“It’s horrible what you saw. To see people like they did, with horses, running them over, people being strapped, it’s outrageous,” the president said in his first public remarks on the situation on Friday.
Tens of thousands of Haitians have attempted to illegally enter the country at the Del Rio crossing, where the appallingly unsanitary conditions have attracted international attention as the new arrivals try to seek asylum in the US.
Photographs of Border Patrol agents on horseback attempting to gain control over the crowds have provoked outrage from many in the Democratic Party, even as Biden’s own administration has sought to quietly re-adopt some of his predecessor Donald Trump’s policies to regain control of the lawless border situation. California Rep. Maxine Waters called the images “worse than what we witnessed in slavery,” insisting the agents’ effort to actually patrol the nation’s borders “takes us back hundreds of years.”