Democrats know that President Joe Biden’s impending decision to end the use of Title 42 to expel about half of those migrants arrested for illegally crossing the southern border is going to lead to more chaos and terrible images on television.
One option would be to revive President Donald Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy that had successfully solved security at the southern border before the COVID pandemic.
That does not appear to be the direction Democrats will choose. The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent advises Democrats to “explain that this is a hard problem, that excluding all asylum seekers isn’t an answer, and that rationalizing the system is worth attempting, deserves public patience, and could ultimately produce a better outcome than mass expulsion has.”
To which former Biden senior adviser for migration Tyler Moran tweeted, “Exactly. Polling shows that the public supports the Administration’s approach & Dems should lean in.”
The only problem is Moran is completely wrong about the polling.
Harvard University, hardly a mouthpiece for the Republican Party, asked 1,578 registered voters, “Do you think that people who cross the border with Mexico illegally should be turned back to Mexico or released into the US with a court date?”
An overwhelming 71% of voters said migrants should be returned to Mexico, and just 29% said they should be released into the U.S. with a court date.
If Moran, Sargent, and the Democrats want to “lean in” to an issue on which voters disagree with them by a 71%-29% margin, good luck. We’ll see you at the ballot box in November.
