BUCK: Here’s Joe Biden on the migrant-payment issue, which last week remember, we were all saying, “This is a total outrage, $450,000 a person…”

CLAY: For people who read that story, yeah.

BUCK: For people who were separated under the Trump administration, of course, they have to say, “under the Trump administration,” because Trump was so heartless and all that stuff. A million dollars per family. Biden said that was malarkey. He didn’t use that word. Sometimes he says that. He didn’t use that word. He said this is basically crap. Now it turns out, no, it’s not. So instead of Biden have the humility to say everybody, “okay, I didn’t know what’s going on my own administration,” he just starts yelling angry old man, get-off-my-lawn style at a reporter. Here he is.

DOOCY: Where do you stand? You said last week that this report about migrant families at the border getting payments was garbage.

BIDEN: No, I didn’t say that! Let’s get it straight. You said everybody coming across the border gets five hundred, $450,000.

DOOCY: So the number is what you had a problem with?

BIDEN: The number I was referring to.

DOOCY: Okay. Sorry.

BIDEN: Here’s the thing. If, in fact, because of the — the outrageous behavior of the last administration, you coming across the border, whether it was legal or illegal and you lost your child… (shouts) You lost your child! Your child is gone. You deserve some kind of compensation, no matter what circumstance, what that will be. I had no idea! I have no idea.

BUCK: Okay, I disagree — and also, it matters a lot how much money it is, Clay. It matters to lots of people that can’t pay their bills.

CLAY: How many kids are “lost,” Buck? Is this a common thing where they have no idea where the kids are? It just doesn’t seem like that’s very common to me. It’s a fairly substantial story.

BUCK: What ended up happening, I’ve spoken to people I know in Customs and Border Patrol, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement about this, and what’s ended up happening was kids were separated. But usually they were put with other family members and then the parent was either let into the U.S. or in some cases if they were deported.

But they’ve been placed with a family member, or they’ve been placed with a safe home. So every circumstance is unique about this, or every individual case. But let’s remember that the basic premise of this was we did not have facilities. For anybody who wants to know what happened, all the facilities at the southern border are built for single adult males, essentially.

CLAY: Because most people historically crossing into the country have been doing so to work, and the general consensus has been they send money back to the countries that they’re from, and they may go back and forth as the seasons change. That’s the general consensus on who comes across the border historically.

BUCK: Correct, and so they built all these facilities for that, and I’ve been to them. I’ve seen these facilities. They are not nice, by the way. They are not pleasant places to be. But you’re supposed to be held in them for a couple of days and then be deported is actually the way the system is supposed to be. They’re not supposed to spend a long time there.

But because of the Flores Decree which comes from a judge that says you can only hold children for 20 days, families came in. They realized they could intentionally overwhelm the system at the border and then we would not have the processing and holding capabilities, so then they’d just be let into the country. So there was an intentional overwhelming of the system.

That was the whole point of it. And then sometimes because you had people who had to be detained and processed. We didn’t have the ability to hold children with them at the time. They’ve since built different facilities and now they have a different process in place. So there were some families that were separated at the border. The Trump administration did change that, Clay, because they did have a crisis.

There was a humanitarian concern and now crisis. “All right, we’ll figure this out.” But initially it was just like if you had been arrested for drunk driving, and there was no relative to take a child who was in the back seat into custody, the state would take custody of that child while you are processed and held in jail and go through that whole system, ’cause they’re breaking the law. This is the part of this…

Democrats don’t view this as in any way actually illegal and problematic. So they skip that part to it and it turns into we owe these migrants not just money, we owe them the right to stay here forever! That’s what they recall think. And that’s where the American people are saying, “Hold on. So they’re gonna get to stay ’cause,” by the way, Clay they are, “and they’re gonna get a huge check?” Which as you pointed out. It’s more than an average American household is gonna make in almost a decade probably tax fee ’cause the federal government is gonna pay the fee and Biden is acting like this was no big deal.

CLAY: And you’re further incentivizing the decision that was made in the in the first place which think about how a literal game in many ways of telephone, this is going to work its way back to Central American and Latin-American countries. It’s going back to not only is the United States the land of milk and honey, but they’re giving people hundreds of thousands of dollars when they come across the border.

Do you think people are gonna understand the nuance that Joe Biden is trying to make here? And again, the larger point too, is, how many families are entitled to this? Okay, Joe Biden says it’s not gonna be $450,000. Let’s say it’s gonna be $350,000. How many American taxpayers dollars, hundreds of millions? What’s the total cost here? How many people are going to be paid out under this procedure? And again, Buck, the bigger-picture question I think that is a really good one to put in context is, this is this is more than we often are paying families in America whose sons or daughters are being killed while serving in our armed forces.

BUCK: There’s about a thousand, by the way. Three hundred parents of separated children have still not been located. I wanted to check, because you ask the number, and about a thousand families in total had some form of separation. So just so everyone understands, there are hundreds and hundreds of thousands that have crossed illegally — families — into the country.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: So this was not… They make it sound like the Trump administration —

CLAY: It’s a pinprick of the overall number.

BUCK: — was to intentionally pull everyone apart. No. They were trying to reunite everybody but also when people come into the country illegally and they don’t want to be processed through the system, they don’t want to show up at their court hearings, they don’t speak English, they don’t have a legal right to be in the country in the first place.

They’re less likely to work through the system to find out what’s actually going on with the separated child — and, remember, sometimes it was a parent, sometimes it was aunts and uncles. They’re trying to get together with family members that are already in the country. The whole thing was a mess, but the entire plan was to overwhelm the system. So the way Biden, the Democrats are setting this up, you’re rewarding people for the intentional act of “we are overwhelming the system.”

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: If you intentionally fill a restaurant with five times as many people as are legally allowed to be inside under the fire code and then you have to evacuate for some reason and some people get hurt leaving it, the people intentionally overwhelming the facility are making a very bad decision and should not do that, right?

CLAY: They shouldn’t be rewarded.

BUCK: Should not be rewarded for it.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: And so this is the… Look, yeah, they should reunite everybody. They are trying to do that no question. But to pay them $450,000 is a slap in the face to a lot of people in this country who are saying, “Hold on a second.”