Biden on Saturday told the president of Poland the U.S. has “thousands of people a day” trying to cross the U.S. southern border just as officials are bracing for a massive migrant surge.
Biden was meeting with Polish government leaders, including President Andrzej Duda, and said it was a “significant responsibility” that “you have so many Ukrainians seeking refuge … in this country” as they flee the Russian invasion.
He then said the U.S. should “do our part” by “opening our borders” to 100,000 Ukrainian refugees, a move that was announced by the White House on Thursday.
Biden’s statement that border officials are facing thousands of migrants a day is a rare recognition of the massive numbers that Border Patrol has been dealing with over the last year.
There were 164,973 encounters in February 2022, compared to 101,099 encounters in February 2021, a month that preceded a massive surge in numbers in the spring and summer months. The Washington Post reported this week that preliminary Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data indicates that authorities are on track to have encountered more than 200,000 in March, compared to 173,277 in March 2021.
Mark Morgan, who served as acting chief of CBP during the Trump administration, was incensed by Biden’s remarks, given what Morgan said was a failure by Biden to address the state of the border under his watch.
“I was infuriated,” Morgan told Fox News Digital. “So the president of the United States, after 14 months denying that there’s a crisis on our own southern border, it took him to fly halfway across the world, to be in another country as they are going through a crisis to finally acknowledge our own crisis on our own southern border. It was infuriating to me.”
Morgan also dismissed any comparison between the two crises, arguing that most of the migrants coming across the U.S. border don’t qualify for asylum and are economic migrants.
Political | Process 
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