President Joe Biden said he 'guesses' he should check out the southern border for himself in a town hall Thursday night, days after new data revealed that a record number of migrants were taken into US custody this year.
Biden touted his success in lowering the amount of children in Border Patrol custody during a CNN town hall in Baltimore hosted by Anderson Cooper.
The president said the number of detained kids went from 5,000 to 504 within the first year of his presidency.
But new data obtained by the Washington Post shows that the US detained more than 1.7 million migrants along the US-Mexico border between October 2020 and September 2021 - the highest number since 1986.
Asked by Cooper if he should go down to the border, Biden said: 'I've been there before ... I know it well ... I guess I should go down.'
President Biden answered questions about everything from climate change to immigration during a Thursday night CNN town hall in Baltimore
Asked by host Anderson Cooper if he should go down to the border, Biden said: 'I've been there before ... I know it well ... I guess I should go down.'
The US detained more than 1.7 million migrants along the US-Mexico border between October 2020 and September 2021 - the highest number since 1986
He cited recent hurricanes and world travel as reasons why he hasn't had 'a whole hell of a lot of time to get down.
'I’ve been spending time going around looking at the $900 billion worth of damage done by hurricanes and floods and weather and traveling around the world.
'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. You notice you're not seeing a lot of pictures of kids lying on top of one another with what looks like tarps on top of them. We've been able to deal with that.
'We've been able to significantly increase funding through the HHS to provide shelter for these kids and people. But, there's much more to be done. It is a thing that concerns me the most about being able to get control of it.'
The commander-in-chief admitted that he has kept in place Title 42 - a Trump-era edict that allows the government to unilaterally expel migrants due to COVID-19 concerns - because of high levels of the virus in Latin America.
'It's very, very high. And so, we maintained the policy. We are not sending back children. We send back adults and we send back large families.
'But we don’t send back children in that circumstance. That’s why I have a proposal to provide for over a billion doses of Covid vaccine to the rest of the world, including a significant portion to Latin and Central America.'
Biden answered immigration questions from law student Megan Crawford, a Republican
Biden says he kept Title 42, which allows the government to expel migrants due to public health reasons, because of high levels of COVID in Latin America. Above, volunteers clean up the Rio Bravo river, on the border between Mexico and US, on October 17
