As with the Trump administration, the Biden administration can be decoded by reading Twitter. But this time, don’t follow the president himself — follow Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff who makes his mind plain with a flurry of retweets and likes.
Thus, it is notable that amid a Cold War between the West Wing and the Department of Homeland Security, Klain retweeted the most shameless defense of President Joe Biden’s border catastrophe not once, but three times after a weekend of radio silence from the White House.
Max Boot, Biden’s second most devoted sycophant at the Washington Post after Jen Rubin, defended the administration’s border policy as “humane” for sending only 2,000 Haitian migrants back to the Caribbean nation while allowing 12,400 to be released into the United States.
“In July 2020, 92% of migrant encounters resulted in expulsion; by July 2021, it was down to 47%,” he wrote. “Biden has already ended other inhumane Trump policies such as the ‘Muslim ban’ and family separations.”
Boot almost stumbled on the simple fact that Biden caused this crisis in the first place, admitting that border crossings are the highest in 20 years “in part because many people believed Biden would welcome them.” But rather than blaming this on Biden ripping apart the diplomacy that was holding back a surge to the U.S.-Mexico border, Boot highlighted the real villain: “pro-Trump forces” who can “exploit” the surge they never wanted.
There are two ways to solve a border crisis without massive alterations to existing asylum case law or just opening the border altogether. Former President Donald Trump campaigned on the first: enhancing the physical security of the southern border. When his administration realized soon enough that this was physically, financially, and politically impossible to complete in any meaningful way, his White House pivoted to the second way to secure the border: use diplomacy to stop the flow of migrants arriving at the border.
Contrary to Boot’s lie, Biden did not stop family separations. That’s mainly because, under the Clinton-era Flores settlement agreement, children legally must be kept in separate Department of Health and Human Services-managed facilities rather than with their parents in Customs and Border Protection custody. Trump’s DHS tried to replace Flores with a rule to allow children to remain with their parents under CBP custody, but the family reunification attempt failed in the liberal 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals under legal challenges from a number of state attorneys general. One from California, Xavier Becerra, went on to become Biden’s missing-in-action HHS secretary.
So the only way to stop family separations is to stop families from crossing the border. The Trump administration did this in two ways. In accordance with international law, the first included a series of “safe third country” deals with the Northern Triangle nations that export the majority of migrants who reach our border. The deals require that a refugee must apply for asylum in the first safe country reached. For example, an ethnic Mayan fleeing Guatemalan genocide would have to apply for asylum in the first safe country — in this case, Mexico, not the U.S. — if heading north.
The second deal was the “Remain in Mexico” policy, brokered with the Mexican government to allow migrants applying for asylum in America to remain in Mexico, outside of the family separations mandated by Flores and the 9th Circuit, until the courts come to a decision.
The Trump administration brokered all of these during the migrant crisis of 2019, when southern border crossings peaked at 144,116 in the month of May. By January, before the coronavirus came to the Western Hemisphere, border crossings had fallen by 75%. Biden inherited a border secure enough that he didn’t have to deal with overflowing facilities or enforcing Flores family separations. All Biden had to do was stand pat.
Instead, he chose the worst of all worlds. His border czarina Kamala Harris talked tough to would-be migrants while Biden shredded all the diplomatic deals that had discouraged them from rushing the border in the first place. As a result, border crossings have nearly tripled from Biden’s inauguration to now.
For all of Trump’s uncouth and arguably racially charged rhetoric about migrants, his post-2019 policies were as humane as any administration’s could possibly be under the legal nightmare that Flores created. Preventing facilities from overflow also meant that asylum courts weren’t backlogged, rendering unnecessary the much-despised policy of “catch and release.” Now Biden isn’t just catching and releasing migrants with a court date and the coronavirus — not even Mayorkas could claim that migrants were required to get the vaccine, let alone provide proof of a negative COVID-19 test. He’s releasing some of them without giving them a court date at all.
Worst of all, he’s beckoning migrants to the border with his bad policies, knowing full well that almost none of them will qualify for asylum and will inevitably be deported in the end anyway. Asylum-seekers must prove they face the founded threat of persecution on the grounds of race, religion, nationality, politics, or social groups such as gender or sexual orientation. Economic distress, however unfortunate, is not grounds for asylum under existing law. And despite all of this, the Biden administration has declared a blanket ban on one of the most legitimate groups of refugees: Cubans seeking asylum from the political persecution of the communist government.
This is what’s inhumane: to restore all of the incentives for migrants to risk their lives on the border crossing when they have only a minuscule chance of getting legal asylum, and to do so knowing that record numbers of unaccompanied minors are being sent alone or worse, trafficked by coyotes.
That the brain behind Biden thinks this is humane shows the crisis rotting his presidency is one of morality as much as it is of competence.
