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Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas says the situation is not a crisis, but “a challenge” – an “acute” and “stressful” challenge with a certain “urgency”, but simply a challenge nonetheless .
Consider the outlines of this challenge. Twice as many people, around 80,000, attempted to cross the border illegally in January this year compared to January a year ago.
Even though it is not yet peak travel season (which traditionally takes place in May and June), the U.S. border patrol has already started releasing migrants in U.S. cities across the border, and the number of minors arriving via day is four times higher than in October. .
Axios reported on a briefing prepared for Biden which warned that the number of migrant children was set to set a record and that there were not enough beds to accommodate them. According to Axios, the briefing predicts that an amazing 117,000 unaccompanied children will show up at the border this year, and he says we will need 20,000 more beds.
Health and Human Services, which takes care of the minors, has started to speed up their release to the United States and pay their transportation costs.
Meanwhile, Biden’s team is reopening the border detention centers that angered Democrats during Trump’s presidency.
Biden officials tend to discuss “pressure factors,” the conditions that drive migrants to flee their Central American country. But changing these underlying conditions, even if it is feasible, is a long-term proposition. What we have much more direct control over are the “pull factors”, our own policies and practices that make people come here.
Trump overestimated the importance of the border wall and had a number of false starts at the border, most notably the “zero tolerance” policy that led to family separations. In the end, however, he had created an entirely reasonable system based on his legitimate authorities to impose a border order, while still allowing asylum seekers to seek asylum in the United States.
There’s no good reason to tear up much of this arrangement, even if that’s exactly what Biden did.
During the early stages of the pandemic, Trump quickly bypassed illegal border crossings for public health reasons. Biden created an exception for unaccompanied minors, which is a clear incentive for families to send children under the age of 18.
Under Trump, Migration Protection Protocols, also known as Stay in Mexico, ended the practice of leaving Central American migrants in the United States while their asylum claims were judged.
This was crucial because under the old arrangement asylum seekers were allowed to enter the United States while their claims were being considered. Even if the requests were ultimately rejected, as the vast majority of them were, the migrants ended up staying overwhelmingly anyway (we lacked the will and resources to track them down and deport them).
It was a huge magnet for migrants – go to the border and apply for asylum and you’re in the United States, very likely to stay.
Biden trashed migrant protection protocols. No new claimants will be enrolled in the program, and the backlog of people waiting in Mexico is admitted to the United States.
He also suspended the so-called safe third country agreements that Trump had forged with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to get asylum seekers to seek asylum in one of these countries (the start of the pandemic has blocked these programs).
The premise of Trump’s comprehensive approach was that people who feared for their lives in their home countries because of the persecution did not necessarily need to come to the United States to escape. It should be enough for them to travel to another country in the region or, if they do seek asylum in the United States, to remain in Mexico during that time.
Allowing them to enter the United States, without a reliable internal enforcement mechanism to remove them if their applications are rejected, is an end of bypassing our immigration system. Because migrants, like everyone else, respond to incentives, the more of them, the more of them. And, since our resources are not infinite, if enough families show up at the border, it will inevitably overload our staff and our facilities.
Obviously, Biden is in a very different place on Trump’s immigration, but even though he has different priorities, it doesn’t make sense to create a willy-nilly rush at the border before a system supposed to be better either in place (whatever that may be). .
Instead of acknowledging that the previous administration, despite everything, had reasonable policies, Biden’s team wants to reject everything altogether.
Mayorkas criticizes Trump for “dismantling our country’s immigration system in its entirety,” a claim as absurd as the idea that the Biden administration started from scratch on vaccinations.
Needless to say, naturalizations and green card issuance continued at a steady pace under Trump. And he had in fact taken over the border, which by 2014 and 2019 had spiraled out of control, creating a major humanitarian debacle.
Call it whatever you like, a crisis, or a challenge, or whatever, but Biden is well on his way to mindlessly repeating this experience.
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