President Joe Biden is once again facing the consequences of his incompetence.
The White House announced this week its plans to restore the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” immigration enforcement policy, which requires asylum-seekers and other migrants to remain outside U.S. territories as U.S. courts process their claims.
It’s an absurd and humiliating turn of events for a president who promised explicitly to overturn Trump-era immigration policies, most especially “Remain in Mexico,” which the previous administration used to return some 60,000 illegal migrants to Mexico regardless of whether they claimed asylum status.
No, really, this was a core promise of Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign.
“Donald Trump’s ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy is dangerous, inhumane, and goes against everything we stand for as a nation of immigrants,” the then-Democratic nominee promised last year. “My administration will end it.”
Now, however, the White House says it’s looking for ways to reimplement the immigration policy it overturned just months ago. Under the circumstances, it was the only thing that could work, and Biden has no one to blame for this embarrassment but his own administration.
“In August, a U.S. District Court in Texas ordered the Biden administration to restart MPP,” the Washington Post reports, “faulting the White House for ending the program improperly. The Supreme Court upheld the decision, forcing Biden officials to restore a policy the president has deplored as inhumane.”
The report adds, “The GOP-run states of Texas and Missouri filed suit against the administration in the Northern District of Texas, saying the abrupt repeal of MPP led to a harmful surge of illegal immigration. The number of migrants taken into custody along the Mexico border this year is at the highest level in at least two decades.”
The Department of Homeland Security announced late Thursday it is “taking necessary steps to comply with the court order, which requires us to reimplement MPP in good faith.”
One complicating factor is that “Remain in Mexico” cannot restart without the consent of the Mexican government. So, the White House is currently “taking steps to address the concerns of the government of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador by setting up better access to legal counsel for asylum seekers and exemptions for vulnerable migrants,” the Washington Post notes.
“Mexico is a sovereign nation that must make an independent decision to accept the return of individuals without status in Mexico as part of any reimplementation of MPP,” the Department of Homeland Security said this week in a statement. “Discussions with the Government of Mexico concerning when and how MPP will be reimplemented are ongoing.”
In other words, the Biden administration now has to reverse course and reinstate a policy it hastily shuttered, a policy the president ran against specifically, because the president and his lieutenants did such a slipshod, chaotic job of overturning it.
If it’s any consolation, the Biden White House also announced this week it plans to use the COVID-19-era emergency health code provision known as Title 42, which likewise returns illegal migrants to Mexico without offering them the opportunity to request asylum, as its primary enforcement mechanism.
“We will continue to use Title 42 for all of the people who are amenable to it and who we can expel to Mexico or to other countries,” an official told the Washington Post.
Biden shuttered “Remain in Mexico” almost immediately upon taking office. Soon thereafter, the Border Patrol recorded an astonishing 101,120 encounters with migrants in February. (This figure includes apprehensions plus crossings of migrants at legal ports of entry.) The agency reported later an estimated 208,887 encounters in August. For reference, the all-time high under former President Donald Trump was the 144,116 encounters recorded in May 2019.
Biden was asked in March, when the Border Patrol reported 173,281 encounters, whether it had been a good idea to shutter the “Remain in Mexico” policy so quickly and without much planning.
“Rolling back the policies of ‘Remain in Mexico,’ sitting on the edge of the Rio Grande in a muddy circumstance with not enough to eat and — I make no apologies for that,” Biden told reporters. “I make no apologies for ending programs that did not exist before Trump became president that have an incredibly negative impact on the law, international law, as well as on human dignity.”
Yeah, so — how’s that working out?
As it turns out, poorly executed drawdowns are this president’s specialty.
