On Wednesday’s broadcast of NBC’s “Today,” White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan stated that President Joe Biden has taken action on the border before and he waited so long to take the action he did this week because there was “a period of intense preparation so that it could be an effective policy.”
Co-host Savannah Guthrie asked, “[W]hy did the President wait so long to address immigration? These border problems are not new. This is the final six months of his first term. Why wait?”
Sullivan answered, “Well, first of all, as the President said in his remarks yesterday, he’s taken a series of actions at the border. And secondly, and this is critical, he put forward a comprehensive proposal to the Congress that, actually, the administration worked with Republicans on. That proposal was agreed to several months ago after painstaking negotiations. And then the very proposal that Republicans had agreed to, they decided not to vote for, because the leader of their party turned around and said don’t vote for it.”
Guthrie then said, “But even that was just in December. The President has been in office since 2021. This immigration problem is not a new one.”
Sullivan responded, “Well, as I said, in his speech, he laid out a series of steps that he has taken at the border to increase capacity, to deal with Mexico and other countries to reduce the flow to try to get the numbers under control, to flow resources to our communities so that they could deal with the problem as well. But also, Savannah, I would just point out that one of your questions was, if he has to act on his own, his law enforcement and his Border Patrol agents don’t have everything they need, which is why they need more resources from Congress, that required preparation and execution. That’s what the President’s been focused on since that border deal didn’t come through, so that when he made his announcement yesterday, he made it after a period of intense preparation so that it could be an effective policy.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
