Popular short-term housing and vacation stay rental service Airbnb admitted it made a “mistake” in banning conservative provocateur Lauren Southern’s parents from using its service this week.
According to Southern, a far-right content creator who used to work for conservative Canadian outlet “Rebel News,” Airbnb alerted her parents that they were barred from renting a property for a “romantic getaway” because of their daughter’s political activity.
Airbnb had banned Southern previously and claimed it extended that ban to her parents.
Right-wing journalist Lauren Southern was barred from entering the U.K.(Facebook/Lauren Southern)
Southern revealed the ban Tuesday on Twitter, writing, “My parents just got banned from AirBnB for being related to me. They have never booked anything for me. They do not represent me in any way. They aren’t publicly political in any way.”
She asked, “How is this sane in any way @Airbnb[?]” In addition to her question, Southern shared an image of the official notice that was provided to her parents after they tried to book their getaway.
It stated, “We’ve removed you from the Airbnb platform because your account is closely associated with a person who isn’t allowed to use Airbnb. This means you’ll no longer be able to book reservations on Airbnb.”
It further elaborated, “For the safety of our community, we may remove accounts that are closely associated with people who aren’t allowed to use Airbnb.”
The notice offered Southern’s parents options for a refund and stated they could appeal the decision.
Southern posted a subsequent tweet defending her parents, insisting they have nothing to do with political activism. She wrote, “My parents are some of the sweetest people I know. They were just planning a romantic getaway, they aren’t political activists.”
She then dinged the company, adding, “All I’ve learned is that if governments and corporations can’t shut you up by harming you, they’ll now go for your families.”
Airbnb admitted it was a mistake to ban parents of a right-wing YouTuber from using its platform recently.(AP)
The tweets gained massive attention on Twitter, with the original one being viewed by more than eight million people. It prompted “Tucker Carlson Tonight” producer Gregg Re to seek answers from the company. He corroborated Southern’s account and relayed that the company told him it reversed its decision on Wednesday.
Re tweeted, “Update: @Airbnb tells me it was a ‘mistake’ to ban Lauren’s family members. Decision ‘reversed.’ They say Lauren is still banned, although the spokesman did not explain why. He says that’s forthcoming in an email. Also he denied Jay Carney is targeting political dissidents.”
Conservative outlet The Daily Wire confirmed the reversal as well, reporting that the company provided them with a statement, saying, “We have reinstated their accounts and apologized to them for this mistake.”
Though Southern denied it was a mistake. Following the reversal, she tweeted “My parents never appealed the decision. They’re trying to make this look like a mistake due to bad PR. It was not. They just miscalculated how far they could go. How about the truth for a change?”
Airbnb has a history of making business decisions in accordance with liberal politics. Fox News Digital reported in December that the company’s updated inclusivity policy banned renting out homes or rooms that have been associated with slavery in the past.
The outlet noted that Airbnb “immediately removed listings that included former slave houses and started working with experts such as historic preservation architect Jobie Hill ‘to address other US-based properties and Experiences associated with slavery.’”
Airbnb has removed approximately 30 listings that included places where enslaved people used to live or work. (Photo Illustration by Mateusz Slodkowski/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Gabriel Hays is an associate editor for Fox News Digital.
President Joe Biden delivered his second State of the Union address on Tuesday.
Here is a fact check of some of the claims from Biden and the Republican response by Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders:
Biden claimed his administration cut the federal deficit by “more than $1.7 trillion.”
Facts First: Biden’s boast leaves out important context. It is true that the federal deficit fell by $1.7 trillion under Biden in the 2021 and 2022 fiscal years, including a record $1.4 trillion drop in 2022 – but it is highly questionable how much credit Biden deserves for this reduction. Biden did not mention that the primary reason the deficit fell so substantially was that it had skyrocketed to a record high under then-President Donald Trump in 2020 because of bipartisan emergency pandemic relief spending, then fell as expected when the spending expired as planned. Independent analysts say Biden’s own actions, including his laws and executive orders, have had the overall effect of adding to current and projected future deficits, not reducing those deficits.
Dan White, senior director of economic research at Moody’s Analytics – an economics firm whose assessments Biden has repeatedly cited during his presidency – told CNN’s Matt Egan in October: “On net, the policies of the administration have increased the deficit, not reduced it.” The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an advocacy group, wrote in September that Biden’s actions will add more than $4.8 trillion to deficits from 2021 through 2031, or $2.5 trillion if you don’t count the American Rescue Plan pandemic relief bill of 2021.
National Economic Council director Brian Deese wrote on the White House website in January that the American Rescue Plan pandemic relief bill “facilitated a strong economic recovery and enabled the responsible wind-down of emergency spending programs,” thereby reducing the deficit; David Kelly, chief global strategist at J.P. Morgan Funds, told CNN in October that the Biden administration does deserve credit for the recovery that has pushed the deficit downward. And Deese correctly noted that Biden’s signature legislation, last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, is expected to bring down deficits by more than $200 billion over the next decade.
Still, the deficit-reducing impact of that one bill is expected to be swamped by the deficit-increasing impact of various additional bills and policies Biden has approved.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale
Biden touted American small business applications.
Facts First: This is true. There were about 5.4 million business applications in 2021, the highest number since 2005 (the first year for which the federal government released this data for a full year), and about 5.1 million business applications in 2022. Not every application turns into a real business, but the number of “high-propensity” business applications – those deemed to have a high likelihood of turning into a business with a payroll – also hit a record in 2021 and saw its second-highest total in 2022.
Former President Donald Trump’s last full year in office, 2020, also set a then-record for total and high propensity applications. There are various reasons for the pandemic-era boom in entrepreneurship, which began after millions of Americans lost their jobs in early 2020. Among them: some newly unemployed workers seized the moment to start their own enterprises; Americans had extra money from stimulus bills signed by Trump and Biden; interest rates were particularly low until a series of rate hikes that began in the spring of 2022.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale
Biden touted low unemployment rates.
Facts First: Biden’s claims are accurate.
The Black or African American unemployment rate was 5.4% in January 2023, just above the record low of 5.3% set in August 2019. (This data series goes back to 1972.) The rate was 9.2% in January 2021, the month Biden took office.
The Hispanic or Latino unemployment rate was 4.5% in January 2023, not too far from the record low of 4.0% that was set in September 2019 – though the 4.5% rate in January 2023 was a jump from the 4.1% rate in December 2022. (This data series goes back to 1973.) The rate was 8.5% in January 2021.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale
Biden criticized the fiscal management of former President Donald Trump’s administration.
Facts First: Biden’s claim is correct. The national debt, now more than $31 trillion, increased by just under $8 trillion during Trump’s four years in office, in part because of Trump’s major tax cuts. It’s important to note, though, that some of the increase in the debt during the Trump era was because of the trillions in emergency Covid-19 pandemic relief spending that passed with bipartisan support. The national debt spiked in the first half of 2020 after increasing gradually during Trump’s first three years in office, and because of spending required by safety-net programs that were created by previous presidents. A significant amount of spending under any president is the result of decisions made by their predecessors.
Charles Blahous, a researcher at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University who authored the 2021 paper “Why We Have Federal Deficits,” wrote that the impact of recent legislation on the long-term structural fiscal imbalance is dwarfed by the creation of Medicare and Medicaid and increases to Social Security, all of which occurred between 1965 and 1972.
“Despite all the political rhetoric expended today to cast blame for skyrocketing federal deficits on either the Joseph R. Biden Jr. administration or the Donald J. Trump administration, on either congressional Democrats or congressional Republicans, the largest drivers of the structural federal fiscal imbalance were enacted roughly a half-century ago,” Blahous wrote.
From CNN’s Katie Lobosco and Daniel Dale
Biden claimed that a new law, the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act, will produce hundreds of thousands of new jobs.
Facts First: Biden’s prediction about future job creation is obviously beyond the scope of a fact check. But his claim about companies having announced $300 billion in manufacturing investments during his presidency is accurate; the White House provided CNN with a list of these publicly announced investments. (It’s worth noting that companies sometimes end up investing less than they initially announce.)
Facts First: This is true. The unemployment rate was 3.4% in January 2023, the lowest figure since the rate also hit 3.4% in May 1969. The unemployment rate was 6.3% in January 2021, the month Biden took office.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale
Biden, speaking about the Inflation Reduction Act, said:
Facts First:This claim needs context. While Inflation Reduction Act tax credits will help save families money on their energy bills, it could take years for EV tax credits to become fully available.
Biden’s claim about energy savings is similar to an estimate from clean electricity nonprofit Rewiring America – which estimated last year that a US household could save $1,800 per year if they installed electric heat pumps to heat their water and heat and cool their air, replaced a gas car with an EV, and installed solar.
Ultimately, new electric vehicles will be eligible for up to $7,500. But there’s a big catch: in order to qualify for these tax credits, the vehicles’ final assembly must happen in North America. At the insistence of Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the IRA has strict requirements for how many electric vehicle and EV battery components must be made in the US or countries that have a free trade deal with the US.
The US Treasury Department is expected to issue guidance on critical minerals and batteries in March. But the complex requirements for these tax credits could take years to fully kick in as companies must move their supply chain to North America.
Starting this year, 40% or more of the critical minerals used to create a vehicle’s battery must be extracted or processed in the United States, or a country that has a free trade deal with the US, for the vehicle to qualify for tax credits. That number will gradually rise to 80% of the battery minerals by 2027 and reach 100% by 2029.
This provision passed because Manchin wanted the US to compete with China on electric vehicles, and it will eventually have the impact of bringing more EV and battery jobs to the US or countries it has a free trade agreement with. The measure has already resulted in several companies announcing new factories in the US.
But it’s also a complex provision that will take time to implement, likely meaning vehicle manufacturers won’t be able to offer the credit in the next couple years as they move their supply chains to the US and North America.
From CNN’s Ella Nilsen
In calling to revive the Democrats’ enhancement of the child tax credit in 2021, Biden pointed to the fact that the provision helped slash the child poverty rate that year.
Facts First: This is true. The child poverty rate was cut nearly in half in 2021, and the expanded child tax credit was the major factor. The enhancement accounted for the bulk of the reduction.
The child poverty rate fell from 9.7% in 2020 to 5.2% in 2021, according to the US Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, which takes into account certain non-cash government assistance, tax credits and needed expenses.
That’s a reduction of 46%, sending the rate to the lowest level since the supplemental measure began in 2009.
The child tax credit – both the traditional credit and the enhancement – reduced the child poverty rate from 9.2% to 5.2%, or 43%, according to the Census Bureau. Without the beefed-up credit, the rate would have only fallen from 9.2% to 8.1%, or 12%.
As part of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act that passed in March 2021, Congress enhanced the child tax credit for one year, beefing up payments to $3,600 for each child up to age 6 and $3,000 for each one ages 6 through 17, for lower- and middle-income families. For the first time, half the credit was paid in monthly installments from July through December, while parents could claim the other half when they filed their 2021 taxes this year.
Also, more low-income parents became eligible for the full amount because lawmakers made it fully refundable.
From CNN’s Tami Luhby
Biden touted progress against inflation.
Facts First: Biden’s claim is correct. He didn’t mention, however, that gas prices are still significantly higher today than they were when he took office. And it’s important to note that presidential policy has a limited impact on gas prices, which are determined by a complex global interplay of supply and demand factors.
As of the day of the State of the Union, the national average for a gallon of regular gas was $3.457, per data from the American Automobile Association. That was indeed down more than $1.50 from a record high of $5.016 in mid-June. But it was still up from a national average of $2.393 on Biden’s Inauguration Day in January 2021.
Biden has taken steps to lower gas prices. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, which contributed to a spike in gas prices, the Biden administration released 180 million barrels of oil from the national Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The administration also issued an emergency waiver that allowed the sale of E15 gasoline, a blend that contains 15% ethanol, last summer. A White House official noted Wednesday that the price of gas today is lower than it was when the Russian invasion began.
But as we regularly note – whether a president is boasting about a decline in gas prices or his critics are blasting him for an increase in gas prices – presidential policy is not a primary factor in the price of gasoline.
