Obama to border critics: 'This is not theater'

Obama pushes back on critics as he meets with Texas governor on immigration crisis

7/9/2014

President Barack Obama, right, next to Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings attends a meeting about the border and immigration with local elected officials and faith leaders, including Texas Gov. Rick Perry, second from left, at DalFort Fueling in Dallas, Wednesday, July 9, 2014. From left are Judge Clay Jenkins, Gov. Rick Perry, Dallas County Commissioner Elba Garcia, Mayor Rawlings, and President Obama. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

ASSOCIATED PRESS

DALLAS — President Barack Obama, seeking to keep a humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border from becoming a deeper political liability, pushed back Wednesday at critics who have cast his administration’s response to the influx of unaccompanied children as slow and ineffective.

To those pressing Obama to visit the border during his two-day trip to Texas, he retorted: “This is not theater. This is a problem.”

Among Obama’s harshest critics has been Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a 2012 Republican presidential candidate who is mulling another run for the White House. Perry greeted Obama upon his arrival in the state, then discussed the situation at the border with him privately and during a larger meeting with local officials and faith leaders.

Obama cast his meeting with Perry as “constructive” and argued that he is already seeking to do much of what the governor is calling for, including sending additional resources to the border to make the deportation process more effective.

“Bottom line is that there’s nothing the governor indicated he’d like to see that I have a philosophical objection to,” Obama said.

Perry, in a statement released after his meeting with Obama, made no mention of having any areas of agreement with the president.

“Five hundred miles south of here in the Rio Grande Valley, there is a humanitarian crisis unfolding that has been created by bad public policy, in particular the failure to secure the border,” he said.