The leader of President Joe Biden’s reelection effort directly contradicted her boss in a new Washington Post profile, insisting that Biden has not advocated shutting down the southern border — when in fact he has.
Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez recently told the Post that “the president doesn’t talk about shutting down the border” and has not been “advocating for shutting down the border.”
But that simply isn’t the case. In remarks expressing his support for a bipartisan border bill considered by Congress earlier this year, Biden not only touted the fact that the legislation would have given him “a new emergency authority to shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed,” but announced that if it passed, he would use that authority “the day I sign the bill into law.”
“If that bill were the law today, I’d shut down the border right now and fix it quickly,” he said in another instance.
Chavez Rodriguez’s assertion is notable for a number of reasons, including the fact that it raises questions over whether the president’s position has changed.
It could also do further damage to Biden’s standing with voters concerned about the crisis at the southern border, including Hispanics, whose support he has hemorrhaged over the course of his tenure in the White House.
Polling indicates that Donald Trump boasts a massive lead over Biden on the issue of immigration and that voters’ lack of trust in Biden to handle the ongoing border crisis is killing him with Hispanics. According to a Marquette University poll of the demographic earlier this year, 49% say they trust Trump to do a better job on border security and immigration than Biden, while just 24% say the opposite. A New York Times/Siena College survey, meanwhile, found that Trump may actually be leading Biden among Hispanics, who have long been a core Democratic constituency, 46-40%. Biden won them in 2020 by more than 20 points.