“Similar to why the primary reason for rise in price isn’t due to the President, the same holds true for declines,” Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, told CNN in a message this week. Asked about the role of the president in the decline since the peak of mid-2022, De Haan said: “While the president may have had a minimal role in lowering prices through easing regulation, and occasionally using waivers, the bulk of the decline is simply due to supply and demand changes, and Russian oil and refined products that are still being exported, providing needed supply to the global market.”
De Haan said Biden’s releases of oil from the strategic reserve “put some downward pressure on the price of oil, but I would not call it materially significant.”
The White House official responded Wednesday by pointing to an analysis from the administration’s Treasury Department that estimated that the releases of reserve oil by the US and its allies could have reduced the price of gas by 40 cents a gallon.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale
Biden claimed to have created more jobs “in two years than any president has ever created in four years.”
Facts First: Biden’s number is accurate: the US economy added 12.1 million jobs between Biden’s first full month in office, February 2021, and January 2023. That number is indeed higher than the number of jobs added in any previous four-year presidential term. However, it’s important to note that Biden took office in an unusual pandemic context that makes meaningful comparison to other periods very difficult.
Biden became president less than a year after the economy shed nearly 22 million jobs over two months, March and April 2020, because of the Covid-19 pandemic. The jobs recovery then began immediately after that, under then-President Donald Trump, but there was still an unprecedented hole to fill when Biden took office.
Biden is free to argue that his stimulus legislation and other policies have helped the country gain jobs faster than it otherwise would have. (As always, it’s debatable precisely how much credit the president deserves for job-creation.) Nonetheless, it is clear that there could only be such an extraordinary number of jobs added in 2021 and 2022 because there was such an extraordinary number of jobs lost in early 2020.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale
While touting his efforts to stand up to authoritarian leaders in China and Russia, Biden painted himself as a champion of freedom and inaccurately claimed that democracy was spreading under his watch.
Facts First:This claim is at odds with data from Freedom House, a leading nonprofit that tracks democracy and human rights around the world. They say democracy has been in global decline over the past few years.
The group’s most recent annual report on the state of global democracy, released in February 2022, was aptly titled, “The Global Expansion of Authoritarian Rule.” Their 2021 report was called, “Democracy under Siege.”
Getting into the data, Freedom House says 60 countries experienced democratic backsliding in the previous year, while only 25 countries improved their position. The group highlighted backsliding in Sudan, Nicaragua and Afghanistan, where the Taliban reclaimed power when Biden withdrew all American troops from the country.
Freedom House’s most recent report is one year old, with a new report likely coming out soon. And to be fair, Biden could merely be expressing his view that autocratic regimes have lost prestige on the world stage.
But the trends appear to be holding. For instance, after Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine last year, he initiated a domestic crackdown that rolled back the few remaining civil liberties that existed in Russia.
Freedom House is largely funded by grants from the US government.
From CNN’s Marshall Cohen
Biden highlighted his administration’s work to build more electric vehicle charging stations.
Facts First:This is more of a promise than a fact, but even so, it needs context. For a few reasons, it’s questionable whether the Biden administration will be able to meet its goal of installing 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations on US roads.
Installing 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations has long been one of Biden’s goals. The president initially proposed Congress spend $15 billion to make it a reality, but just half of that – $7.5 billion – passed as part of the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure bill.
Though the administration has said that could be backfilled by private investment, that change in funding could hinder the administration’s ability to meet the goal. States can now unlock more than $900 million in funding for fiscal years 2022 and 2023, which the administration estimated will “help build” chargers across approximately 53,000 miles of US highways. Over the next five years, the full $5 billion will be spent to build out a network of EV chargers on major highways. Another pot of $2.5 billion in grant funding is also available for states to apply to.
There is also a wide range in how much different types of chargers cost, and individual states have a lot of leeway in deciding what kinds of chargers will go on their roads. DC fast chargers can charge a car to mostly full in 20 minutes to an hour and are meant to go on major highways and roads. Another kind of charger known as an L2 charger can take hours to charge a car to full. But DC fast chargers are much more expensive, costing around $100,000 compared to around $6,000 for an L2, Ellen Hughes-Cromwick, a senior resident fellow at the think tank Third Way, has told CNN.
In an interview with climate publication Grist last year, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said that ultimately the number of EV chargers on the roads “really depends on how the states decide to mix the fast chargers and different types of technology.”
From CNN’s Ella Nilsen
In another claim about the economy, Biden claimed to have created “800,000 good-paying manufacturing jobs.”
Facts First: Biden’s figures are correct; however, the “good-paying” qualifier is subjective and can’t be independently verified for each of those 800,000-plus positions.
The US economy added 803,000 manufacturing jobs from Biden’s first full month in office, February 2021, through January 2023, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The job growth rate during Biden’s first two years in office was 6.58%. The last time a comparable growth rate was higher was in 1979.
The average hourly wage in the manufacturing industry was $31.57 for all employees and $25.84 for production and non-supervisory positions in January, preliminary BLS data shows. Nationally, the average hourly wage was a projected $33.03. From CNN’s Alicia Wallace
Biden said 30 million workers had to sign non-compete agreements, illustrating his point with an example of a cashier at a burger place being unable to cross the street to take a similar job at a restaurant that pays more money.
Facts First: This is partially true. Millions of rank-and-file employees and independent contractors, in addition to business executives across industries, have signed non-compete agreements that critics say suppress competition, wages and entrepreneurship. The Federal Trade Commission in January proposed a rule to ban employers from imposing those agreements on workers and to rescind all existing noncompete agreements. But are burger chain workers really subject to those noncompete agreements? It’s not likely – not anymore, anyway.
An investigation in Washington state in 2017 revealed that several fast-food chains, including Arby’s, Auntie Anne’s, Buffalo Wild Wings, Carl’s Jr., Cinnabon, Jimmy John’s, and McDonald’s, had been enforcing no-poaching rules that prevented employees from moving between franchises within the same chain – not, as Biden suggested, between rival chains. By 2018, all those chains agreed to end their no-poach practices at roughly 25,000 restaurants nationwide.
From CNN’s David Goldman
Biden also addressed inflation.
Facts First: Biden’s claims are true that inflation has come down, but take home pay has only recently started to see gains over inflation.
Food prices were up 10.4% in December 2022 from the year-before period, according to the latest available Consumer Price Index report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Food price inflation, as measured by the CPI, has slowly declined since hitting a 40-year high of 11.4% in August 2022.
Overall inflation, as measured by the CPI, was 6.5% in December 2022. The headline inflation rate has declined for six consecutive months since hitting a 40-year high of 9.1% in June 2022.
The CPI, which measures the average change in the prices over time of a basket of consumer goods, is one of several closely watched inflation barometers that also have showed price increases to have moderated in recent months. Within CPI and other indexes, there are various measures to gauge inflation. Most notably, “core” inflation excludes items with more volatile price increases.
Biden’s claim that take-home pay has gone up is true if you start the calculation seven months ago; “real” wages, which take inflation into account, started rising in mid-2022 as inflation slowed. However, real wages are lower today than they were both a full year ago and at the beginning of Biden’s presidency in January 2021. That’s because inflation was so high in 2021 and the beginning of 2022.
There are various ways to measure real wages. Real average hourly earnings declined 1.7% between December 2021 and December 2022, while real average weekly earnings (which factors in the number of hours people worked) declined 3.1% over that period.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Alicia Wallace
Biden once again took aim at Republicans in Congress over Social Security and Medicare, accusing some of them of wanting to make changes to the programs. His remarks elicited cheers from Democrats but loud jeers from Republicans, including GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene who shouted “liar.”
Facts First: Biden was referring to Florida GOP Sen. Rick Scott, who last year issued “An 11 Point Plan to Rescue America.” As the president said, Scott’s proposal would sunset all federal legislation – including the two entitlement programs – every five years and require Congress to pass them again. Another GOP senator, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, last year suggested while campaigning for a third term that entitlement programs, like Social Security and Medicare, should be shifted to discretionary spending that Congress has to approve annually.
Scott’s plan didn’t make it far. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell quickly dismissed it, also saying that the GOP will not include in its agenda a bill that sunsets Social Security and Medicare within five years.
Also, the Republican Study Committee last year put out a budget plan that calls for making several changes to Social Security and Medicare that would amount to cutting the programs’ benefits for future senior citizens.
For instance, the conservative lawmakers proposed raising Medicare’s eligibility age to be in line with the normal retirement age for Social Security, which currently is 67 for anyone born in 1960 or later, and then indexing it to life expectancy. But they would also raise the normal retirement age for Social Security, as well as trim benefits for higher-income earners.
Biden has repeatedly said that GOP lawmakers want to cut Social Security and Medicare. The drama has flared up again in recent weeks amid the debt ceiling debate. House Republicans are demanding that lifting the borrowing cap be tied to spending reductions.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, however, reiterated in remarks on Monday that “cuts to Medicare and Social Security are off the table” in the debt ceiling discussions.
From CNN’s Tami Luhby
In the official Republican rebuttal to the State of the Union, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders suggested the Biden administration and Democrats have largely called to defund the police.
Facts First: While some Democrats have joined calls for a radical shift in police policy, including a reduction in police budgets, Biden and top congressional Democrats have not supported and even rejected calls to “defund the police.”
It’s worth noting that the slogan “defund the police” means different things to different activists – from the dissolution of police forces to partial reductions in funding.
That being said, Biden in particular has explicitly stated his opposition to abolishing or defunding the police several times.
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden told CBS, “No, I don’t support defunding the police.” Rather, he said, “I support conditioning federal aid to police based on whether or not they meet certain basic standards of decency and honorableness. And, in fact, are able to demonstrate they can protect the community and everybody in the community.”
Attacking Biden and Democrats on police funding is not a new tactic from Republicans. Ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, several ads from Republican candidates attempted to create the inaccurate impression that the Democratic candidates they were targeting supported defunding the police. Some of the Republican ads simply made things up. Other ads falsely described bills the Democratic candidates have supported. Still other ads tried guilt by association, noting that the candidates have supporters who have called to defund the police but not mentioning that the candidates themselves rejected defunding the police.
From CNN’s Tara Subramaniam
Sanders claimed that after Trump left office, Biden inherited “a world that was stable and at peace.”
Facts First:It’s obviously ridiculous to claim that there was world peace when Trump’s tenure ended, and calling the world “stable” is a subjective claim.
When Trump left the White House in 2021, there were still plenty of wars ongoing around the world – albeit not as many as under previous presidents, and very few of those conflicts directly involved American armed forces.
For instance, Trump did not end the war in Afghanistan, which was still ongoing when Biden took office. There were thousands of US troops in the country when Biden was sworn in, before he withdrew them all in 2021.
The long-running Yemeni civil war was still happening when Trump left office. (Under Trump and Obama, the US supported Saudi Arabia’s military intervention in the war through arms sales. Biden ended that policy in 2021.)
The Syrian civil war was also ongoing, though at a more isolated level than in past years. And a war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region was in full swing. The drug war in Mexico was still leading to deaths and disappearances.
Additionally, the war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region was still unresolved. The war began in 2014, but had settled into a “frozen conflict,” with Russian proxies occupying a large chunk of the eastern Donbas region, and Ukrainian troops dug into trenches. It escalated into a full-blown war when Russia invaded in February 2022, after Biden had already taken office.
From CNN’s Marshall Cohen
Sanders said that the US is experiencing the “worst border crisis in American history.”
Facts First: It’s true that the Biden administration is facing record levels of apprehensions along the border, but Democrats and Republicans have defined the crisis on their own terms.
In fiscal year 2022, US Border Patrol encountered migrants more than 2.2 million times attempting to unlawfully cross the US southern border, according to federal data, marking a new record.
Those figures include repeat crossers and reflect shifting migration patterns. For example, there has been an increasing number of Cubans, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans and Haitians journeying to the US-Mexico border amid deteriorating conditions at homeexacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. That’s posed a unique challenge to the Biden administration because the US is largely limited from removing some of those nationalities.
Republicans and Democrats each define crises differently. Republicans have argued that the increase in migrants at the border is evidence of an “open border” under President Joe Biden despite the administration still using a Trump-era Covid restriction, whereas Democrats have described it as a humanitarian crisis reflective of the poor conditions at home. From CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez
Facts First: This is partially true, but it lacks context. The US economy was bouncing back from the steepest job losses America had ever faced from the Covid shutdowns at the beginning of the pandemic.
