America may disapprove of President Joe Biden’s handling of inflation more than any other issue, but the country has disapproved of Biden’s handling of immigration for the longest.
On his first day in office, Biden ended President Donald Trump’s successful “Remain in Mexico” policy, announced a 100-day moratorium on all deportations, and ended Title 42 for unaccompanied minors. He would soon end Title 42 for families as well.
As a direct result of these changes, the number of immigrants illegally crossing the southern border immediately soared, as did the number of immigrants dying at the border.
Things went so bad so fast that as early as August 2021, there was a debate in the White House about whether or not Biden should bring back Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, albeit with better protections and care for immigrants staying in Mexico.
Whoever these border hawks were within the Biden administration, they ultimately lost the internal debate. By October, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas issued a brief four-page memo crushing any suggestion that the Biden administration would bring back “Remain in Mexico.”
While Mayorkas’s memo does admit that Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy was effective, it says that other political concerns outweighed the costs of a never-ending border crisis.
“I have determined that MPP should be terminated. In reaching this conclusion, I recognize that MPP likely contributed to reduced migratory flows. But it did so by imposing substantial and unjustifiable human costs on the individuals who were exposed to harm while waiting in Mexico,” the memo read (emphasis added).
Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy worked because it denied immigrants access to the United States. Once they know they will not be caught and released into the U.S. and that they instead will be caught and returned to Mexico, they will not make the trip to the border. As even the New York Times admits, the vast majority of these immigrants are economic immigrants and will therefore lose their asylum cases.
If the internal White House debate had gone the other way, if the border hawks had won and Biden had implemented a more humane “Remain in Mexico” program, there would be no border crisis, hundreds of immigrants would be alive today, and Arizona, Texas, and Florida would not be shipping illegal immigrants from their overwhelmed communities to cities run by Democrats away from the border.
