“Some things may be true, even if Donald Trump said them.”
That was the epiphany that ABC’s Jonathan Karl had over the weekend. It’s a difficult concept for the news media, and the Biden administration is having an even harder time grasping its corollary: Some policies are humane and necessary, even if former President Donald Trump implemented them.
President Joe Biden is now rejecting sensible border policies that aid refugees, help our border guards do their job, and dissuade Central American families from making terribly dangerous and costly treks across Mexico, apparently all because Trump was the one who implemented them.
On his first full day in office, Biden suspended the “Remain in Mexico” policy to dissuade families from trekking to our border with frivolous asylum claims. On June 2, Biden repealed the policy.
Supportive media called Biden’s “the latest in a series of moves to dismantle the Trump administration’s restrictive immigration policies.”
House Democrats Bennie Thompson and Nanette Diaz Barragán called it “the Trump administration’s reprehensible ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy, which forced migrants to wait in inhumane conditions indefinitely before being allowed to come to the U.S.”
But if you can abstract away from Trump’s role and look at the policy on its own merits, you see something quite different. The “Remain in Mexico” policy didn’t mostly result in migrants remaining near Mexico’s border with the United States awaiting asylum hearings in the country. It primarily resulted in migrants never making the perilous journey across Mexico, putting their own and their children’s lives in danger.
The asylum process had long been a magnet for illegal immigrants, and Trump shut off the magnet. Biden has now turned the magnet back on, resulting in inhumane overcrowding at U.S. border facilities.
In fiscal 2017, the Border Patrol apprehended more than 94,000 undocumented families from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, according to Department of Homeland Security data.
These families were not necessarily trying to sneak past border guards. Instead, they typically presented themselves purposefully to border officials and declared they were seeking asylum.
In theory, the U.S. grants asylum only to foreigners who are fleeing persecution by their governments, not to every foreigner whose life would be improved by moving to the U.S. Of those 94,000 families who came to the border in 2017, this was surely true of very few of them.
However, as long as they stated an asylum claim, they knew they would be released within the U.S. and told to report to immigration court at some date months down the line for a hearing.
“Of those, 99% remain in the country today,” Homeland Security reported in 2019. Word had gotten out that one can game the system in this manner, eventually skipping the court date.
Trump put an end to that with a simple rule: If you show up at the U.S.-Mexico border seeking asylum, you will get your day in court — but you must wait for it in Mexico.
The effect: a huge drop in the number of families showing up at the southern border claiming asylum. Because most of those requesting asylum lacked meritorious claims, the number of people desiring to come and actually wait to get a trial was considerably smaller than the number who had been gaming the system when an asylum claim meant automatic entry to the U.S.
Biden has switched the magnet back on. New asylum-seekers can look forward either to being released (and probably absconding) or to being detained at overcrowded border facilities. That’s not good for migrants or America. But if you set your moral compass to whatever is opposite Trump, then perhaps Biden’s actions make sense, even if they harm both.
