Biden, then a senator serving Delaware, was seeing U.S. interference in Eastern Europe, including parts of the former Soviet Union where he said the presence of nuclear weapons posed a threat to the United States. He then evaluated that foreign policy system against the possibility of a U.S.-led attack on Haiti, whose president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was removed in a revolution in 1991, downplaying the country's attention to foreign policymaking by contrast to the situation in Bosnia.
“If Haiti, a god awful thing to say, if Haiti just quietly sunk into the Caribbean or rose up 300 feet, it wouldn't matter a whole lot in terms of our interest,” Biden told Charlie Rose, then of PBS.
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The words returned this week as Biden got himself in a position to face a Haiti-related uproar again, this time from the White House, in the form of Haitian nationals gathering at the U.S.-Mexico border by the thousands.
Migrants set up a camp under a bridge near Del Rio, Texas, and their numbers increased to upwards of 15,000 last weekend despite the administration declaring that the borders are not clear and deterring people from journeying to the U.S.
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The migrants came amid increasing difficulties at home for the people of Haiti. Their former president, Jovenel Moise, was slain in July, and a recent earthquake killed a few thousand people.
Many of the migrants came not from Haiti , but from other Central and South American countries, and Republicans accused Biden's border policies as an offer for migrants to come.
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Images of Customs and Border Protection agents corralling Haitian migrants while on horseback headed to allegations that the migrants were being punished. Even though CBP rejected the charge, many Democrats lashed out at the force, with Biden promising those responsible "will pay."
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Some 2,276 of the more than 10,000 mostly Haitian migrants processed had been shipped back to Haiti as of Friday, an administrator from the Department of Homeland Security told the Washington Examiner. Another 6,615 were freed into the U.S., while 160 have been served papers ordering they be sent back to their country of origin. Thousands stayed to wait for processing as of Friday.
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Biden, 78, has made several other remarks widely considered racially insensitive, with African Americans often the case of his mistakes.
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