The economy shrank at an annual adjusted rate just shy of 30% in the second quarter of 2020, the sharpest economic contraction on record.
The economy quickly recovered that summer, growing at an annualized rate of 35.3% in the third quarter of 2020, the fastest pace on record. But the pace of economic growth began to stall in the winter before Biden took office.
America’s gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 3.9% in the fourth quarter of 2020 and America lost jobs in December 2020. Biden’s stimulus bill helped juice the economy in 2021, although that helped stoke an inflation crisis caused in part by pandemic-related supply chain disruptions and exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – a war that continues to impact the global economy to this day.
From CNN’s David Goldman
This story has been updated with additional information.
Democrats in Pennsylvania have won control of the state House of Representatives after besting Republicans in three special elections on Tuesday, reaching a majority in the chamber for the first time in 12 years.
The Associated Press called the three races, all in the Pittsburgh area, ending a monthslong stalemate over which party would control the House. Democrats now hold 102 of the 203 seats that make up the chamber, giving them a slim one-seat majority.
Republicans went into the November general election with a 113-89 seat majority, but lost 12 of them to Democrats.
The Pennsylvania state Capitol in Harrisburg is seen on Dec. 14, 2020.(AP Photo/Matt Slocum, File)
One Democratic member passed away from cancer ahead of the election in October, and two subsequently resigned after winning higher office, leaving three vacant seats and a slim 101-99 margin for Republicans.
Prior to Tuesday’s special elections to fill those three vacant seats, Republicans sought to strike a deal to avoid losing their majority by supporting state Rep. Mark Rozzi, a Democrat-turned-independent, to be House Speaker.
Part of the deal was for Rozzi to drop his Democratic Party registration and become a registered independent, which would have left the chamber in a tie. He didn’t, however, drop his Democratic registration and ultimately recessed the House indefinitely after a consensus couldn’t be reached on a piece of legislation.
Pennsylvania House Speaker Mark Rozzi says he has no intentions to step aside for conventional Democratic leadership in his chamber.(AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
With a clear majority, Democrats are expected to put up another candidate for speaker and oust Rozzi, but it is unclear which candidate might have the votes to win the job.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Brandon Gillespie is an associate editor at Fox News. Follow him on Twitter at @brandon_cg.
Bed Bath & Beyond, America’s quintessential home furnishings’ chain, is fighting to stay in business.
The company has avoided a bankruptcy filing for now by completing a complex stock offering that will give it an immediate injection of $225 million in funds and a pledge for $800 million in the future to pay down its current debt load.
Bed Bath & Beyond is also shrinking to save money. The company said it plans to close around 400 of its roughly 760 Bed Bath & Beyond stores. It will keep open its most profitable stores in key markets.
The moves are a lifeline for Bed Bath & Beyond. They will give the company time to pursue a turnaround without a bankruptcy filing, which can be costly, out of its control and wind up in a liquidation.
“They are essentially doing a reorganization outside of bankruptcy court,” said Daniel Gielchinsky, an attorney at DGIM Law specializing in bankruptcy. “Slow the cash burn is the name of the game for the next 6 to 12 months and allow the company to pivot into a profitable position.”
It will be a complicated turnaround and the company’s future remains uncertain. If Bed Bath & Beyond comes up short in the current version of its turnaround plan, the likelihood of a liquidation increases.
Here’s how Bed Bath & Beyond, once a retailer pioneer, veered to the edge of bankruptcy and where it turns next.
Bed Bath & Beyond had been a crown jewel of the era of so-called “category killers”: chains that dominated a category of retail, such as Toys “R” Us, Circuit City and Sports Authority. Those companies, too, ultimately filed for bankruptcy.
Bed Bath & Beyond became known for pots and pans, towels and bedding stacked from the floor to the ceilings at its cavernous stores — and for its ubiquitous 20%-off coupons. The blue-and-white coupons became something of a pop culture symbol, and millions of Americans wound up stashing them away in their cars, closets and basements.
The retailer attracted a broad range of customers by selling name brands at cut-rate prices. Brands coveted a spot on Bed Bath & Beyond’s shelves, knowing it would lead to big sales. Plus, the open-store layout encouraged impulse buying: Shoppers would come in to buy new dishes and walk out with pillows, towels and other items.
Stores were a fixture for shoppers around the winter holidays and during the back-to-school and college seasons, and Bed Bath & Beyond also had a strong baby and wedding registry business.
Founded in 1971 by two veterans of discount retail in Springfield, New Jersey, the chain of small linen and bath stores — then called Bed ‘n Bath — first grew around the northeast and in California selling designer bedding, a new trend at the time. Unlike department stores, it didn’t rely on sales events to draw customers.
“We had witnessed the department store shakeout and knew that specialty stores were going to be the next wave of retailing,” co-founder Leonard Feinstein reportedly said in 1993. “It was the beginning of the designer approach to linens and housewares and we saw a real window of opportunity.”
In 1987, the company changed its name to Bed Bath & Beyond to reflect its expanded merchandise and bigger “superstores.” The company went public in 1992 with 38 stores and around $200 million in sales.
By 2000, those figures leaped to 241 stores and $1.1 billion in sales. The 1,000th Bed Bath & Beyond store opened in 2009, when the chain had reached $7.8 billion in sales.
The company was something of an iconoclast. It spent little on advertising, relying instead on print coupons distributed in weekly newspapers to attract customers.
“Why not just tell the customer that we’ll give you a discount on the item you want — and not the one that we want to put on sale? We’ll mail a coupon, and it will be a lot cheaper,” Bed Bath & Beyond co-founder Warren Eisenberg, now 92, said in a 2020 New York Times interview.
The chain was known for giving autonomy to store managers to decide which products to stock, allowing them to customize their individual stores, and for shipping products directly to stores instead of a central warehouse.
But as brick-and-mortar began to give way to e-commerce, Bed Bath & Beyond was slow to make the transition — a misstep compounded by the fact that home decor is one of the most commonly bought categories online.
“We missed the boat on the internet,” Eisenberg said in a recent Wall Street Journal interview.
Online shopping weakened the allure of Bed Bath & Beyond’s fan-favorite coupons, too, because consumers could find plenty of cheaper alternatives on Amazon or browse a wider selection on sites like Wayfair
(W).
