President Joe Biden is fond of blaming former President Donald Trump for exacerbating issues at the U.S.-Mexico border, but his most recent problems are of his, and his team’s, own making.
Biden was skewered by liberal Democrats last week for seeming to walk back a campaign promise to admit more refugees. Hours later, he appeared to bow to pressure from the political Left — a top spokeswoman on Monday denied Biden caved, saying critics merely misunderstood the White House’s plans. On Saturday, Biden undermined some of his top officials by calling the immigration situation at the southern border a “crisis,” a word his administration has aggressively avoided.
As Biden approaches his 100th day in office, his administration is set to be judged for its own uneven response to the immigration problem, including a slew of unforced errors.
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Biden would have been better off “sticking to his original position” and permitting the number of refugees he pledged, “rather than backtracking and then backtracking again,” according to Republican strategist Cesar Conda. He was Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s chief of staff during Congress’s unsuccessful 2013 immigration reform push.
Plus, “the words Biden uses to describe the situation at the border are as important as what he does. It is a crisis,” Conda told the Washington Examiner.
And a majority of people agree, at least those who responded to a Quinnipiac University poll published last week. The survey found 55% of the public disapproves of Biden’s handling of immigration and the border. Another 29% approve, while 15% did not have an opinion.
But after months of White House press secretary Jen Psaki following Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’s lead in not categorizing the border situation as a “crisis,” Biden did exactly that over the weekend after a round of golf in Delaware.
Biden made the comments while explaining why he had flip-flopped on his promise to lift Trump’s refugee cap from 15,000 to 62,500 this fiscal year, a pledge made during the campaign and reiterated in February after his inauguration. The plan was also to admit more refugees from countries such as Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia while relaxing Trump’s restrictions on applicants from Somalia, Syria, and Yemen.
Yet, Biden last week kept Trump’s cap in place as part of an interim presidential directive. Hours later, after the decision was condemned by the likes of New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the White House released a statement saying Biden would “set a final, increased” cap before May 15, though it would “likely” be fewer than 62,500.
Aggressive Progressive podcast host Christopher Hahn was adamant Biden’s refugee cap whiplash would not damage his standing with liberal Democrats, nor had it empowered them to demand more of a president who historically gravitated toward the ideological center-left.
“They should have been on top of it, especially with something so politically sensitive as this, but it’s completely understandable they weren’t,” he said of the administration and the cap. “Biden corrected it. And I think that’s fine, move on.”
Hahn dismissed the “crisis” flap, too, as semantics, contending people who were grappling with the issue are not “bogged down in what to call the problem.”
“This country is probably 30 years overdue for major immigration reform, and to expect Joe Biden to solve it in 90 days of being president is really asking too much,” he said. “Are there more people coming now than there were a year ago? Five years ago? Yes. Does that make it any more or less of a problem that this country needs to resolve? No.”
Conda advised Biden to rally around “achieveable” immigration legislation, such as the 2021 Dream Act introduced by Sens. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, and Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican. Meanwhile, former California Democratic Party adviser Bob Mulholland suggested Biden engage another Republican ally.
“President Joe Biden should call former President George Bush and have a conversation about immigration, something President Bush is speaking in favor of, and both should share that conversation with the American people,” Mulholland said of the 43rd commander in chief.
Bush last weekend urged Congress to ditch “harsh rhetoric about immigration” and vouched for an amnesty program for illegal immigrants brought to the country as children as he promotes his book, Out of Many, One: Portraits of America’s Immigrants. The Dream Act would similarly forge a pathway to citizenship for so-called Dreamers.
Biden acknowledged last weekend he had not signed the directive rolling back Trump’s refugee cap because of the surge in migrants illegally crossing the border amid the coronavirus pandemic, another connection aides had been reticent to make.
“We’re going to increase the number,” Biden said. “The problem was that the refugee part was working on the crisis that ended up on the border with young people. We couldn’t do two things at once. But now, we are going to increase the number.”
Psaki had to defend Biden’s refugee cap remarks in multiple heated exchanges during Monday’s press briefing, as well as his use of the word “crisis.” Psaki told reporters “people weren’t understanding what we were conveying to the public,” parroting the statement she issued last week in which she said there had been “some confusion” regarding Biden’s refugee directive.
“We have every intention to increase the cap and to make an announcement of that by May 15 at the latest, and I expect it will be sooner than that,” she said, attributing the delay to the administration having more time to assess the situation.
Psaki continued: “The president does not feel children coming to our border seeking refuge from violence, economic hardships, and other dire circumstances is a crisis.”
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More than 171,000 migrants were apprehended at the border in March, up from about 100,000 in February. Last month, 18,800 of those stopped were unaccompanied minors. The spike has overwhelmed DHS and the Department of Health and Human Services, even though refugees from overseas are processed differently from migrants at the border. Simultaneously, roughly 2,050 refugees have been resettled in the United States during this fiscal year.
