Asked on Fox News Sunday this weekend about the planned roll-back of pandemic-related restrictions on crossing the southern border known as Title 42, Biden administration press secretary Jen Psaki expertly dismantled the idea that Biden’s team is somehow ignoring serious immigration-related issues. In fact, she observed, there have already been serious immigration reform proposals from the Biden administration — and if Republicans would like to engage on these issues with the White House instead of publicly ranting about whatever it is that they happen to be on about on any given day, then the president’s team is ready, Psaki indicated. Across the span of some two years following the Title 42 restrictions getting enacted under the guise of concerns about COVID-19, over 1.7 million expulsions of migrants at the southern border in connection to the policies were recorded, according to February 2022 federal data.
Americans are getting back to work at a historic pace.
Over the last four weeks, fewer Americans filed initial claims for unemployment insurance than at any time in our nation’s recorded history.
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Host Dana Perino asked Psaki whether she believed that the roll-back of Title 42 policies would go through, to which the Biden administration official remarked as follows:
‘Title 42 is not an immigration plan or an immigration authority. No one in the administration thinks that. It’s an authority given to the CDC, actually by Congress, to make a determination about whether it should still stay in place. We agree that the immigration system is broken, it should be addressed, and we should do more to fix it. And Democrats, moderates — wherever they fall in in the party, Republicans of any flavor who want to work with us on that — we’d love to do that. That’s why the president put forward an immigration reform plan on his first day in office.’
“Certainly her testimony was helpful,” Liz Cheney says on @CNNSotu of Ivanka Trump’s eight hours before the Jan. 6 committee
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As for the path ahead, Psaki added the following:
‘I can’t make a prediction of where Congress is going to vote, but what is important right now is they are using this to hold hostage funding for COVID. COVID funding that we need in order to buy pills to help immuno-compromised [people]… to ensure we can reboot our uninsured program, to make sure we have testing capacity. That’s what they are doing. Let’s have debates, let’s have discussions, let’s have people come down to the White House, talk about immigration. We all want to fix it, but we need this COVID funding, and it’s really a huge disappointment to us that the Congress has left for two weeks without passing this into law.’
Republicans have made clear that their concerns about Title 42 aren’t meaningfully related to COVID-19 — besides, have they been supportive of supposed pandemic-related safety measures in just about any other context? Anywhere? Former White House physician-turned-Texas Republican Congressman Ronny Jackson recently tweeted that “Biden is about to SURRENDER our border completely to criminal drug cartels. Once Title 42 is lifted, it’s OVER – violent criminals will have full reign. It’s bad now, but next month, it’s going to get WORSE.” While obviously nonsensical, the tweet shows where the Republican headspace, at least in certain circles, is on this issue. Watch Psaki’s remarks below:
