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THE BIDEN BORDER SURGE. The Washington Examiner’s Anna Giaritelli, who covers immigration closely, reports that officials are “warning of an impending crisis at the southern border due to the Biden administration’s immigration stances.”
Current and former officials tell Giaritelli that Biden’s plan to end two current Trump policies could lead to a huge surge of illegal crossers at the U.S.-Mexico border. The first policy is known as Title 42. Adopted to deal with the coronavirus emergency, it allows U.S. authorities to quickly return illegal crossers to Mexico instead of holding them in detention in the United States. The second policy is the Migrant Protection Protocols, which allows the U.S. to require that asylum seekers wait in Mexico while their cases are adjudicated, rather than allowing them to live in the U.S. during that (often very long) period.
If Biden quickly rescinds those two policies, “you will see a global crisis within a couple of weeks,” Mark Morgan, the acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, said recently. Attempts to enter the U.S. illegally are already growing, in part due to economic conditions in Central America and Mexico and in part in anticipation of Biden loosening U.S. border security. Giaritelli reports that attempted illegal entries have grown from 17,000 in April to 70,000 in November.
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It’s no mystery. People in Central America and Mexico follow the news. They know what is going on in the United States. They know that Biden has pledged to halt all deportations for 100 days, to create a path to citizenship for illegal entrants, to dramatically reduce detention, to allow those who enter illegally to stay in the U.S. while their cases are considered, to stop construction of the border wall — they see it all. “If you had a moratorium on deportations, you shut down a lot of ICE detention,” former Immigration and Customs Enforcement official Tom Homan told Giaritelli. “If you’re not going to be detained, you’re not going to be deported, there’s going to be no more work-site enforcement operations, we’re gonna give you your free healthcare, including COVID treatment, why would you not come?”
Even press outlets friendly to the new administration are sounding the alarm. “Swiftly reversing Trump administration policies could be construed as opening the floodgates,” the New York Times reported recently, “risking a rush to the border that could quickly devolve into a humanitarian crisis.”
Biden can act virtually at will. “Because virtually all the changes to immigration policy made by the Trump administration have been executive actions of one sort or another, the incoming administration will simply rescind them in the same manner,” notes Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors tighter controls on immigration. Resistance judges stopped Trump when he tried to undo some of Barack Obama’s executive actions on immigration, Krikorian adds, but they won’t stop Biden from undoing Trump’s.
So what will Biden do? Act fast, or slow it down? There seems little doubt he will throw out many policies designed to control the number of illegal entries into the United States. But Krikorian believes the Biden administration “will not make the changes as quickly as possible, preferring instead to boil the frog slowly.” For example, Biden might not throw out Title 42 immediately, as many of his supporters want. Instead, Krikorian predicts, Title 42 “will be whittled down with exemptions until it’s a nullity, but will technically remain for some time.”
But it’s not clear whether the thousands surging to enter the U.S. will get the message. Biden’s arrival in the White House, and Trump’s departure, will send a powerful message to those seeking to enter the United States illegally: The door that was closed will soon be open. Even if Biden wanted to maintain some restrictions, his Democratic base will push him to do just the opposite. A big change is coming.
