CONCORD, N.H. — Joe Biden ripped the Trump administration’s response to Hurricane Maria at a campaign stop here on Tuesday night, saying he suspected that officials botched the response because they didn’t realize people in Puerto Rico are U.S. citizens.
“It’s shameful, the way we treated Puerto Rico and the islands,” Biden said to an audience of several hundred people gathered in a union hall. “I’m not even sure people in the president’s administration knew Puerto Ricans are all citizens.”
“I’m not joking,” Biden continued. “And so there’s this notion of somehow, why should we have to make and invest that kind of money in dealing with what is a genuine existential crisis?”
House lawmakers on Monday passed a $19.1 billion disaster relief bill that includes hundreds of millions of dollars in community development grants and nutrition assistance to Puerto Rico and other islands hit by Maria in September 2017. It now awaits Trump’s signature. The president has bristled at the extra aid for Puerto Rico, called officials there “grossly incompetent” and accused them of misusing previously allocated hurricane relief funding.
More than 3,000 people died as a result of the hurricane, which devastated Puerto Rico. Trump has challenged that number, saying it is “not fair” to count deaths that happened weeks or months after the storm, though researchers disagree with him.
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Biden is on a campaign swing in the early-voting state of New Hampshire. Earlier in the day, he talked to voters in Berlin and Plymouth.