It wasn’t just Amazon and online shopping that sank Bed Bath & Beyond, however.
Walmart
(WMT), Target
(TGT) and Costco
(COST) have grown over the past decade, and they have been able to draw Bed Bath & Beyond customers with lower prices and a wider array of merchandise. Discount chains such as HomeGoods and TJ Maxx and have also undercut Bed Bath & Beyond’s prices.
Without the differentiators of the lowest prices or widest selection, Bed Bath & Beyond’s sales stagnated from 2012 to 2019.
The company was hit hard during the pandemic, closing stores temporarily during 2020 while rivals remained open. Sales sunk 17% in 2020 and 15% in 2021.
What’s more, Bed Bath & Beyond has rotated through several different executives and turnaround strategies in recent years.
Former Target executive Mark Tritton took the helm in 2019 with backing from investors and a bold new strategy. He scaled back coupons and inventory from national brands in favor of Bed Bath & Beyond’s own private-label brands.
But this change alienated customers who were loyal to big brands. The company also fell behind on payments to vendors and stores did not have enough merchandise to stock shelves. Tritton left as CEO in 2022.
As of late November the company had 949 stores, including 762 Bed Bath & Beyond stores and 137 buybuyBaby stores.
It said Tuesday that it will ultimately have about half that number – 360 Bed Bath & Beyond stores and 120 buybuyBaby locations.
Bed Bath & Beyond will close stores that drain the most cash out of its business.
But the closures will mean Bed Bath & Beyond will give up on stores that brought in $1.2 billion in annual sales, Michael Lasser, an analyst at UBS, said in a note to clients Tuesday. Bed Bath & Beyond will recapture a portion of those sales from its other stores and online, Lasser said, but the majority will go to other retailers.
But, to survive, the company needs to grow sales at its remaining stores. Otherwise, too much of Bed Bath & Beyond’s revenue will go toward repaying debt that it won’t be able to turn a profit.
Reversing sales declines won’t be easy given challenges with waning customer demand, online traffic and rising competition in Bed Bath & Beyond product categories, Lasser said. Bed Bath & Beyond will have to overcome its significant hurdles to become a healthy, profitable company.
Bankruptcy lawyer Daniel Gielchinsky, however, said it was an encouraging sign that Bed Bath & Beyond was able to raise enough cash through a public offering to stay afloat. The offering was reportedly backed by investment firm Hudson Bay Capital. (Hudson Bay did not respond to a CNN Business request for comment.)
Still, liquidators will be watching closely, he said, eager to pounce.
“They are assuredly waiting on the sidelines to dismantle the company at the ready.”
FIRST ON FOX: GOP Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders is proposing major overhauls to the state’s education system, tackling issues from teacher wage increases to school choice to eliminating critical race theory (CRT) in curriculum, Fox News Digital learned exclusively.
On Wednesday, Sanders’ office is expected to propose legislation to be considered by the Republican-controlled state legislature, called “Arkansas LEARNS,” as one of her first major pushes since taking office as the nation’s youngest governor.
The bill, if it passes, would increase the current base salary for teachers from $36,000 to $50,000 which would rank Arkansas 4th highest base-salary for teachers in the nation. The measure would also provide 12 weeks paid maternity leave and merit-based bonuses of up to $10,000.
Sanders’ bill will also eliminate any CRT or “indoctrination” in curriculum.
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders speaks after taking the oath of the office on the steps of the Arkansas Capitol Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2023, in Little Rock, Ark.(The Associated Press)
The measure is also aimed at broadening school choice, with the goal of adopting full universal choice for all Arkansas families by school year 2025-2026.
Currently in Arkansas, only 35% of students in third grade can read at grade level. To combat the issue, Sanders’ bill will fund 120 new literacy coaches to be deployed across the state to “maximize student learning,” and $500 of supplemental education services per year per any student from kindergarten to third grade who’s struggling to read at grade level.
Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, former Trump White House press secretary.(Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
Before advancing to the fourth grade, students will be required to read at a third grade level.
As part of Arkansas LEARNS, students will be required to complete 75 hours of community service to graduate high school. High school students will be offered dual-track diplomas that will benefit students entering the workforce directly after graduation and help them qualify for high-paying jobs.
Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders. (AP Photo/Will Newton)
Sanders, who delivered the Republican rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address Tuesday night, is expected to unveil her education package on Wednesday at 12:30 p.m. CT from the state capitol.
Brianna Herlihy is a politics writer for Fox News Digital.
A city bus crashed into a day care center north of Montreal on Wednesday, leaving two children dead and sending six children to the hospital, officials said. The bus driver was arrested and charged with homicide and careless driving.
Police set up a large perimeter around the building housing the day care in Laval, Quebec, and panicked parents who ran to the center were diverted to a nearby elementary school. Dozens of police and emergency vehicles lined the blocked-off road leading to the day care.
Laval police spokesperson Erika Landry identified the driver as a 51-year-old employee, but did not release his name. Laval Mayor Stéphane Boyer said the driver has worked for Societe de transport de Laval for about 10 years and has no incidents of note in his file.
“There is a theory that it was an intentional act, but that remains to be confirmed by the investigation,” Boyer said. Added Landry, “As of now, we don’t know the motive.”
A man who lives near the day care said he rushed to the scene of the crash and that he and three parents managed to subdue the driver, who he said stepped out of the bus, removed all his clothing and started screaming.
Parents and their children are loaded onto a warming bus after a city bus crashed into a daycare center in Laval, Quebec, on Feb. 8, 2023. (Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press via AP)
“The first thing he did was take off all his clothes after opening the bus door. …. He was just yelling; there were no words coming out of his mouth,” said Hamdi Benchaabane.
The day care is located at the end of a driveway off a cul-de-sac. There is a bus stop on the cul-de-sac, but the driver would have had to veer off the road and head down the long driveway to hit the building.
Benchaabane said he and the others had to strike the driver to get him under control, before police cuffed the man. The driver, he said, “was in a different world.”
Benchaabane said he was able to help pull one child from the day care, adding that he and the others tried to save a second child before firefighters ordered them to leave because pieces of the roof were at risk of falling.
