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By Nick Reynolds
Senior Reporter, Politics
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Conservatives are blasting President Joe Biden for his Caribbean Christmas vacation amid several simultaneous crises around the country ranging from cataclysmic weather forecasts to a pending emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border.
On Tuesday, the White House announced the Bidens had departed Washington D.C. en route to St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where the president and First Lady Jill Biden would begin a several-day vacation with family through Jan. 2.
The virtue of a presidential vacation is not a foreign one, even as presidents like the Bushes and former President Bill Clinton set a longstanding precedent of remaining in D.C. for the holidays. Biden's predecessor, President Donald Trump, would often leave Washington to ring in the holiday season at his Mar-a-Lago home while before that, President Barack Obama would spend Christmases at his family's vacation home in Kailua, Hawai'i.
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But for a president who has already faced scrutiny from the Washington press corps for his frequent trips away from D.C., the timing of Biden's trip is already proving problematic among his fiercest critics.
Amid Biden's departure, a vicious blizzard gripped the Western New York city of Buffalo, leaving several dozen dead.
Holiday weather caused the cancellation or delay of thousands of flights across the eastern seaboard, paralyzing travel nationwide and leaving scores of Americans stranded.
And at the southern border, cities braced for the potential end of a Trump-era policy credited with preventing thousands of undocumented immigrants from entering the country.
"Where is @POTUS during this crisis?" Republican congressman Jim Banks, a frequent critic of the president, asked on Twitter. "Vacationing in St. Croix."
Biden has continued to work through the holiday season.
On Monday, Biden signed off on an emergency declaration to assist with cleanup associated with the Buffalo-area storms.
On Tuesday, his office announced a push by the U.S. Department of Transportation to address what it called an uncharacteristically high rate of cancellations among American airlines. And while there is idle time on vacation, presidents tend to continue their work through their time away from D.C. to ensure the continuity of executive branch operations.
"No matter where the President is, he is working," a White House spokesperson told Newsweek in a statement. "The President will continue to closely monitor updates and will remain in close touch with staff over the New Year."
Conservative commentators, however, criticized the optics of his travel schedule: particularly amid some of the worst winter weather conditions Americans have experienced in roughly half a century.
"Not only is it a vacation, but it's somewhere warm and beautiful while others are freezing, literally, to death," noted former NFL sideline reporter turned-conservative commentator Michelle Tafoya on Fox News Tuesday morning.
Meanwhile, the controversial pandemic-era Title 42 policy that allows the U.S. border patrol to reject migrants under the cover of an ongoing public health emergency could potentially end almost any day, while the White House has so far delayed announcing an alternate proposal to mitigate the impact of thousands of migrants adding onto the already mounting numbers of daily crossings at the southern border. It is currently unclear when, or if, a plan is coming soon.
"It's unlikely we get any kind of new commitment to an immigration policy, a post-Title 42 policy, within the next few days because President Biden is going to be in St Croix," Fox News' White House reporter Peter Doocy noted in a segment for the channel Tuesday. "He and the rest of the First Family fly down there through the New Year."
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