'Your Trip is Not International, But It’s Not Really a Domestic'; Secret Service Documents Detail Jill Biden Visit

As former First Lady of the United States Jill Biden was leaving Puerto Rico at the end of her second official visit, I submitted a Freedom of Information (FOIA) request for communications, maps, and presentations associated with the trip. To be honest, I was solely looking to see if they had to specifically plan a route that avoided all the potholes on Puerto Rico’s horrible roads. However, I cast a wide net to see if I could find any interesting tidbits that would have not been included in a hyper-focused request. Nearly a year later, I received 173 heavily-redacted pages of emails and schedules without any mention of roads.

However, I have pulled out the most interesting bits of information and laid them out below.

“Your trip is not international, but it’s not really a domestic [sic]. It [sic] very similar to Nantucket,” reads an email from a Secret Service agent to a redacted recipient, likely another Secret Service agent. While the quote is referring to having to bring a “carplane,” a C-17 cargo aircraft that the Secret Service uses to carry the armored cars used in presidential motorcades, describing the archipelago in this way will strike a chord with many Puerto Ricans no matter what side of the status debate they fall on because it sounds eerily similar to how Puerto Rico is described in the Insular Cases – a series of Supreme Court opinions from 1901 about the unincorporated territories the United States gained after the Spanish-American War (Puerto Rico, Guam, Cuba, and the Philippines).

The Supreme Court argued that, because these newly-minted colonies were “inhabited by alien races, governing them according to Anglo-Saxon principles may be for a time impossible” and the U.S. denied them certain constitutional rights.  For example, Puerto Ricans have statutory citizenship not birthright citizenship. We were too “foreign in a domestic sense,” as Justice Edward Douglass White wrote in one of his opinions, for the real thing. Although these cases are widely considered racist, it took until 2024 for the Justice Department to condemn them. I think I know how the Nerd Reich feels about that decision. However, as far as I know, they have not said anything about it.

The comparison between Puerto Rico and Nantucket is more apt than Secret Service Agent [REDACTED] realized even if it was likely not intentional. While Nantucket is a "summer colony" and Puerto Rico is just a straight up colony, both places are tourist destinations where it's expensive as hell to live. This phenomenon has become especially prevalent in the archipelago over the last decade after Puerto Rico's government created tax incentives for rich people to move here and not pay their certain parts of their taxes, which has caused an increase in housing prices as well land speculation.

Further adding to the Nantucket comparison, the Secret Service was having a “very tough” time booking hotel rooms for its agents and Reddit tells me that you usually have to reserve a hotel there 3-4 months in advance. “The entire Nantucket market is essentially luxury,” one real estate agent said.

Puerto Rico is on its way there. While federal agents tend to book more modest accommodations (they stayed at the DoubleTree by Hilton), there are currently several luxury hotel compounds being built throughout Puerto Rico. These resorts will guarantee anyone willing to shell out top dollar will be waited on hand and foot by Puerto Ricans who definitely cannot afford to stay there. In fact, the mayor of Lajas has floated the idea of turning La Parguera, a beach boardwalk that includes a lot of buildings illegally built on public land, into "Puerto Rico's Venice." President Trump said something similar about Gaza, which he hopes to turn into the "Riviera of the Middle East."

It seems colonialism always involves beach front property at some point.

The second thing that jumped out at me while reviewing the documents is that the Secret Service had to assure its agents Puerto Rico’s water is safe to drink. The comment came from a document that laid out what attire and gear to bring for the trip.

For what it's worth, there are reasons to not trust Puerto Rico's water. Many people worry that tap water isn’t as safe as they have been told by state and federal authorities.

“Puerto Rico also does not get the same amount of resources allocated to other jurisdictions in the U.S. and budget cuts have been made to all government agencies on the island, including environmental quality and protection agencies, Ruth Santiago, an attorney and environmental health advocate with Earthjustice,” told ABC News.

In 2015, 99.5% of Puerto Rico’s population was being served by a water system that violated federal standards, according to a report from the Natural Resources Defense Council, El Puente: Enlace Latino de Acción Climática, and Asociación Nacional de Derecho Ambiental. As Heavy Weather has previously reported, there are a bevy of PFAS lawsuits coming from Puerto Rico’s municipalities, firefighters, and other entities.

This email chain shows there was a kerfuffle over where they could get K9 units to assist with the visit. First, they wanted to use dogs from Fort Buchanan, misspelled “Ft. Bucannon.” However, they couldn’t because Buchanan’s two K9 units cannot leave the facility and Jill Biden’s trip also had them stopping off at El Morro, a former military installation that is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. They ended up relying on a K9 unit from a local police department. While the department is unnamed in the email, it was probably San Juan. 

The documents also include a letter from the Office of Protective Operations to the Chief Ranger at the San Juan National Historic Site, which includes El Morro. It’s a bog-standard request letter for this type of thing. However, the letter mentions a map that was not included in the material I received from the Secret Service. I don’t mean it was redacted. It was straight up not included, directly contradicting what I asked for. So, I’ve filed an appeal for that map and for their communications with local law enforcement, as well as for them to reconsider the redactions and explain the ones they're keeping in detail.

At more or less the same time I filed a FOIA request for the Jill Biden visit, I also filed a request for similar things related to former Vice President Kamala Harris’s visit to Puerto Rico when she came to fundraise shortly before the election.

If you want to see the heavily-redacted document in full, I uploaded it to DocumentCloud and you can read it below as well.