President Joe Biden entered office on Jan. 20 expecting to champion immigration reform, but his first 100 days were overtaken by the southern border, where the problems were far beyond what other administrations had faced.
More than three months into the crisis, the U.S.-Mexico border situation threatens to overtake Biden’s next four years, shuttering chances of legislative action on immigration in Washington.
The White House came out of the gate wiping away Trump-era and decades-old policies. Biden suspended border wall construction, paused most deportations for 100 days, stopped forcing asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico while their claims proceed, and scrapped bilateral agreements that allowed the United States to send asylum-seekers to Central American countries to seek protection there instead.
By early February, the increase in people arriving at the border was already being felt across Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California. Trouble at the border had been brewing during former President Donald Trump’s final nine months in office, as the number of people encountered attempting to come across the border illegally had climbed from 17,000 in April 2020 to 78,000 in January. Mexican authorities were seeing rising levels of people from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras seeking asylum, which immigration policy analyst Cris Ramon said was a sign that people were increasingly emigrating and the U.S. should prepare for similar effects on its own southern border.
172,000 TRIED TO CROSS BORDER ILLEGALLY IN MARCH, THE MOST IN 15 YEARS
“One telltale sign was that you didn’t see [Biden] announce anybody in their transition team who dealt exclusively with the border,” said Ramon.
Trump officials at the Department of Homeland Security, as well as career law enforcement officials, briefed Biden’s transition team that the surge of Mexican adults was increasing. Last March, fewer than 27,000 single adults were encountered trying to sneak into the U.S. By January, it had grown to 65,000.
“It is impossible for them to argue that they had no idea that this was going to happen,” said James Carafano, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s vice president of foreign and defense policy studies. “The career people in the department told them what would happen. So they full-well knew that this was going to happen, but it is also clear that their response is inept, uncoordinated, and disorganized.”
The only measure keeping the border operable was Title 42, a Trump-era policy that allowed all adults, families, and children to be turned away at the border instead of being taken into custody and held at cramped facilities amid the coronavirus pandemic. The downside was that because adults were immediately pushed back across the border, there was no consequence for illegally crossing, so they would try again and again.
Weeks into his presidency, the Biden administration decided not to keep turning away children who showed up at the border without parents, otherwise known as unaccompanied minors. Almost overnight, children began arriving at the border in historically high numbers, from 5,900 in the month of January to more than 18,000 in March.
Border Patrol agents were already struggling to return adults and now had to take every child into custody inside stations that were not equipped to hold children. The minors were transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services, which searches for a family member in the U.S. to release the children to. By March, more than twice as many children were in federal custody than when the previous record was set in 2019 under Trump.
“In the case of unaccompanied children, [rescinding Title 42 for single children] provided incentives for their family members in the United States to pay smugglers to bring those children to the United States, in the anticipation that they would be quickly released,” said Art Arthur, a senior fellow for the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that favors restricting immigration.
HHS began opening the first of what are now more than a dozen temporary emergency “reception” sites to hold children. Internal government documents revealed officials expected to see 117,000 unaccompanied minors at the border in 2021, far greater than the 2019 record.
Republican lawmakers grew concerned about the rising numbers of children and adults. By late February, families began arriving in high numbers. While the Biden administration had claimed it was expelling “most” families, Mexico refused to take back the majority. Once again, Border Patrol was forced to take this new demographic into custody. The 7,300 family members who showed up at the border with a family member in January jumped to nearly 20,000 in February’s end. Ramon said Biden officials failed to prepare.
“The fact that the Mexican government passed a law [in 2020] that basically said we can’t keep kids and families in immigration detention should have been a clear sign,” said Ramon. “At a certain point, you would have had to see that you’re going to need a border strategy to deal with the arrivals of unaccompanied kids and families.”
The Biden administration directed Border Patrol to release many of the families directly from its stations and into U.S. communities like Yuma, Arizona, rather than turn them over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where they can be held up to 20 days. Those released were not tested for the coronavirus by the government before being released. Approximately 15,000 people were released without documents that mandate they appear in court, where an immigration judge would decide their fate.
For some families that were expelled out of the U.S., parents began self-separating from their children and sending the minors back across the border, knowing that they would be released into the U.S. In addition, virtually no families were undergoing rapid DNA tests to verify they were related, as border officials had done during the 2019 family surge.
All the while, Republicans chided the White House for not dubbing the situation a “crisis.” Meanwhile, more adults, children, and families were arriving by March. Just shy of 100,000 single adults were encountered in March. Families and children were coming over in triple-digit groups at a time. The DHS warned it was about to face its worst year in two decades.
“This is the first time that we’ve seen three historical periods of migration at the U.S.-Mexico border happening simultaneously,” said Ramon. “We’re sort of seeing trends from the 1980s, ’90s, and early 2000s mashed up with the 2014 unaccompanied kids and a dosage of 2019 families arriving at the border.”
Biden now faces a worsening situation at the border, and the path forward in his second 100 days remains unknown.
“The way forward on immigration is to find a lasting and cohesive bipartisan solution that honors both security and our nation’s historical openness to new citizens. Those efforts will take time and political will,” said Paul Rosenzweig, former DHS deputy assistant secretary for policy.
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Ali Noorani, president and CEO of the immigrant advocacy group the National Immigration Forum, said Biden should “acknowledge this complexity and help people see how the different pieces of the response are coming together.” Beyond that, Congress ought to put together immediate and long-term solutions, he said.