“It was a nightmare, I can’t believe it,” he said of what he witnessed. “It was horrible.”
Aerial news footage from the scene shows the bus crashed into the front of the day care center. The building is located at the end of a driveway, and the bus driver would have had to leave the road to hit it.
David Hasselhoff walked daughter Taylor Hasselhoff done the aisle last weekend.
Hasselhoff married her fiancé Madison Fiore in Escondido, California.
“It was so great being able to bring everybody together from our families and friends, and have everybody in the same room,” she told People of their wedding, adding that guests traveled from all over the world to attend.
The father and daughter walked down the aisle to “Bittersweet Symphony” and the newlyweds later later danced their first dance to “Can’t Help Falling in Love With You” performed by a live band.
Hasselhoff revealed she was engaged in December 2021, writing on Instagram, “If someone told me I would meet my future fiancé on a dating app, I’d say bet! Madison, you are my best friend and soulmate & I absolutely cannot wait to spend the rest of my life with you. You are my rock, my light and now fiancé! We did it baby!! I LOVE YOU!!” she wrote on Instagram alongside pictures of the couple surrounded by rose petals.
The two are now heading off to their honeymoon in Costa Rica.
National Pizza Day is observed every Feb. 9 — but before you head out for a celebratory slice, you’d be wise to take a few precautions.
Mark Bello, owner and operator of Pizza School NYC, helped Fox News Digital judge an unappealing slice of pizza before buying it a couple of years ago.
While it’s easy enough to look up any restaurant’s reviews online, determining the quality of a pizza often comes down to gut instinct, especially before you actually taste it.
Bello has demonstrated pizza making at the James Beard House and was named a “pizza expert” at the Food & Wine masters series.
By his own estimation, he’s tasted thousands of pizzas, both in the U.S. and abroad. And when it comes to trying out a new slice shop, he told Fox News to beware of five red flags.
National Pizza Day is celebrated every year on Feb. 9. (iStock)
National Pizza Day is an unofficial holiday in the U.S., although the tradition of eating pizza in the western hemisphere dates back to the early large-scale Italian immigration during the late 19th and early 20th century.
Inherited directly from Italy, there existed two types of distinct American pizza styles: Chicago deep-dish and New York pizza.
The Chicago pies have a high edge and fluffy bread that allows for the pizza to be filled with an abundant amount of sauce and cheese. The New York pizza has a thinner crust from thick dough with less tomato sauce but large amounts of mozzarella.
Before World War II, pizza was a popular dinner food among Italian immigrants.
Before World War II, pizza was a popular dinner food among Italian immigrants before veterans from the Italian campaign in Europe started eating it after returning home. By the 1960s and 1970s, large pizza chains like Dominoes and Pizza Hut began to emerge all over the country.
The modern Pizza Day every Feb. 9 is meant to be a celebration of the Italian custom as well as a chance for communities and friends to break bread over a widely popular Americanized dish. Here are some of the tips Bello told Fox News Digital to look for during the pizza holiday.
Too-good-to-be-true-deals
Sorry-looking slices
The wrong ingredients
It’s praised as great ‘drunk food’
Their cheese slice stinks
A pizza with a too-good-to-be-true price is probably not good at all. Avoid eating pizza that’s cheap as you might regret it later.(iStock)
1. Pizza fail 1: Too-good-to-be-true deals
Bello said consumers should immediately be wary “if the place is trying to sell you on the quantity of the pizza over the quality of the pizza.”
That doesn’t mean the pizza is necessarily bad. It’s just the first of a few factors that could suggeset poor pizza.
2. Pizza fail 2: Sorry-looking slices
Quality pizza is always going to look appetizing, but it’s not always going to look consistently the same, even between slices from the same pizzeria. And it should never be too “pale,” Bello said.
“If the outer crust resembles the rim of a Styrofoam cup in geometry, uniformity and pale color, it’s likely going to taste like the outer rim of a Styrofoam cup,” according to the expert.
3. Pizza fail 3: The wrong ingredients
Depending on the size of the pizzeria, some shops may have their ingredients — cans of tomatoes, bags of flour, cheese — on display or at least in view of customers.
If you sense something amiss with the ingredients, take your tastebuds elsewhere.
“For example, often pizzerias have their bags of flour stored in view of the customer. If they say ‘bromated’ and/or ‘bleached’ that’s not good,” Bello said, referring to flours that have been treated to change their pigments, to help develop gluten or to strengthen the dough.
4. Pizza fail 4: It’s praised as great ‘drunk food’
Good pizza should taste like good pizza all the time, not only when you’re inebriated.
Or, as Bello advised, never go out of your way “if the overwhelming recommendations you hear for the pizzeria in question emphasize ‘it’s best if you go there at 3 a.m. when you’re really drunk.'”
5. Pizza fail 5: The cheese slice stinks
If a cheesy pizza doesn’t smell super appetizing, you’ll likely want to avoid eating it.(iStock)
So the pizza seems slightly questionable, but it looks halfway decent, and you can’t see the ingredients. In that case, stick with a single cheese slice. It’s the ultimate indicator of the rest of the menu, according to Bello.
“If their classic cheese and sauce slice is bad, move along,” the expert advised.
Recent telescope data revealed that a small planet in the far reaches of our solar system has a dense ring round it. And scientists are baffled as to why.
The planet, Quaoar, is one of roughly 3,000 small planets that orbit the sun beyond Neptune, and at 690 miles (1,110-kilometers) wide, it’s about the seventh largest, with Pluto and Eris ranking as the biggest.
Observations of Quaoar made between 2018 and 2021 revealed that the planet has a ring sitting farther away from it than scientists previously believed to be possible, according to a news release from the European Space Agency, which used ground-based telescopes and a new space-based telescope called Cheops to collect the data.
Based on conventional thinking, all the material that makes up Quaoar’s dense ring should have condensed and formed a small moon. But it didn’t.
“Early results suggest that the frigid temperatures at Quaoar may play a role in preventing the icy particles from sticking together but more investigations are needed,” according to the news release.
