Biden visited Arizona Tuesday to deliver a 16-minute speech to a factory of computer-chips. However, he said that he couldn’t visit the border with Mexico due to record levels of illegal immigration and that he had “more important” things to do.

Biden did not make any new policy announcements at Phoenix’s plant of Taiwanese firm TSMC, but he repeated his recent speeches praising economic optimism and the CHIPS Act for subsidized semiconductor manufacturers.

Biden asked a reporter on the White House lawn, “Why go to a state border and not visit it?” before he left for Arizona.

“Because they have more important things happening,” replied the president. They will invest billions in a new state enterprise.

Biden started Air Force One and traveled more than 2,000 miles out West. He almost immediately returned to Washington, despite only speaking a few kilometers from the border.

For a border stop, a Marine One helicopter flight would have taken approximately 45 minutes. This distance is roughly equal to the distance between the White House, Wilmington, Delaware home of Biden, which he frequently returns to for weekends.

It is not clear if Biden made any visits to the border in his 36-year tenure as a senator, or as a vice president. However, Republican border-state officials regularly ask him to.

In a Fox News interview Tuesday night, Arizona’s Republican attorney General Mark Bronovich stated that “We need less photo ops” and “more border stops by our president… More then 5 million illegally entered this nation since Joe Biden became President.”

In fiscal 2022, more than 2.3 millions people were detained for crossing the border. This is an all-time high, up from 1.7 million in fiscal 20,21, less than 500,000 fiscal 2020, and almost 1 million in fiscal 2019. These figures don’t include illegal migrants.

Critics attribute the border crisis to Biden’s policies. These include relaxing a Trump-era policy that quickly deported border-crossers according to a CDC COVID-19 rules and ending a policy that required migrants to stay in Mexico while they await a court ruling regarding their asylum claims.

Biden stated at a CNN Town Hall in October 2021 that “I guess it’s time to go down [towards the border]”. The point is that I haven’t had the time to go down.

Biden also claimed at the CNN town hall that, despite not having any evidence to the contrary, he had been to the border with Mexico at one time in the past.

Biden stated, “I’ve been there before, and I haven’t — I mean I know it well.”

However, the White House could not provide a specific example of Biden visiting. It could only point to a Washington Post fact-check that stated that Biden “briefly drove beyond the border” upon landing at El Paso’s El Paso airport in 2008. This was in 2008 for an event called Mesilla, N.M. Biden and his motorcade “a route that for just a few minutes hugs Mexico’s border.”

Republican governors. Greg Abbott from Texas and Ron DeSantis from Florida have this year bused or flown thousands to the US-Mexico border with Democratic bastions like New York City and Washington, DC in an effort to press Biden into adopting stricter policies.