Katie Pavlich Busts Biden Giving Your Baby’s Formula to Illegals

BUCK: We’ve been telling you about the baby formula shortage. Biden is holding an event today — the press is not gonna be there but they’ll give a readout to the press — on the baby formula shortage. He’s gonna be speaking with retailers and manufacturers, apparently, that’s from the White House. But there’s something else going on here. “The Biden Administration is Shipping Pallets of Baby Formula to the Border.” That’s the Townhall piece. It’s up at ClayAndBuck.com right now from Katie Pavlich, who joins us right now from Fox News. She’s a Townhall.com columnist as well. Katie, great to have you on the program.

PAVLICH: Hey, guys, thanks so much for having me.

BUCK: Tell us about this one because we had… Katie, we could have taken phone calls for the whole show yesterday from just anxious and pretty furious parents who were scrambling to get baby formula. Your piece in Townhall lets everybody know that, well, there’s no problem with baby formula at the southern border. What’s going on?

PAVLICH: Yeah. So Republican Congresswoman Kat Cammack had a Border Patrol agent contact her sending her photos of stocked shelves inside a Border Patrol processing facility with baby formula and told her that there are pallets of baby formula that have been delivered to these processing centers. So while shelves in stores across America are bare and parents are driving hours and hours to find formula for their children, the federal government clearly has some kind of contract to buy up the limited supply and deliver it, not to stores, but to processing centers on the southern border.

So this, of course, brings up two issues. The first is that the crisis at the southern border is a man-made Biden administration problem. And as we dig further into the reasons behind the baby formula shortage, it’s clear that that’s also another Biden administration federal government problem with the FDA shutting down major plant then not reopening it, wrapping it in a bunch of red tape.

And now of course there’s a limited supply and much of that is now going to solve the crisis on the border with people coming across with their children — who, of course, still need to be fed as well. So it’s infuriating, it’s frustrating. Parents are, you know, wondering where the next, you know, case of that is gonna come for their family. And there seems to be plenty available for people who broke the law to get into the country but not enough available for people who are citizens of the country.

CLAY: Katie, that’s great work by, and it also shines a light on how little attention is being paid to the border, that it might take a baby formula shortage — and therefore baby formula being shipped to the border — for many in the media actually cover anything there. As we are talking right now, I just got an alert sent to my phone from the Wall Street Journal, and the headline is: “Baby Formula Shortage Could Last for Months.”

In other words, this is not something that is going to leave anytime soon. They are now limiting how much parents can buy inside of stores when they actually find baby formula there. Kate, we know from the pandemic — unfortunately, a lot of us experienced this — when there is a fear of a shortage in a product, it actually exacerbates the shortage because when people find it, they buy more of it than they otherwise would. How does this get fixed for so many moms and dads out there that are trying desperately to find baby formula all over the country?

PAVLICH: Well, the FDA could work to get this major plant back open after there was a recall. It’s been months now. They keep saying they want it to be safe for parents and babies. Obviously, everybody wants that to be the raw. But they keep throwing up these roadblocks to reopen this plant that supplies the country with something like 50% of the baby formula. Also, I would note that yesterday incoming press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, whose first day starts tomorrow — she currently is a deputy press secretary — was asked specifically about how the Biden administration is working to manage this crisis as it gets worse.

She gave, you know, a paragraph worth of statements about how they’re working on it 24/7, how they’re looking at all options — the usual bureaucrat speak — and then when their follow-up question was asked about who exactly was handling the situation she literally laughed out loud and said that she did not know.

CLAY: Yeah. We played that audio. That’s crazy.

PAVLICH: So that’s a problem. So they’re claiming that they’re dealing with this issue. I’m wondering where Pete Buttigieg is at this point. The federal government could do a lot when it comes to commerce and figuring out how to look at these contracts, maybe, that are going to the border and maybe limit the number of baby formula pallets that are sent there before they’re sent to American stores across the country. There’s a couple different options we have but we haven’t heard much about it.

BUCK: We’re speaking to Katie Pavlich, editor at Townhall.com, Fox News contributor. Katie, I know you spent a lot of time down at the border and have a lot of contacts in Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement. What are you hearing from them about what’s gonna go on here with the Title 42 revocation which is supposed to happen here in a couple of weeks? I know there’s a judge that’s involved at this stage.

But also give the number that just came out yesterday, 107,000 overdoses, mostly fentanyl, and most of that, vast majority of that coming across the border illegally, feels like there’s renewed urgency to get this right. What are your Border Patrol folks and contacts telling you?

PAVLICH: Look, they’re saying basically Border Patrol has been turned into a processing agency and Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been turned into a travel agency. The administration’s response to Title 42 getting taken off and the estimates of 18,000 people a day crossing the border is not to deter people from coming to put up barriers to entry. It’s to simply open up new processing centers so they can process these people through and then give them a plane ticket to wherever they want to go.

That’s solution that they’re offering here. And Border Patrol has terrible morale at this point. You know, their job and their mission is to protect the homeland from foreign threats, from drug traffickers, as you mentioned, from human traffickers, from human smugglers. But this administration policies has been to simply process thousands of people through the system and to let them go into the country.

It’s kind of like having a leak in your roof and putting out a bucket and then as the bucket fills up and the leak gets bigger, they just add a couple buckets. So that’s what they’re doing. They’re going to open up new processing centers, and they’re going to put people in the front of the line for Title 42 processing in terms of the court system, making the backlog even worse. So that’s where we’re headed as a result of this.

CLAY: Katie, when we talk about baby formula shortages and the bored being a sieve and inflation at 8.5 or 8.3%, you’ve got obviously murder rates skyrocketing everywhere, you’re really smart; you’re good at communication skills. If Joe Biden came to you and he said, “Katie, I need you to make a pitch for something that I’ve done really well so far in my presidency, nearly 18 months…” Buck and I are fairly smart guys. We can’t even come up with a pitch for Joe Biden as we get closer to the midterms. I’m not talking about the abortion angle. What has Joe Biden actually done well? Can you even think of one? I mean, it truly is incomprehensible how bad he has been even for people who expected — and I think Buck and I are in this camp —

BUCK: Oh, yes.

CLAY: – and you are, too, that it wasn’t going to be good, but I don’t think any of us expected him to be this bad. Could you even point to anything that hasn’t been a disaster for him?

PAVLICH: Well, no. I mean, his pitch is not to the entire country is he promised, Mr. Unification. His pitch is to the far left of his party. He is controlled by the far left of his party. If you look at the move he made yesterday to stop the leasing in Alaska and the Gulf Coast. They think that that is a pitch to the base hoping that the base gets out in midterms ’cause midterm elections are base elections, and that’s who he’s pitching to.

That’s who he wants to talk to. That’s who he’s a communicating to. If you see it from that perspective, you know, there are a number of far-left policies that he’s implemented that he would see as a success, that they would see as a success. But for the rest of the country it has been a complete and total disaster.

You look at the polls it that show, you know, do you think Joe Biden is doing a good job, and like 30% of the country still says yes, and you wonder who those people are. Well, that’s the far left of the base that thinks that these things that he’s doing are good for the country or the cleaning up of whatever they think that Trump did. And that’s who he’s a speaking to. He’s not speaking to the entire country.

BUCK: We got Katie’s piece linked up at ClayAndBuck.com on plenty of formula at the border, but not for all the rest of the American people. Katie, thanks so much for being with us. Come back soon.

PAVLICH: Thanks, guys. I will. Thanks so much. See ya.