WASHINGTON — President Biden said Wednesday that he’s ready to change course on US-Mexico border policy after House Speaker Mike Johnson confronted him at a White House meeting and accused him of unleashing a “catastrophe.” 

“[Biden] said that ‘I’m ready to make significant changes to the border.’ He said it was broken. He knows that it needs to be fixed,” Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), a participant in the meeting, told reporters afterward.

A source briefed on the talks between Biden and 18 House and Senate members said that McCaul’s account was accurate, but another source said it was their understanding that the president was vague. 

Although Republicans heard in Biden’s words an awakening that could result in a grand policy pivot, a White House official told The Post his comments were consistent with prior presidential remarks and shared examples of Biden saying there was a “broken border system.”

The context of Biden’s comments to members of Congress looking for a deal, however, was distinct from typical White House citations of Biden’s three-year-old proposals to boost legal immigration and grant amnesty to those already in the US as ways to address a “broken” system, which critics say would worsen the border surge.

The 81-year-old commander-in-chief made the remarks amid record-breaking levels of illegal crossings that critics attribute to his policies.

Johnson (R-La.) told reporters after the meeting that he told Biden to his face that his actions had caused a national security and humanitarian “catastrophe” and that border policy changes are needed before House Republicans consider approving $61.4 billion in new military aid to Ukraine.

“I told the president what I have been saying for many months, and that is that we must have change at the border — substantive policy change,” Johnson said.

“We documented 64 instances where the president took executive action or his agencies took actions to create the current catastrophe that we have at the border,” the speaker added. “It is a national security and a humanitarian catastrophe and I articulated that to the president in the meeting.

“We understand that there’s concern about the safety, security and sovereignty of Ukraine, but the American people have those same concerns about our own domestic sovereignty and our safety and our security.”

Johnson said he wants Biden to take steps including restoring former President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy for asylum seekers and ending the practice of quickly releasing into the US a majority of people who illegally cross the border.

Both Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Johnson told reporters there was general consensus on the issues — with the Democratic leader saying upon returning to the Capitol there was “remarkable consensus” that both issues need to be addressed in a supplemental funding bill.

“There was a large amount of agreement around the table that we must do Ukraine and we must do border,” Schumer told reporters on the White House driveway immediately after the meeting with Biden.

“There was tremendous focus on Ukraine and an understanding that if we don’t come to Ukraine’s aid that the consequences for America around the globe would be nothing short of devastating and within a year, we would be on our back foot doing all kinds of things that we wouldn’t want to do.”

Schumer added that “the president himself said over and over again that he is willing to move forward on [the] border.”

Bipartisan supplemental funding talks led by senators including Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) are making progress, Schumer went on.

“I am more optimistic than ever before that we’ll come to an agreement — I put the chances a little bit greater than half now,” he said.

House Republicans are increasingly skeptical of Biden’s request for new Ukraine aid, as polls show significant public resistance to new aid on top of $113 billion already appropriated to counter the Kremlin’s stalled February 2022 invasion.

Johnson has repeatedly accused the Biden administration of ignoring his questions about assistance for Ukraine, including about oversight and the end-game for the nearly two-year-old war between Kyiv and Moscow.

“What is the endgame and the strategy in Ukraine? How will we have accountability for the funds?” the speaker told reporters at a morning news conference. “We need to know that Ukraine would not be another Afghanistan.”

While briefing reporters after meeting with Biden, Johnson said that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had stressed to him during a December meeting that specific military equipment requests are the highest priority.

“He said that the necessary ingredient is the proper weapons systems that they need,” Johnson said. “We need the questions answered about the strategy, about the end game and about the accountability for the precious treasure of the American people.”

Biden in October requested $106 billion in supplemental funding outside the normal budget process to finance military support for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan as well as enhanced US border security amid a record-breaking surge in illegal crossings.

The proposal includes $61.4 billion for Kyiv’s war effort, $14.3 billion for military assistance to Israel for its fight against Hamas terrorists in Gaza, and $13.6 billion to enhance border enforcement.

National Security Council spokesman John Kirby swatted back at GOP criticisms on Ukraine funding before Wednesday’s meeting.

“This idea of a blank check is not true,” Kirby said, referring to House Republicans’ characterization of the US assistance package.

He added that the discussion will “bring members of Congress up to speed on what we’re seeing right now on the battlefield.”

In a Senate floor speech Wednesday morning, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), a staunch advocate of Ukraine aid, also hit Biden over the “urgent crisis” on the southern border, saying “negotiators are making headway toward the most significant border enhancements in almost 30 years.”

McConnell told reporters later that he expected the bill to be voted on next week, urging Republicans toward “a unique opportunity to accomplish something in divided government that wouldn’t be there under unified government.”

At the same time, Johnson is catching flak from the right flank of his caucus over a $1.66 trillion topline federal spending agreement he reached earlier this month with Schumer, raising fears that hardline members would force a partial government shutdown beginning Friday night.

Over the weekend, the House speaker knocked a leaked draft of the supplemental bill produced by a conservative immigration-focused group that showed a patchwork of solutions to the record-breaking migrant crisis on the southern border.

Those provisions included an increase in green card handouts to 50,000 per year and a threshold for daily migrant expulsions of 5,000 if crossings exceed that number over a seven-day period.

Lankford, the chief Republican negotiator on the bill, cautioned the press and fellow lawmakers “not to believe everything you read on the internet” following the leak.

“We don’t know exactly what the Senate has come up with because we’ve not seen the text,” Johnson said Wednesday morning, adding that House Republicans will not consider “comprehensive immigration reform” with Democrats controlling both the White House and Senate.

“You can’t do that quickly,” he told reporters, saying his conference was standing firm in support of its border security bill from last year, known as H.R. 2.

Schumer blasted a Senate companion version of the legislation pitched by Republicans last November for “making Ukraine funding conditional on the hard-right border policies that can’t ever pass Congress.”

“H.R. 2 had very important elements: restore Remain in Mexico policy; end catch and release; reform the asylum program, the broken parole process; rebuild the wall,” Johnson said at his press conference ahead of meeting with Biden. “You can’t choose from among those on a menu and assume you’re going to solve the problem.”

“We talked to the deputy chief of US Border Patrol, who’s a 33-year veteran of the agency,” he said of his recent trip with 64 House GOP lawmakers to Eagle Pass, Texas, the center of the migrant crisis on the southern border.

The deputy chief, he said, informed them that Border Patrol was “administering an open fire hydrant” with “more buckets,” rather than working “to reduce the flow.”

“No one should be playing politics with this. There’s too much at stake. Fentanyl is the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18 to 49,” Johnson added. “The cartels on the border down there are making billions of dollars trafficking humans into the US. … The human catastrophe cannot be overstated.”