Post by abbey1227 on May 1, 2021 1:12:13 GMT
NBC News
'One god-awful mess': Biden lays border crisis on Trump admin's refusal to cooperate
Rebecca Shabad and Julia Ainsley Fri, April 30, 2021, 8:08 AM
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden blamed the Trump administration for ongoing problems at the U.S.-Mexico border, citing its failure to cooperate and share critical information during the presidential transition period.
In an exclusive interview that aired Friday with "TODAY" show co-anchor Craig Melvin, Biden said his administration inherited “one god-awful mess at the border” from former President Donald Trump. He said it’s the result of “the failure to have a real transition — cooperation from the last administration, like every other administration has done.”
After the November election, Biden said that he had dispatched his transition team to meet with the officials leading the major departments across the government.
“The two departments that didn’t give us access to virtually anything were the immigration and the Defense Department,” said Biden, who added that his team didn’t know until he was sworn into office that Trump had fired many people from those departments and they were “understaffed considerably.”
Biden declined to call the border situation a crisis. He also acknowledged that his administration has struggled to reunite the children and families who had been separated under Trump policies.
“We don't know yet where those kids are,” he said. “We're trying like hell to figure out what happened. What happened to that child when he got separated? Where’d they go? Where are they?”
'One god-awful mess': Biden lays border crisis on Trump admin's refusal to cooperate
Rebecca Shabad and Julia Ainsley Fri, April 30, 2021, 8:08 AM
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden blamed the Trump administration for ongoing problems at the U.S.-Mexico border, citing its failure to cooperate and share critical information during the presidential transition period.
In an exclusive interview that aired Friday with "TODAY" show co-anchor Craig Melvin, Biden said his administration inherited “one god-awful mess at the border” from former President Donald Trump. He said it’s the result of “the failure to have a real transition — cooperation from the last administration, like every other administration has done.”
After the November election, Biden said that he had dispatched his transition team to meet with the officials leading the major departments across the government.
“The two departments that didn’t give us access to virtually anything were the immigration and the Defense Department,” said Biden, who added that his team didn’t know until he was sworn into office that Trump had fired many people from those departments and they were “understaffed considerably.”
Biden declined to call the border situation a crisis. He also acknowledged that his administration has struggled to reunite the children and families who had been separated under Trump policies.
“We don't know yet where those kids are,” he said. “We're trying like hell to figure out what happened. What happened to that child when he got separated? Where’d they go? Where are they?”
In fact, pro-bono lawyers and Biden’s task force to reunify families have struggled to locate some of the parents who were separated, not their children. But those lawyers say many parents are in Central America and ready to be reunited once the Biden administration makes good on its promise to bring them back to the United States to be with their children.
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