Before these new observations of Quaoar, scientists largely believed that it was impossible for planets to form rings beyond a certain distance. It’s a generally accepted rule of celestial mechanics that material in orbit around a planet will form a spherical object — or a moon — if it orbits at a far enough range away from the planet. But that moon will be ripped apart if it moves closer than what’s called the “Roche limit,” a point at which the planet’s tidal forces would be stronger than the gravity holding the moon together.
All the rings around Saturn, for example, lie inside of the planet’s Roche limit. What’s puzzling about Quaoar, however, is that its ring lies well beyond the planet’s Roche limit, in an area where the material should form a moon.
“As a result of our observations, the classical notion that dense rings survive only inside the Roche limit of a planetary body must be thoroughly revised,” said Giovanni Bruno of INAF’s Astrophysical Observatory of Catania, Italy, in a statement.
Collecting the data that revealed Quaoar’s puzzling ring was in itself a cause for celebration, according to ESA. Because of the planet’s small size and distance from Earth, researchers wanted to observe it using an “occultation” — a means of observing a planet by waiting for it to be essentially backlit by a star, illuminating its silhouette.
That can be an extremely difficult process, according to ESA, because the telescope, planet and star must all be in perfect alignment. This observation was made possible by the space agency’s recent efforts to provide an unprecedentedly detailed map of the stars.
ESA also used Cheops, which was launched in 2019. Cheops typically studies exoplanets, or bodies that lie outside of Earth’s solar system. But for this instance, it set its sights on the nearer target of Quaoar, which orbits the sun even farther than Neptune — about 44 times farther than Earth’s orbit.
“I was a little skeptical about the possibility to do this with CHEOPS,” said Isabella Pagano, the director of the INAF’s Astrophysical Observatory of Catania, in a statement.
But it worked. And Cheops’ observation marked the first ever of its kind — an occulation of one of the most distant planets in our solar system by a space-based telescope, according to ESA.
Researchers then compared data collected by Cheops with observations by Earth-based telescopes, leading to their surprising revelation.
“When we put everything together, we saw drops in brightness that were not caused by Quaoar, but that pointed to the presence of material in a circular orbit around it. The moment we saw that we said, ‘Okay, we are seeing a ring around Quaoar,’” said Bruno Morgado, a professor at The Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, who led the analysis, in a statement.
Theoreticians — scientists who are experts in various theories — are now at work attempting to surmise how Quaoar’s ring survived, according to ESA.
Fox News anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum preview President Biden’s State of the Union address as dignitaries and guests enter the House chamber.
President Biden on Tuesday used his State of the Union address to double down on calls for Congress to pass a mass amnesty for illegal immigrants, while touting a recent drop in migrant numbers at the southern border from the historic highs seen during his administration – and was met by yells to “secure the border” by some Republicans.
“Let’s also come together on immigration and make it a bipartisan issue once again,” he said.
Biden’s administration has been rocked by a migrant crisis at the southern border now into its third year, with a record 2.3 million migrant encounters and nearly 600,000 “gotaways” in FY 2022. In December there was a record 251,000 migrant encounters alone.
Republicans have battered the administration over the crisis, blaming the administration’s rolling back of Trump-era border security policies and interior enforcement. But the administration has blamed a hemisphere-wide crisis and has hit out at Republicans for not agreeing to funding and reform measures proposed by the administration.
Vice President Kamala Harris and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy applaud during President Biden’s State of the Union address at the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2023.(Jacquelyn Martin/AP/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
On Tuesday Biden touted increases in Border Patrol staffing and also increased fentanyl seizures at the border, which officials have said shows that apprehension is getting better.
“We now have a record number of personnel working to secure the border, arresting 8,000 human smugglers and seizing over 23,000 pounds of fentanyl in just the last several months,” he said.
He also noted border measures introduced last month, which extended a humanitarian parole program for Venezuelans to include Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans nd would allow 30,000 in a month if they did not cross illegally, had a sponsor already in the U.S. and met other conditions.
That was accompanied by an expansion of Title 42 expulsions to include those nationalities.
Sources tell Fox News that there were approximately 150,000 encounters in January, which would mark the lowest number since Feb. 2021. Biden cited additional statistics showing a drop in encounters since the measures were announced.
“We’ve launched a new border plan last month, unlawful migration from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela has come down 97%.”
But Biden repeated his prior appeals for Congress to pass a sweeping immigration reform bill. The bill was unveiled on Biden’s first day in office in 2021. At the core of the bill is an eight-year path to citizenship for illegal immigrants in the U.S. before Jan. 1 2021 — as well as immediate green card eligibility for farmworkers, Temporary Protected Status recipients, and some who came to the U.S. as minors, who activists refer to as “Dreamers.”
The bill would also set up refugee processing locations in Central America, increase the number of immigration judges and open up a number of additional avenues for legal immigration — including “recapturing” unused visas from prior years, clearing visa backlogs, and expanding the diversity lottery visa program. The legislation would also provide additional funding for technology at the border and expand anti-smuggling efforts in Central America.
Republicans balked at the legislation due to the inclusion of an amnesty for illegal immigrants, and it has shown no sign of picking up Republican support — but the administration has continued to push the bill.
Biden reiterated those calls on Tuesday, although he said he would accept a smaller plan — but one that would still include at least a partial amnesty and funding for the border.
“America’s border problems won’t be fixed until Congress acts. If we won’t pass my comprehensive immigration reform, at least pass my plan to provide the equipment and officers to secure the border. And a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers, those on temporary status, farmworkers, and essential workers,” he said.
In response to the remarks, some Republicans were heard yelling “secure the border.” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy appeared to shush the raucous members.
Later in the address, Biden highlighted the fentanyl crisis that is killing tens of thousands of Americans each year. Officials have said that fentanyl is produced in Mexico using precursors from China and then transported into the U.S. across the land border.
“Fentanyl is killing more than 70,000 Americans a year. Let’s launch a major surge to stop fentanyl production, sale, and trafficking, with more drug detection machines to inspect cargo and stop pills and powder at the border,” Biden said, before calling for cooperation with couriers and increased trafficking penalties.
The mention of fentanyl led to Republicans yelling, “It’s your fault” and renewed calls from some Republicans to “secure the border.”
“You got it,” Biden said.
Fox News’ Bill Melugin contributed to this report.
Adam Shaw is a politics reporter for Fox News Digital, primarily covering immigration and border security.
