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