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Top Republicans demand Homeland Security turn over Secret Service communications for Biden’s ‘sanitized’ border photo op where he saw no migrants
- Since Biden took office, Republicans have pleaded with him to visit the southern border and see the thousands of migrants stationed on either side.
- When Biden finally visited, he spent three hours hopping between facilities that had been cleaned up.
- Dissatisfied Republicans criticized the visit as a “photo op.”
Rep. James Comer is demanding that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) turn over documents related to President Biden’s trip to Texas to see if they were involved in ‘covering up’ the squalid and overcrowded conditions often encountered Come to the southern border.
Since Biden took office the republicans have implored him to visit the southern border and see firsthand the many thousands of migrants stationed along each side of the US-Mexico border and surrounding cities, foreign nationals who often survived a dangerous journey and arrived to the United States with only their children’s clothes. return with the hope of a better life.
When Biden finally did, the first known tour of the border he has taken during his five decades in public office, he spent three hours hopping between facilities that had been cleared for his visit. He was not seen meeting any migrants.
Dissatisfied Republicans criticized the visit as a “photo op.”
Joe Biden made his first trip to the southern border this month with a stop for a few hours in El Paso, Texas, en route to the Three Amigos Summit in Mexico. Comer noted that the president waited for Republicans to take control of the House before making the trip.
“The Oversight and Accountability Committee is monitoring the possible involvement of the Department of Homeland Security in covering up poor conditions at the southern border in El Paso, Texas, to benefit President Biden’s recent three-hour photo op,” Comer ( R-Ky.), he said in a statement.
“These encampments were cleared immediately prior to President Biden’s visit to the city on January 8, 2023. We are writing to understand the circumstances surrounding the role DHS played in clearing homeless illegal border crossers for the President Biden’s visit to El Paso”.
Comer requested in a letter all documents and communications between DHS, the Secret Service, and the city of El Paso or the state of Texas regarding the cleanup of homeless encampments.
Last year set an all-time record with 2.3 million border apprehensions, and crossings don’t seem to be slowing this year: in the first two months of fiscal year 2023 there were 561,000 apprehensions.
Custom and Border Protection (CBP) found 233,740 in November. It’s the slight increase from the previous month and the third-highest month of gatherings in recent history, all occurring under the Joe Biden presidency. Since Biden took office, CBP has encountered approximately 4 million migrants.
Texas National Guard troops have been deployed on the US side of the border to try to prevent people from crossing during Biden’s visit.
Migrants gather at the border fence around El Paso after crossing the Rio Grande into the United States. Here they wait for border agents to open a gate and start processing them
What the president missed during his trip were the squalid makeshift encampments scattered around El Paso that generated headlines last month about immigrants taking to the streets.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, police teams moved through the center of the city, picking up migrants who had entered the country illegally.
“It’s a pony and dog show,” volunteers helping dozens of migrants seeking shelter at Sacred Heart Church told DailyMail.com: “They’ve cleaned everything up.”
Officials say they are just enforcing the rules and any time is a coincidence.
But one day before the arrival of the president and the scenario could not be more different from the chaos of late December. The number of immigrants then surged as arrivals timed their trips to coincide with the expected end of Title 42, a Trump-era restriction that ultimately won a stay of enforcement in the Supreme Court.
Then hundreds of refugees, mostly Venezuelans, camped out on the sidewalks around the downtown Greyhound bus station.
Just before the president’s visit, his bundles of clothing and belongings went missing after border agents moved through the area during the week.
Last week, Comer invited four border patrol agents to testify before his committee at one of the first hearings of the new Congress on February 6.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Tuesday that Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas “could” be impeached over the border crisis as members of his party took a course that moderates have tried to change. brake.
‘If those December numbers are even higher and break new records, should you stay in this job?’ McCarthy said Tuesday, according to CNN
“We can investigate, and then that investigation could lead to an impeachment inquiry.”
The Republican leader vowed not to “predetermine” Mayorkas’s fate and repeated earlier assurances that he would not “use impeachment for political gain.”
Though he added: “But if the person is derelict of their duties, and they’re hurting Americans and Americans are actually dying for lack of their work, that might be up to that occasion.”