Biden tells Puerto Rico ‘I was sort of raised in the Puerto Rican community’

Bragging about being “tight” with minorities is one of President Biden’s favorite pastimes. On Monday night, while in Puerto Rico, Biden boasted “I was sort of raised in the Puerto Rican community at home, politically.”

Biden was on the island promising to provide aid after Hurricane Fiona damaged the island’s southern coast. “We have a very, in relative terms, a large Puerto Rican population in Delaware relative to our population,” Biden said. “We have the eighth largest black population of the country and between all minorities we have 20% of our state [that] is minority. And so I — I was sort of raised in the Puerto Rican community at home, politically.”

The New York Post reports:
According to the 1970 US Census, Delaware had about 2,154 people who were either born in Puerto Rico or descended from Puerto Rican parents — roughly 0.39% of the First State’s population of nearly 550,000 at the time.
The number of Puerto Ricans in Delaware reached 4,857 — .81% of the state’s population — by the time Biden was serving his second term in the US Senate in 1980, according to that year’s census.

Biden did not describe any links to Puerto Ricans in Delaware in his 2007 memoir “Promises to Keep” and the White House did not supply any examples in response to a request for comment from

Although Delaware had an extremely small Puerto Rican community, Wilmington’s port was a common destination for emigrants from the island — though it’s unclear if Biden interacted with those migrants.

The Post adds previous minority claims made by Biden:

Biden last September told Jewish leaders that he remembered “spending time at” and “going to” Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 after the worst anti-Semitic attack in US history, in which 11 people were murdered. The synagogue said he never visited and the White House later said he was thinking about a 2019 phone call to the synagogue’s rabbi.

In January, Biden told students at historically black colleges in Atlanta that he was arrested multiple times while protesting in favor of civil rights — another claim for which there is no evidence.