OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
A CNN segment on Monday was unusually critical of Democrat Joe Biden following his first visit to the chaotic U.S.-Mexico border as president. Biden, over the weekend, traveled to El Paso, where he was met on the tarmac by Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott, who handed the president a letter filled with border security policy demands.
In particular, CNN reporter Rosa Flores called Biden out for refusing to meet with migrants who have crossed into the U.S. illegally. CNN host Poppy Harlow spoke to Flores on Monday after Biden visited the border city for three hours on Sunday.
Harlow pointed out that Biden met with local officials and U.S. Border Patrol agents but no migrants.
“That’s why the president is being criticized by both sides because of what he didn’t see,” Flores said. “So let me show you. Because this is one of the migrant camps that’s here in downtown El Paso. And you know, the immigration advocates here in El Paso and Gov. Greg Abbott usually don’t agree on much, but they do raise the same question: If President Biden came here to El Paso to see the reality on the ground about the border and he didn’t come here, what’s considered the epicenter of this crisis, did he leave with a clear understanding?”
“My colleague, MJ Lee, asked the White House about the president not interacting or meeting with any migrants, and a senior administration official told her that it is because there were no migrants at the respite center at the time that the president visited and that it was coincidental,” Flores added.
Flores did not appear to buy into that answer, however.
“But Poppy, I checked the migrant dashboard that the city of El Paso has. And at the time when the president was here, there were nearly 1,000 migrants who were in federal detention. So if the president really wanted to see conditions, I kind of doubt that the president of the United States would have been denied access,” she said.
Harlow, meanwhile, responded that there were migrants sleeping on public sidewalks behind Flores.
“You see them here behind me. Hundreds of people living in the streets of America, I should highlight. This is a city in America, in the United States, and the top executive of this country came here, [but] he did not come to see this,” Flores criticized.
WATCH:
Meanwhile, the Border Patrol’s union chief also ripped Biden for essentially turning it into a political photo op and not going to areas where there are legitimate border security issues.
Thousands of migrants daily pass legally through the El Paso port of entry, but local officials reportedly removed illegal immigrant encampments last week ahead of Biden’s visit.
“The only people that he met with in the in the Border Patrol were upper-level management,” Brandon Judd snapped. “If they don’t tell him what he wants to hear, they’re subject to be moved. He did not meet with any rank-and-file frontline agents.”
“Every single Border Patrol agent that I’ve spoken with is extremely frustrated and upset about what just took place yesterday,” Judd continued, per the Daily Mail. “They are upset that he was not willing to see what’s actually going on. They’re upset that they cleaned everything up. They’re upset that him knowing that he was going to bring the mainstream media with them, that we all of a sudden doubled the number of agents in the field so the mainstream media would say: ‘Hey, there’s nothing going on here, nothing to see.’”
“He didn’t tour any facilities where migrants would have been. So he didn’t see anything. He did not see any of the chaos that he’s created, that he’s caused,” Judd concluded. “He didn’t get any more of an understanding [than] what he had before he went, and again, that’s politics. It was just optics. It was a photo shoot.”
