Biden vs. Biden
the Dems and their immigration faceplant
(this post was written in collaboration with research intern Alice Wanamaker)
Let’s start with his answer, as much as it isn’t one: “Because we worked very hard to get a bipartisan agreement that not only changed all of that, it made sure that we are in a situation where you had no circumstance where they could come across the border with the number of border police there are now.”
That’s President Biden rattling on about immigration during the June 27 presidential debate.
The question, from CNN’s Jake Tapper, was: “President Biden, a record number of migrants have illegally crossed the southern border on your watch, overwhelming border states and overburdening cities such as New York and Chicago, and in some cases causing real safety and security concerns. Given that, why should voters trust you to solve this crisis?”
(That, however, is not a given. Border states are not overwhelmed (I live in one and can directly attest), cities such as New York and Chicago are burdened but only temporarily so and will soon be bolstered by the new immigrants, and safety and security concerns are blown enormously out of proportion. Study after study after study after study after study after study (and I could go on and on and on) show that migrants commit far fewer crimes than native-born residents.)
Biden, continuing his answer, said that when Trump was president, “we found ourselves in a situation where… he was taking, separating babies from their mothers, putting them in cages, making sure the families were separated.”
According to Biden: “That’s not the right way to go.”
(The Biden admin has also separated migrant children from their parents, as I’ve reported, and his recent policy pushes will result in yet more family separations.)
So what, according to Biden, is the “right way to go”?
“What I’ve done – since I’ve changed the law, what’s happened?”
(He has not changed the law. Presidents don’t do that. He has, however, issued regulations and proclamations.)
Biden continued, “I’ve changed it in a way that now you’re in a situation where there are 40 percent fewer people coming across the border illegally... And I’m going to continue to move until we get the total ban on the – the total initiative relative to what we’re going to do with more Border Patrol and more asylum officers.”
“I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence,” Trump responded. “I don’t think he knows what he said either.”
Trump’s right. Biden’s policy record on asylum is confusing, not to mention morally degenerate. (That’s a basic observation, not a judgment: his admin’s policies prioritize an unfounded fear of mild cultural change or demonstrably false prospects of a financial downturn over the life and safety of others.)
Besides the nearly nonsensical platitudes mumblingly spewed on debate night, where does Biden stand in terms of border and immigration? What has he accomplished? What are his policy priorities if he wins another term? He hasn’t made them clear, which, along with his questionable mental competence, is a problem. The White House website — in boilerplate government-website nothing-speak — claims that Biden wants a “fair and orderly immigration system that welcomes immigrants”. He also came into office promising to “restore asylum.” But lately he’s been championing severe restrictions to asylum access that will have, and likely already are having, deadly consequences.
His volte-face was most poignantly and painfully highlighted last month when he issued a proclamation implementing an automatic denial of asylum to almost anyone who crosses the southern border outside of an official port of entry. Only those facing extreme danger (when Border Patrol officers will let them say so) or those with an appointment made through the notoriously glitchy CBP One app will be allowed to apply for asylum until border crossing rates reach a low not seen since July of 2020.
The rule is similar to the Trump administration’s 2019 attempt to categorically deny asylum by inflating the ‘safe third country’ rule, down to a similarly argued immediate legal challenge from the ACLU. And it may end up having the same outcome: eventual anticlimactic legal injunction by a judge. In the meantime: chaos, deportation, increased suffering, death.
Another outcome of Biden’s new rule is increased detention. Days after issuing the rule, ICE said it was seeking to expand immigration detention. According to a June 10 email: “The agency continues to manage its detention contracts to enhance its ability to add detention capacity within the funds that Congress has made available. These actions include adjusting existing detention facility contracts to expand the number of beds in ICE’s detention network and filing a motion to allow intake of individuals to resume at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center.”
Adelanto is one of the most notoriously abusive detention centers in the country. In 2018, government inspectors found multiple nooses inside cells. This is the infrastructure that has been deemed the most appropriate for Biden’s asylum plans. (A story for another time, but I once U-locked a young woman’s neck to the gate where deportation buses drive out of Adelanto.)
On the heels of Biden’s asylum crackdown, however, the administration also passed a new immigration rule that would be unfathomable under a Trump presidency, allowing undocumented spouses and children of U.S. citizens to apply for permanent residency without leaving the country. The rule could be helpful to hundreds of thousands of people.
Rhetorically, the Biden campaign wants it both ways: to be seen as the humanitarian choice and to win the border security argument on that argument’s existing terms. Their combination of tangled pathways to citizenship and Trumpian crackdowns give them arguments to offer to both camps. But it’s difficult to overstate just how horrific and divorced from reality the existing terms of the discourse on “border security” is. And it’s difficult to understate how little Biden’s ‘pro-immigrant’ policies have attempted to change the fundamental, inaccurate, and inhumane assumptions this discourse is based on.
On July 26, a group of migrants walking through the remote land of the Barry M. Goldwater Range (an active bombing range where those who know they’re entering sign a waiver against injury from live warheads) set off a rescue beacon, having been forced to leave four members of their party behind. Three were shortly after found dead.
Biden has clearly not, as he claimed in the debate, created “a situation where you had no circumstance where they could come across the border.” Instead, he presides over a border where migrants die of heatstroke in the midst of active bombing ranges to avoid his “border police.” And he calls this a success.
Meanwhile, Trump promises worse.
So where does that leave us? It leaves me with the clarity that there is currently not a major American party that supports migrants. Do with that what you will, either in the ballot box in November or elsewhere, but know that migrant justice is not to be found in the current Democratic party, and definitely not with Republicans.
One curious note in the extreme right’s hopes for immigration reform: in a comprehensive transition plan (part of Project 2025) for the possible next Trump administration, former acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Ken Cuccinelli, writes that he and his MAGA-club’s “primary recommendation is that the President pursue legislation to dismantle the Department of Homeland Security.”
The problem is, they want to dismantle it to build back up an even more powerful, intrusive, and oppressive anti-immigrant agency.
What I’m writing
-A quick recap of the new asylum regs.
-An explainer of the early effects of the regs.
-A recent podcast appearance where I discuss the idea of open borders.
-And, modeling what local news can do, here’s my attempt with the Arizona Luminaria team to offer Pima County residents the intel they need to make (four stories in all) a good decision about the local sheriff’s race.
What I’m reading
A couple articles, by The Atlantic’s George Packer and The New Yorker’s Rachel Monroe, about the weird experiment of Arizona. Lots of books and articles about human smuggling for a forthcoming review of Jason De León’s Soldiers and Kings.
And this smart response from Atossa Araxia Abrahamian to New York Times’ David Leonhardt’s politically naive take on Biden’s recent immigration moves.