President Biden announced new immigration restrictions Thursday, including the expansion of programs to remove people quickly without letting them seek asylum, in an attempt to address one of his administration’s most politically vulnerable issues at a time when the nation’s attention is focused on Republican disarray in the U.S. House.
The measures will expand Biden’s use of “parole” authority to allow 30,000 migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and Venezuela to come to the United States each month, as long as a U.S. sponsor applies for them first. But those who attempt to migrate through the region without authorization will risk rapid expulsion to Mexico, as the administration plans to expand its use of the pandemic-era Title 42 public health policy. Mexico has agreed to take back 30,000 border-crossers from those nations each month, U.S. officials told reporters during a briefing Thursday morning.
Biden’s new policies represent a move to the center on an issue that has loomed over the first two years of his administration. The changes are likely to draw challenges from immigration advocacy groups, because U.S. law says that anyone can apply for asylum if they set foot on U.S. soil. But officials say people are misusing those laws to cross the border to work, which is not grounds for humanitarian protection.
The White House said the measures “will expand and expedite legal pathways for orderly migration and result in new consequences for those who fail to use those legal pathways.”
“The actions we are announcing today will make things better, but will not fix the border problem completely,” Biden said in a speech from the White House. “Until Congress has acted, I can act where I have legal capacity to do so.”
Biden, who has said he will seek reelection in 2024, is contending with the political and operational fallout of two consecutive years of record numbers of migrants taken into custody at the Mexican border, in part because of his more welcoming policies.
Before taking office, Biden said he wanted an orderly system, not “2 million people on our border.” The number of border apprehensions jumped to 1.7 million during his first year in the White House, however, and soared to nearly 2.4 million in his second year. Biden campaigned on the promise that his administration’s immigration system would be “safe, orderly and humane”; his pivot toward amped up enforcement suggests the White House sees immigration as a 2024 liability.
The administration’s solution is legally thorny and likely to anger immigration advocates and even some Democrats — and will probably do little to silence Biden’s Republican critics.
Biden announced that he will stop in El Paso on Sunday, in advance of a trip to Mexico City next week for a regional summit. On Wednesday, Biden told reporters he wanted to see “peace and security” at the border and is “going to see what’s going on.”
It will be his first trip to the border as president and will likely attract international attention and be politically fraught. But the disarray among Republican members of the U.S. House has provided some political cover for the White House.
Republicans have sputtered in their effort to elect a speaker of the House, a public display of disarray that Biden called “an embarrassment” on Wednesday. The effort reached its third day and seventh ballot on Thursday morning, as a group of right-wing holdouts continued to stymie the election of Republican Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) leaving Congress with a nonfunctioning lower chamber.
Many of Biden’s staunchest immigration critics are mired in the chaos — and some are the cause of it. The administration has long argued that the best way to improve the nation’s immigration system is for Congress to pass sweeping overhauls.
Like the Obama administration, the president is resorting to administrative measures because he has few legislative options with a deeply divided Congress and Republicans now in control of the House and vowing to attack the administration’s border policies.
“It’s just a fact that years of congressional inaction and the previous administration destructive policies have created an immigration system that does not serve our national interests and that makes it much harder for legal migration to take place in a safe, orderly and humane way,” said the senior administration official who briefed reporters.
The president’s Republican critics have pressured him for months to visit the southern border at a time when federal authorities are making record numbers of immigration arrests. Biden and his top officials have dismissed that criticism, insisting he’s had more urgent priorities to attend to.
Still, Biden acknowledged the political calculus on Thursday. “It’s clear that immigration is a political issue that extreme Republicans are always going to run on,” he said. “If the most extreme Republicans continue to demagogue this issue, I’m left with only one choice: to act on my own.”
But a member of the president’s own party was among the first to criticize his plan.
Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), who along with Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) has pushed the Biden administration for months to end Title 42, criticized the administration’s plan, saying it goes too far in restricting migrants’ access to the border.
“The Biden Administration’s decision to expand Title 42, a disastrous and inhumane relic of the Trump Administration’s racist immigration agenda, is an affront to restoring rule of law at the border,” Menendez said in a statement. “Ultimately, this use of the parole authority is merely an attempt to replace our asylum laws, and thousands of asylum seekers waiting to present their cases will be hurt as a result.”
Immigration has been a precarious issue for presidents for decades, with deadlock in Congress over how to deal with the flow of migrants across the border and historically backlogged immigration courts. Migrants from the four countries in Biden’s expanded parole plan, Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba and Nicaragua, are among the most difficult groups to manage at the southern border, since they are fleeing repressive or unstable governments that can make it difficult for U.S. immigration agents to quickly deport those who are ineligible to stay.
On Nov. 15, a federal judge ruled against the continued use of Title 42 a public health order the Trump administration used to quell immigration at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. In 2022, more than a million migrants were quickly expelled because of the order. Just after Christmas, the Supreme Court blocked the ending of the restrictions while it considers a bid by Republican state officials to keep the rules in place.
Advocates for immigrants, meanwhile said at a recent news conference that country-specific parole programs that aim to reduce border pressures are undermining federal asylum laws — and possibly forcing migrants to stay in dangerous places as they wait for approval.
Margaret Cargioli, a lawyer with the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, said the program was effectively screening out migrants who lack U.S. connections or money to buy airplane tickets. She said Title 42 was “put in place by a racist and xenophobic administration” bent on stopping immigration, not protecting public health.
“It really does go against the nature of … ‘My life is in danger. I need to get out,’” she said at a Dec. 29 news conference. “And that is what the essence of an asylum seeker is.”
This is a developing story. It will be updated.