The Biden administration’s refusal to call the migrant surge at the Mexico border a “crisis” might be making it harder to deal with.
President Biden’s aides stonewall reporters who demand clarity on migrant numbers. The administration instead blasts former President Donald Trump for the “cruelty” of his immigration policy.
This dodging has stoked congressional Republicans and the White House press, who are intensifying their demand for details. Daily jousting about the label “crisis” has drawn extra attention to what is widely seen as a weak policy at the border.
In a White House briefing room that exudes more bonhomie than when Trump was next door in the Oval Office, the most contentious issue that’s emerged between White House press secretary Jen Psaki and reporters is immigration.
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So why the reticence to call the situation a “crisis” and instead use “enormous challenge”? After all, the Biden administration is grappling with public health and economic crises caused by the coronavirus pandemic and has not hesitated to refer to climate or homelessness as crises.
What’s another on the list?
Republican strategist Cesar Conda, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s chief of staff during Congress’s unsuccessful 2013 immigration reform effort, believed the situation “would demand a solution” if the Biden administration were to use this particular “C-word.”
“But the solution would be [to] put back into place Trump’s policies to disincentivize unaccompanied teenagers and children from making such a dangerous trek to the southern border,” Conda told the Washington Examiner. “Biden doesn’t want to admit that the largest illegal immigration surge in two decades is a crisis of his own making and it was completely unnecessary.”
Rutgers University history and journalism professor David Greenberg dismissed semantics over the term “crisis.” But it is “crucial” that the Biden administration acknowledges the immigration predicament was “an intractable one,” according to Greenberg.
“During the 2016 and 2018 campaigns, Democrats invested so much energy in denying the magnitude of the problem in order to deny Trump a winning issue, that they’re now finding it hard to pivot and admit the obvious,” Greenberg said.
The situation has been complicated by polarization, Greenberg explained. “Yearslong failure” to reform the country’s immigration system produced the Trump presidency, and then his “extreme” rhetoric and positions drove Democrats to adopt extreme stances of their own.
“Now, a compromise seems even more elusive than ever,” he said.
For Greenberg, a solution between “Trump’s draconian policies and the lax ones many Democrats favor” is “up for debate.”
“What matters is finding a way to deter and discourage huge numbers of people from flocking to the Mexican border while also treating those who do so fairly and humanely,” he said.
Though Biden administration officials have been careful to avoid categorizing the predicament at the border as a “crisis,” Psaki slipped up this week when she refuted the perception that the U.S. was sending Mexico AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine doses in exchange for help stemming the flow of migrants.
“There have been expectations set outside of, unrelated to, any vaccine doses or request for them that they would be partners in dealing with the crisis on the border,” she said.
When asked if her language represented a policy shift, Psaki quickly walked back her misstep.
“No,” she said before parroting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’s word “challenge.” “Nope,” she reiterated.
Roughly 4,500 migrant children are being held by Customs and Border Protection, a DHS agency, as the Biden administration processes their applications ahead of families and adults amid the pandemic.
Mayorkas conceded this week that the U.S. was on pace to encounter more individuals at the border than “we have in the last 20 years.” Those figures prompted Biden last weekend to order the Federal Emergency Management Agency, another arm of DHS, to assist in housing the minors, including turning the Dallas Convention Center into a shelter for up to 3,000 migrant teenagers.
After three days, the children are supposed to be transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services for longer-term care. But limited resources have led to reports that some are overstaying that time in DHS custody, breaching the Flores settlement agreement.
Biden refused to accept this week that his discourse had contributed to the increase in migrants seeking asylum.
“The idea that Joe Biden said, ‘Come’ — because I heard the other day that they’re coming because they know I’m a nice guy,” he said. “Here’s the deal, they’re not.”
At the same time, the Biden administration has been criticized for restricting press access to border facilities. Aides have cited COVID-19 and privacy concerns.
Psaki declined to share photos this week taken inside the centers by officials dispatched to the border earlier this month on Biden’s behalf.
“We typically don’t provide those materials publicly, but we do want you to be able to, or a pool of media to be able to, have your own visuals and get your own footage of these facilities,” she said.
Mayorkas flew to Texas again on Friday with a bipartisan group of senators for a border briefing. The trip was closed to the news media as well.
