President Joe Biden has said the White House is currently exploring executive actions to help address the crisis along the southern border caused by the continual stream of unlawful crossings into the U.S.
During an interview with Univision’s Enrique Acevedo, which was filmed last week but aired on Tuesday, the president said there have been no official decisions, but he and his team have been considering every option.
When Acevedo asked Biden whether he plans to take executive action, Biden responded that his team has been “examining whether or not I have that power.”
“I would have that power under the legislation when the border has over … 5,000 people a day trying to cross the border, because you can’t manage it, slow it up. There’s no guarantee that I have that power all by myself without legislation,” he continued, per Breitbart.
“And some have suggested I should just go ahead and try it, and if I get shut down by the court, I get shut down by the court, but we’re trying to work through that right now.”
Biden’s interview comes as the crisis along the border has become one of the most hot-button issues in recent months, with federal legislation being discussed as another potential solution.
A previous border bill, which Biden referenced in his Univision interview, failed in the U.S. Senate due to Republicans’ concerns about the number of crossings allowed and the amount of funding it allocated to foreign countries.
The president previously described the bill as the “toughest and fairest set of border reforms in decades,” but it would have seemingly done little to assist the crisis along the border.
Under the provisions outlined in the bill, an estimated 1.8 million unlawful migrants would be permitted to enter the country each year, and a shutdown of the border would only be enacted when encounters with unlawful migrants reached 5,000 in a single day, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.
Although the bill would have then required the border to be shut down until encounters dipped below the 75% threshold, the president would be granted authority to end the border shutdown whenever he deemed necessary.
In addition to the vast number of crossings, the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee stated that the bill would have included a total of $118.28 billion in spending, with just $20.23 billion being used to support operations at the southern border.
This bill would have allocated $86.5 billion in foreign aid, with more than $60 billion going to Ukraine to assist the country in the ongoing war against Russia and additional amounts for humanitarian aid for Ukraine and other conflict zones across the world.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) criticized the bill and claims made by Biden that it would help solve the issues at the border, writing in a statement that it “fails in every policy area needed to secure the border and would actually incentivize more illegal immigration.”
