The White House has been playing damage control since a confrontation between the president and Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy, related to a Wall Street Journal report. That report said the administration was considering paying $450,000 to illegal immigrants who were separated from their parents during the Trump administration. Doocy asked Biden if the article was true.
Biden: "If you guys keep sending that garbage out, yeah, but it's not true."
Doocy: "So this is just a garbage report?"
Biden: "Yeah. $450,000 per person. Is that what you're saying?"
Doocy: "That was separated from a family member at the border under the last administration."
Biden: "That's not going to happen."
The head of the ACLU, which was suing on behalf of the illegal aliens, issued a statement basically suggesting Biden may not have been fully briefed about the actions of his very own Justice Department.
Since the Biden-Doocy exchange, the assistant press secretary for the White House – Karine Jean-Pierre – has stated the president is "perfectly comfortable" with the Department of Justice settling with those families currently in litigation with the federal government because it "saves taxpayer dollars" and puts the issue to rest.
'Oblivious' in the Oval Office
American Family News talked with Robert Law, director of regulatory affairs and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies. He says the ACLU was right.
"The negotiations to pay these illegal aliens $450,000 each very much was in the works. That's what the Wall Street Journal reported," he points out. "They saw the documents; they saw internal materials – this was really in the works."
The president, he argues, has no clue what his lieutenants are doing.
"Perhaps the combination of the Wall Street Journal article coming out [and] generating a lot of understandable outrage – and then the president being asked at the White House the other day? He may effectively have stopped it," Law shares.
"But these are the types of extreme and outrageous decisions that the unelected political appointees are doing behind the scenes – and the president is oblivious to it."
Read related article by Robert Law:
Biden backpedals on payments to illegal aliens
