Today Joe Biden will visit Arizona, which — coincidentally or not — is nearly as far away from Georgia’s runoff election today as possible within the continental US. Biden wants to promote his green-energy and “investment” policies. However, Biden won’t bother traveling to the border to see the outcome of his Homeland Security policies and the border-crisis catastrophe they have created.

Apparently, border security and human trafficking pale in presidential importance to gladhanding photo ops in front of chip factories. Or so Biden told reporters this morning on the South Lawn:

Peter Doocy asks Joe Biden why he's going to Arizona, but refuses to visit the border.

BIDEN: "Because there's more important things going on!" pic.twitter.com/rqarRmWYaV

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) December 6, 2022

President Biden defended his decision to skip visiting the U.S.-Mexico border while in Arizona on Tuesday, saying, “there are more important things.”

Biden made the defense while boarding Marine One at to depart the White House on Tuesday. Biden has never visited the border throughout his presidency, despite the ongoing crisis with record numbers of illegal immigrants crossing the border each month.

“Why go to a border state and not visit the border?” Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy asked.

“Because there are more important things going on,” Biden responded. “They’re going to invest billions of dollars in a new enterprise.”

There are more important things than the border crisis? That’s certainly not true of this visit to this new manufacturing site in Phoenix. TMSC is indeed investing $40 billion in its chip manufacturing here in the US, but it’s not because Joe Biden might show up once and pay a visit. They aren’t going to shut down the plant merely because Biden might take a side trip to look at the disaster at the border, either. In fact, Taiwan-based TMSC may well be even more highly attuned for the role a firm and controlled border has in allowing for investment in business operations.

Even then, this might be excusable if Biden had made a few recent visits to see the crisis in person. However, Biden has never visited the border as president, not even a single time. At times the White House has claimed that Biden has visited the border, including this claim last week:

DOOCY: "Kevin McCarthy says that he invited president Biden down to the border. How does the president RSVP? We know the president has never been down to the border…"

KJP: "He's been there. He's been to the border."

DOOCY: "When did he go to the border?" pic.twitter.com/bzLAQ2eJci

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) November 30, 2022

The answer, according to Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler thirteen months ago: Once. In September 2008, long before becoming president. And that was a drive-by to a rally in Las Cruces:

We did our own search through the Lexis-Nexis database and also could not find a record of a visit. There were many Senate hearings in which the border situation was discussed with Biden in attendance, but that’s not the same as an actual visit. We also found clips of Biden traveling to Mexico to discuss the border situation, such as on a 2001 delegation headed by then-Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), but those trips do not appear to include a visit to the border. (That was the first time a U.S. congressional committee had met on foreign soil with a committee of a foreign legislature.)

But after digging some more, we discovered that Biden briefly drove past the border while on a campaign swing in 2008.

On Oct. 17, he held a rally in Mesilla, N.M. The press officer on the trip, David E. Wade, told The Fact Checker that the plane landed at the El Paso airport and then the motorcade took the nearly one-hour drive to the suburb of Las Cruces. The drive took Biden along a route that for a few minutes hugs the border of the United States and Mexico. “For most of us, it was unfamiliar territory,” Wade said, who recalled that some reporters joked about crossing the border during the event.

Oddly, Kessler skipped over this recent claim, as did other media-based fact checkers. Perhaps Biden’s comment today may prompt them to revisit it. I’m not holding my breath waiting for a rating.

This should have Republicans in the House and Senate even more wary of the latest immigration-reform compromise floated out on Capitol Hill. Biden’s still evading responsibility for his failures and the catastrophe he created on the southern border, and this new package looks like it will make things worse by increasing incentives to cross the border in the next few months without appreciably adding to border security. Biden won’t go to the border because that would force media outlets to give more attention to the crisis. The compromise bill would then allow Biden and his media allies to claim that the crisis is “old news” and has already been addressed.

There are few things more important at the federal level right now than getting border security fixed. Biden needs to be held accountable and forced into the correct policies to the extent possible. His scoffing at the crisis is an insult to our intelligence — and he shouldn’t be allowed to get off the hook for his dereliction of duty.