We reported Thursday on the announcement from the Biden White House that Joe Biden was finally going to the southern border after decades of never visiting during his time as Senator, Vice President, and now President.
The news came one day after Biden told a reporter who asked during a press gaggle if he would visit the border during his upcoming trip to Mexico for the “Three Amigos Summit” that it was his “intention” to visit. “We’re working out the details now,” he added at the time.
Though officials told the media that Biden planned to “address border enforcement operations and meet with local officials” while there, they were vague on the details, including on where exactly Biden would be going during his visit.
Clues have emerged on that front courtesy of a report from the DC Examiner, which noted that according to several law enforcement officials, downtown El Paso was being cleaned up in advance of Biden’s scheduled arrival, with migrant encampments quietly disappearing:
City sidewalks that transformed into makeshift homeless camps as tens of thousands of illegal immigrants were released into downtown El Paso in recent months have been cleared out ahead of President Joe Biden’s arrival Sunday.
The hundreds of people camped out on individual blocks surrounding the Greyhound Bus Station and Sacred Heart Church have been moved out of eyesight by local El Paso police officers and federal Border Patrol agents, according to four law enforcement officials who spoke with the Washington Examiner on Thursday.
[…]
The undertaking began last week after authorities discovered several groups of people on the streets were pretending to have been released by Border Patrol but had never been arrested and were considered unlawfully present.
Sounds like awfully convenient timing, doesn’t it?
Biden spokesman John Kirby was asked Friday about the possibility that Biden would be seeing a “sanitized” version of what El Paso normally looks like on any given day.
“There’s reporting that El Paso has cleared the downtown of these expansive migrant camps that have grown there in advance of the President’s arrival,” the reporter began. “Is the President going to see a sanitized version of El Paso when he arrives at the border on Sunday?”
Kirby responded by saying that Biden was “very much looking forward” to seeing “firsthand” what the situation “looks like,” and was eager to speak to border patrol agents “on the ground” to get their opinions on what’s going on.
Watch:
From the sounds of things, it looks like Biden’s El Paso visit is shaping up to be a whole lot like the one Vice President Kamala Harris made in June 2021, a photo op and nothing more, and never visiting the actual border. In fact, the closest Biden is likely to get to a border is when he makes a run for the border — to Taco Bell.