The Biden administration is forcing Americans to provide a negative coronavirus test when traveling back into the country, yet illegal border crossers are not held to the same standard, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) noted Thursday, railing against President Biden’s inconsistent coronavirus mandates.
“What President Biden’s doing by trying to impose more restrictions, he’s now going to say if you go to the Bahamas as an American citizen and you come back, you’ve got to do a test, a COVID test. But if you just come right across the boarder illegally, that somehow that’s fine and we don’t care about the test or vaccination, I just don’t understand,” DeSantis said during the press conference in Pensacola, Florida, where he proposed $100 million in the budget for the Florida National Guard, as well as the creation of a Florida State Guard.
Indeed, on Thursday, Biden announced a change in the rules for international travel, requiring travelers to provide a negative coronavirus test within one day of departure rather than three, regardless of vaccination status.
This week, Biden’s chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci dismissed border crossers as “a different issue” than international travelers.
As Breitbart News reported:
Fauci claimed there was some coronavirus testing at the border — even though the Biden administration has not required universal testing or vaccine mandates for border crossers before they are released into the United States.
Since taking control of the border, the Biden administration has struggled for months to explain why they have failed to implement the same policies for border crossers, illegal immigrants, and migrants entering the United States as legal residents, American citizens, and even tourists.
DeSantis said the inconsistent rules are going to cause “a lot of problems” and added that he disagrees with Biden extending existing mandates as well.
“I don’t think that they should be imposing any mandates on air travel or any of the things that they have done,” he said. Notably, Biden announced Thursday his administration will, yet again, extend the mask mandate for air travel, this time through the winter.
“It has not been anything that has really made much of a difference. I think it’s inconvenienced a lot of people. I think it’s crimped the willingness of people to travel, and I don’t think that it’s necessarily a good thing,” DeSantis added.
However, the Florida governor also said he was “happy” Americans had “gotten some relief in a court decision against the Biden CMS mandate which threatened to cause healthcare workers to potentially lose their jobs.”
While he said the Florida legislature created protections for workers from vaccine mandates in the special session, “at the same time, you had the federal government … threatening to take away all Medicare and Medicaid funding from these providers, and that would have been just devastating.”
“So that is on hold across the country. And that means thousands and thousands of jobs are going to end up being preserved,” he added.