President Biden was furious and cursed repeatedly about the border crisis as illegal immigrants kept flocking to the overwhelmed southern border, according to an upcoming book detailing the first years of Biden’s presidency.
In ‘The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House,’ author Chris Whipple described Biden’s fury as his administration attempted to get a grip of the raging crisis at the border in 2021 – where a historic surge was underway, and there was growing criticism of his administration.
‘Meanwhile, illegal immigrants kept arriving. And Biden was furious,’ the book says. ‘Aides had rarely seen him so angry. From all over the West Wing, you could hear the president cursing, dropping f-bombs (he’d always apologize when women were present).’
One senior adviser told Whipple that the frustration came from a ‘lack of solutions.’
‘It’s like, ‘How would you feel if you were me and these were the solutions you had?’ It’s the weight of the presidency, right?’’ the adviser said.
In another part of the book, Whipple goes back to the crisis at the border, which he says: ‘Next to vaccine disinformation, this was the thing that made Biden’s blood boil.’
Whipple also describes Biden as ‘on a short fuse’ on a separate issue later in the year.
‘Early in his term he had reserved the f-bomb mostly for discussions of the southern border, but lately he was using it more often,’ the book says.
The book, which will be on sale on Jan. 17, has already made headlines for reporting that Biden once described Vice President Kamala Harris as a ‘work in progress.’
There were more than 1.7 million migrant encounters in FY 2021, and more than 2.3 million in FY 2022, as the border has seen multiple months of well over 200,000 encounters.
The Biden administration has touted a whole-of-government approach that has focused on tackling root causes in Central America – an effort led by Harris – cooperation with Western Hemisphere countries and restoring legal asylum pathways that is says were decimated during the Trump administration.
But the administration has faced criticism from Republicans for unraveling Trump-era border security policies such as the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) and wall construction at the southern border. It has also taken heat for its efforts to narrow interior enforcement to prioritize only criminals and recent border crossers. Republicans have accused the Biden administration of encouraging migration by reducing enforcement and by releasing more migrants into the interior.
That crisis has come into focus this month amid a backdrop of the potential end of the Title 42 public health order – which has been used to expel hundreds of thousands of migrants at the border.
The Biden administration was ordered to end the policy by a federal court. The order was due to end on Wednesday, but has temporarily been blocked by the Supreme Court in response to a last-minute lawsuit from a coalition of GOP-led states.
The administration has been calling for more funding from Congress, while acknowledging there is likely to be an even bigger surge if and when the order ends. It has also said it has a six-point plan in place to deal with the surge, while also urging Congress to overhaul what it has described as a broken immigration system.
