Joe Biden Is Trying to Get Ahead of a Big Weakness: The Border

The answer came instantly. In late December, I talked with an associate of President Joe Biden’s team. Sure, the midterms had gone surprisingly well for the Democrats, but with a new year looming, what weaknesses was the president’s camp concerned about? “It’s the border,” the Biden associate said. 

On Thursday morning, with most of the political world focused on the House Republican melodrama spiraling at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Biden delivered a speech in which he laid out new measures to try to reduce the surge of migrants entering the US through Mexico, including expedited expulsions. The president will follow that up Sunday with his first visit to the southwest border, in El Paso, Texas, a trip Republicans have been carping for—and hoping to embarrass Biden with—ever since he took office. 

The sudden urgency comes after almost exactly two years of policy sluggishness, humanitarian misery, and escalating political pressure, inflamed by the cruel stunts of Florida and Texas governors Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, who have flown and bused migrants to Washington, DC, New York, and Massachusetts. Biden, on his first day in office, delivered on a campaign promise by sending a comprehensive immigration-reform proposal to Congress, where it has sat ever since. The political math to pass much of anything has been daunting, likely requiring at least 10 Republican senators to join Democrats voting in favor of the package. Yet while Biden managed bipartisan wins on infrastructure and gun safety and climate change, immigration advocates have grown frustrated at the lack of progress on their issue. “After four years of constant hell for migrants under Trump, and then fighting so hard as a movement to ensure that Biden won, to turn around and have the president continue some of Trump’s policies and not do what it takes to protect a program like DACA—what more do we have to go through?” asks Bruna Sollod, the political director of United We Dream.

The Biden administration has reacted to crises, like last fall’s wave of Venezuelan migrants fleeing poverty and gang violence, by implementing regulatory changes it could make on its own. The administration has also gone back and forth on Title 42, a policy created during the pandemic by the Trump administration that enabled expulsions, supposedly in the interest of public health. Biden, during the 2020 presidential campaign, vowed to come up with a more humane policy. But after taking office, he left Title 42 in place for months; one result was the ugly September 2021 scene in which Border Patrol agents confronted Haitian migrants trying to cross a river into Texas. When the administration tried to drop Title 42, red states sued, and now Biden has ended up broadening the policy’s reach. 

The president’s lieutenants have, however, also made lower-profile gains in fixing the decades-in-the-making mess Biden inherited. Whereas Trump pushed to deport all migrants who had entered illegally, Biden’s Department of Homeland Security has rationalized the process for assessing who gets to stay and who must leave. Biden’s DHS, unlike Trump’s, doesn’t threaten to arrest people at schools and in hospitals. A pilot program to evaluate asylum-seekers more quickly is up and running. “I think this administration is handling immigration as ably as it can, given the limited tools in its toolbox,” says Angela Kelley, who until May was part of the Biden administration, as senior counselor to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. She is now chief adviser for policy and partnerships at the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “We’ve never been in a situation where there’s been a pandemic on top of a global economic crisis, and large numbers of people coming from four failed nation-states—Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Haiti,” Kelley says.

Biden’s new agenda expands Title 42 rules to migrants from those countries who attempt to reach the US through Mexico; the president is also expanding a “parole” program that could admit 30,000 migrants per month from those countries, if they apply for admission to the US from abroad. “The administration has done some meaningful and very consequential positive things. Our system of legal immigration is in a much better place today than it was two years ago,” says Jorge Loweree, the managing director of programs and strategy at the American Immigration Council. “But Title 42 is responsible for much of the chaos we’ve seen at the southern border, and expanding a policy the administration has disavowed is a step in the wrong direction.”