CLAIM: President Joe Biden “has been to the border,” according to White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.

VERDICT: FALSE. Biden has never visited the southern U.S. border in 50 years in politics, though he was once driven by it in El Paso.

Fox News’ Peter Doocy asked Jean-Pierre on Friday whether President Biden would accept the invitation of Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), the likely incoming Speaker of the House, to visit the southern U.S. border.

As Breitbart News’ Charlie Spiering noted, Jean-Pierre laughed at the question.

When Doocy stated — correctly — that Biden had never been to the border, Jean-Pierre said: “Look, he’s been there, he’s been to the border.”

She did not answer when Doocy asked her when, exactly, Biden had visited the border.

In September 2021, then-Press Secretary Jen Psaki responded to a similar question from Doocy by saying that she did not know whether Biden had ever visited the border.

A month later, she said: “There’s been reporting that he did drive through the border when he was on the campaign trail in 2008.” She appeared to be citing a Washington Post article that fact-checked Biden’s claim to have visited the border, and found that “Biden briefly drove past the border while on a campaign swing in 2008” in El Paso, Texas.

The Post added:

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.

Vice President Kamala Harris, who is theoretically tasked with addressing the “root causes” of the ongoing migrant crisis at the border, made one actual visit to the border last year, also in El Paso, after the White House feared being pre-empted by former President Donald Trump, who had already announced a visit.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.