President Joe Biden said he’s still considering unilateral action to shut the southern US border, and studying whether he has legal authority to do that without congressional approval.
“We’re examining whether or not I have that power,” he said in an interview with Univision Noticias broadcast Tuesday. “There’s no guarantee that I have that power all by myself without legislation. And some have suggested I should just go ahead and try it. And if I get shut down by the court, I get shut down by the court. But we’re trying to work that, work through that right now.”
A bipartisan Senate bill that collapsed earlier this year would have given Biden the power to effectively shut the border when crossings hit 5,000 a day. The White House has been weighing executive measures, which have regularly been struck down or challenged in court under several administrations.
Immigration has become one of the president’s biggest political liabilities, with polling showing Americans increasingly concerned about the volume of people coming to the country irregularly, typically simply by walking in. Polling by Bloomberg News and Morning Consult has shown the border is cited second-most-frequently when respondents are asked to pick their most important issue, behind only the economy.
Biden said in the Univision Noticias interview that the US doesn’t have enough staff to interview asylum claimants or enough Border Patrol officers. The Senate bill failed after former President Donald Trump objected and pressured Republicans to kill it rather than risk handing Biden a victory.
“It was a good piece of legislation, and I’m not giving up on it,” Biden said.
The article originally appeared on Bloomberg.