President Joe Biden came into office with a relatively low bar to clear. Anything, it seemed at the time, had to be better than former President Donald Trump’s blatantly racist and intentionally harsh tactics to limit all immigration across the southern border, legal or otherwise.
In the two years since, the White House is clearly getting desperate when it comes to immigration. The pressure that has been building at the border since 2017 threatens to erupt as the barriers erected at the start of the pandemic strain. Immigration overall has become a seemingly insolvable problem, not due to a lack of solutions but a deliberate poisoning of the well by Republicans. That has forced Democrats to look for answers that will provoke minimal backlash from the GOP. In practice, that has looked like the adoption of Republican policies of border control and detention that dehumanize migrants and abandon any moral high ground Democrats had held.
Immigration overall has become a seemingly insolvable problem, not due to a lack of solutions but a deliberate poisoning of the well by Republicans.
The New York Times reported Monday that the Biden administration is “considering reviving the practice of detaining migrant families who cross the border illegally.” The law currently allows for migrant children to be detained for no longer than 20 days, but the administration’s practice has been to release families temporarily while using “ankle bracelets, traceable cellphones or other methods to keep track of them,” the Times reported.
While no decision has been taken yet, and, according to NBC News’ reporting, “many inside the administration are against the move,” it’s still one of the options being bandied about ahead of the May 11 expiration of Title 42, a public health measure that Trump and Biden have leaned on to quickly expel migrants. That the idea is up for discussion at all showcases just how badly Biden wants to avoid scenes of chaos at the border that Republicans can exploit politically. It also highlights a stark contrast between President Joe Biden and candidate Joe Biden, who in 2020 tweeted:
The criticism from immigration advocates and experts has been unsparing. Yael Schacher, Refugees International’s director for the Americas and Europe, said in a statement, “Family detention is inhumane. It is unfair and inefficient to conduct screenings about fear and eligibility for protection in family detention.” Schacher called the potential reinstatement of the practice “a huge and unconscionable step backward by the Biden administration.”
The administration’s discussion about detaining migrant families also comes at a time when it has moved to discourage asylum-seekers who cross the border without permission. Last month, the administration began rolling out a system that significantly raised the bar for what would qualify an applicant for asylum, rejecting those who didn’t first seek asylum in any of the countries they passed through on their way to the U.S. border.
It’s a policy that closely mirrors one from Trump, whose changes to the immigration system have proved harder to unravel than many officials seemingly expected. “When the status quo changed, it shifted the foundation assumptions,” one Biden administration official told the Los Angeles Times’ Hamed Aleaziz. “Suddenly, it was a choice. Status quo was to keep them out, and the status quo is always easier.”
Merely softening Trump-era policies is not what the officials who entered office in 2021 wanted. Andrea Flores, who served as the National Security Council’s director of border management before resigning last year, tweeted last month that “it is deeply disheartening” to watch the administration she once served “normalize the dehumanizing narrative that Black and brown migrants at the southern border deserve to be punished for seeking out a legal pathway that Congress provided for them.”
Merely softening Trump-era policies is not what the officials who entered office in 2021 wanted.
Those pathways may be closed off for many entirely under a bill that the Biden administration is reportedly drafting. Reuters reported last month that the Department of Homeland Security is taking the lead on developing legislation that would use “large-scale processing centers” to speed up the process of asylum claims at the border. The bill could also implement “different procedures for asylum seekers based on nationality, with migrants from countries with typically higher rates of approval given more freedom of movement while they await the outcome of their cases,” Reuters reported. (DHS downplayed the discussions, with a spokesperson telling Reuters that “no proposal is under serious consideration.”)
One DHS official told Reuters that the goal is to work with Congress to create an asylum system that’s “fair, fast and functioning.” But “fast” is often to the detriment of the other factors, NBC News reported last year. Speedily processing claims hampers attempts to gather evidence and find lawyers for those seeking asylum. That’s especially the case for minors, according to First Focus, an advocacy group for child welfare policy. Expedited processes “increase the risk that children will be wrongfully denied legal protection, separated from family, and/or sent back to the very persecution, torture, or abuse that they have fled,” the group said in a recently released issue brief.
I understand the urge to do something in anticipation of what the expiration of Title 42 will bring, especially given Congress’s unwillingness to pass anything that resembles reform that would actually benefit migrants and asylum-seekers. (I am normally loathe to “both sides” an issue, but too many congressional Democrats have been cowed into submission with the GOP’s false “open borders” rhetoric to make any progress.) But the Biden administration is crafting immigration policy in the hopes of avoiding bad politics and failing in both cases.
No matter how much the White House tries to appease them with more restrictive immigration policies, Republicans will attack. At the same time, any deterrents it tries to erect will never fully stem the flow of people willing to cross mountains, rivers and borders in pursuit of a better life. In the face of these two truths, Biden is at risk of letting his fear of Republicans make him cruel.