It didn’t take a rocket scientist to accurately predict that President Joe Biden’s conveniently planned “border visit” to El Paso during his trip to Mexico for the “Three Amigos Summit” over the weekend would turn out to be nothing more than a “tightly controlled” photo-op where the only thing that got accomplished was Biden giving off the appearance of Doing Something™.

Ahead of Biden’s visit, we learned that Democrat-run El Paso, which in December declared a state of emergency over the surge in illegal immigrants crossing the border, reportedly had been scrubbed and “sanitized” of the migrant camps that had cropped up in the downtown area. This is similar to how Democrat-run cities have in the past temporarily swept the homeless off the streets ahead of DNC presidential conventions.

And though Biden didn’t end up visiting downtown El Paso after all, he didn’t encounter migrants anywhere he went during his staged and scripted tour of the Mexico/U.S. border.

As a fitting footnote to all of this, Fox News reported Monday that there were over 500 migrant encounters in a 24-hour period from Sunday to Monday all while Joe Biden was there to supposedly get a firsthand look at what was going on:

BREAKING: CBP Sources tell @FoxNews that there were 518 migrant encounters in the El Paso sector in the last 24 hours yet WH pool reports indicate @POTUS did not witness any migrants at any of this three stops in El Paso yesterday

— Griff Jenkins (@GriffJenkins) January 9, 2023

Further, the network also reported that migrant encounters for the first quarter of fiscal year 2023 have eclipsed numbers for the same period of time in FY 2022:

U.S. border authorities have encountered more than 718,000 migrants attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border in the first 100 days of fiscal year 2023, Fox News Digital has learned.

FY 2023 began on October 1, and U.S. Customs and Border Protections (CBP) has encountered more than 230,000 migrants each month since, CBP sources told Fox. Of the 718,000 encounters, just over 198,000 were immediately removed under Title 42, which President Biden’s administration failed to end in December.

The data shows a shocking spike in migration compared to the same period in fiscal year 2022 when the CBP saw roughly 518,000 border encounters in the first quarter.

Something else to remember in all of this is how despicable it was to see Biden putting his arms around border patrol officials and feigning support after he threw the agency under the bus over the Haitian migrant whipping nontroversy, something for which neither Biden nor anyone else in his administration including Dept. of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has apologized despite the fact that the agents in question have been cleared on the most serious of charges.

But move along here, nothing to see. Just the President of the United States using our tax dollars to give meaningless, bare minimum attention to a crisis of his and his administration’s own making so that the next time he’s questioned on visiting the border he can huffily tell the reporters asking him that he’s done his part.

Flashback: Chip Roy Rips Into Biden, Mayorkas After CBP Report Clears Agents of ‘Whipping’ Migrants