Since then, the realities of governing and the continued influx at the southern border have severely tested, and ultimately undermined, those high-minded aspirations.
With the border crisis looming over his administration and his potential 2024 reelection bid — and with a pandemic-era rule allowing for rapid expulsions set to expire in May — Biden has moved to place more restrictions on how people can seek asylum. That has now culminated in his administration’s toughest policy yet on asylum claims. (The White House has not responded to a request for comment.)
The administration this week debuted a new proposed rule that would presume those who cross the border illegally are ineligible for asylum. It would also generally allow for the quick deportation of anyone who hasn’t first applied for protection in another country they passed through, taken advantage of country-specific parole programs, or used a mobile phone app to schedule an appointment in advance to review their asylum claim once they arrive.
The policy has been met with widespread denunciations by pro-immigration activists and some Democrats. They have likened the policy to Trump’s attempted “transit ban,” which was blocked by the courts.
Trump’s policy was unquestionably harsher, though, in that it automatically regarded illegal border-crossers as ineligible. Biden’s plan provides humanitarian exceptions (the Department of Homeland Security calls the presumption of ineligibility “rebuttable”). It also allows people to avail themselves of other processes, such as humanitarian parole (which Biden recently expanded), shy of just showing up at the border.
But this new policy still marks a significant departure from how Biden spoke about these issues just a few years ago, when he criticized Trump for forcing people to stay outside the United States while applying for asylum and emphasized the hardship such people faced.
“We’re a nation where … we live by the values that embraces immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers — does not slam the door on those fleeing persecution, violence, and oppression, does not make people seeking asylum have to stay in another country to do it,” Biden said in March 2020.
Such rhetoric obviously aimed to appeal to a Democratic Party that has trended left on immigration issues. But it persisted long after Biden won that party’s nomination.
“This is the first president in the history of the United States of America that anybody seeking asylum has to do it in another country,” he said at a late-2020 debate with Trump, adding: “They’re sitting in squalor on the other side of the river.”
Biden continued to talk in these terms after he became president. At a February 2021 town hall, he said, “Everyone is entitled to be treated with decency, with dignity, and we don’t do that now.”
“For the first time in American history, if you’re seeking asylum, meaning you’re being persecuted — you’re seeking asylum, you can’t do it from the United States,” Biden said. “You used to come, have an asylum officer determine whether or not you met the criteria … but you can’t even do that. You have got to seek asylum from abroad.”
Technically speaking, migrants did need to — and still must — be in the United States to initially seek protection; what Biden objected to was Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, which sent asylum seekers to Mexico while they awaited a decision.
Around the same time, Biden pressed his administration for new regulations that would ease the asylum-seeking process for those fleeing gang or domestic violence. But despite asking for such regulations within nine months, the administration has yet to issue such rules.
In the months that followed, the Biden administration often defended Trump’s immigration policies in court, including on Title 42 (the pandemic-era program allowing for rapid expulsions), visas, green cards and denying permanent residency to thousands of immigrants. It argued that it was required to, and in some cases did so out of expediency, but in other cases the Justice Department pushed to reverse policies it disagreed with.
Last month, Biden visited the southern border after nearly two years of Republicans criticizing him for not doing so. Around the same time, he offered a precursor to the policy we see today. It allowed up to 30,000 migrants per month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to take advantage of temporary humanitarian “parole” if they had a sponsor in the United States. But it also deemed others from those countries ineligible if they crossed the border illegally or didn’t apply for protection from another country first.
“Do not just show up at the border; stay where you are and apply legally from there,” Biden said, offering a contrast to his 2020 and 2021 rhetoric.
The administration has cast this as a game changer in preventing illegal border crossings. Late last month, federal officials said those crossing the border illegally from those four countries specifically dropped by more than 95 percent — from 3,367 migrants a day on Dec. 11 to a seven-day average of 115 per day. This helped contribute to the lowest number of overall border apprehensions since Biden’s first full month in office, in February 2021.
Given that — and given Title 42 is set to end in May — it should be no surprise the idea is being expanded less than two months later.
Polls indicate the border is one of Biden’s biggest political liabilities, with a Washington Post-ABC News poll early this month showing 28 percent approved of his handling of it, compared to 59 percent who disapproved. Those were the worst marks of his presidency, and they were significantly worse than both his overall numbers and how people viewed him on the economy and Ukraine. There is also evidence that large numbers of Americans have reverted to wanting less immigration after a brief decline in such sentiment late in the Trump years.
As the administration has taken these steps, it has repeatedly indicated that the lack of congressional action on immigration has forced its hand.
“To be clear, this was not our first preference or even our second,” a senior administration official told reporters this week while describing the new asylum restrictions.
Even if it means alienating immigration advocates — and the left wing of his party, which he perhaps felt he had to cater to just a few short years ago — Biden has also clearly wagered that addressing the crisis at the border is necessary.
