How Biden is Reconstructing the American Southern Border Debate — Using Humanity and Coordination
As president, Donald Trump had pursued grueling restrictions on immigration, particularly against undocumented immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers at the southern border during his four years. His series of policies have not only been criticized domestically and internationally, but have also radically changed the landscape of American society in the face of immigration issues. Due to his explicit cruelty on the border issue, thousands of families are separated, and riots have broken out in detention centers run by private prison companies.
When Biden was running for president, he made changing and repealing Trump’s immigration policies a key part of his promise on the executive agenda. After he became president, he did take the plunge and change some of the Trump-era immigration restrictions by signing executive orders. As president, Biden stopped the travel ban, reinstated DACA, reduced the number of ICE deportations, restored Temporary Protected Status, required the Department of Homeland Security to reunite families separated by the Trump administration, restored the number of refugee applications to Obama-era numbers, and stopped forcing asylum seekers to apply in their home countries. This series of actions has also been praised by a large number of Democratic politicians and immigrant rights advocates.
In addition, Biden has advanced a bill to Congress called the American Citizenship Act, which would give all undocumented immigrants living in the United States a path to permanent residency or citizenship. Although the bill was difficult to pass in its current form, it was enough for many to see Biden’s boldness on reform.
But are these actions enough? By simply undoing some of the oppressive policies practiced under the Trump administration, will Biden be able to make the U.S. immigration system, especially for the vulnerable populations, more inclusive and humane? Has the urgency of the immigration issue changed? Are those disadvantaged groups that have been hit extra hard under Trump really safe?
The harsh reality gave Biden’s rhetoric and ambition on immigration a hard blow. Just as Biden was arguing with Congress to push through bills to further change many of the problems that had emerged in the border long before Trump, an influx of refugees at the U.S.-Mexico border that had been predicted by the media and experts ripped apart the faint consensus that Biden and Congress had just reached on immigration, catching the Biden administration off guard.
The Emergent Southern Border Crisis
In both March and April, Border Patrol caught more than 170,000 refugees trying to force their way across the border in both the United States and Mexico. That number is up 63 percent compared to April 2019, and a large number of them include young males acting alone to try to find work in the United States. They can only be forcibly returned to the waiting zones in Mexico under existing DHS regulations. In addition, in March and April, close to 20,000 unaccompanied minor children crossed the border illegally, guided by cartels or smugglers, and were temporarily housed in bases run by HHS or FEMA as required, and at one point these children faced shortages in hygiene and food.
The crisis has also brought Biden accusations from both sides: the Right accuses him of refusing to acknowledge that immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border has become a serious crisis that threatens national security, while the Left criticizes him for treating refugees and children entering the country inhumanely and still continuing a series of Trump-era actions.
People living in Central America, particularly in the “Northern Triangle” (Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala), have been plagued by civil wars and gang conflicts for decades. In these countries, governments are perennially corrupt, poverty rates remain high, and social order is often in chaos. As a result, since the 1990s, nationals of these countries have been the majority of those who have traveled long distances to the U.S.-Mexico border to survive in the United States by applying for asylum or refugee status.
By 2020, the situation had gotten even worse for these people: two Category 4 hurricanes in November brought torrential rains and severe natural disasters that killed more than 200 people and affected more than 5.3 million. For many families, the hurricanes completely took away the possibility of staying and living locally, as everything that belonged to them has been swept away by floods or buried under mountains by mudslides.
The still-raging COVID-19 pandemic means that many of those affected by the hurricane will not be able to find work to support their families, and they will therefore not be able to properly rebuild everything they have. In all three countries, UN investigators have been receiving reports of food shortages and even famine. At the same time, the governments of these countries are struggling to rebuild due to government incompetence, further prompting many of them to choose a new life in the United States by applying for asylum.
Biden’s Response to the Crisis and Why It Is Inadequate
In Biden’s view, the current administration is not ready to accept these hundreds of thousands of refugees into the country. For him, the top priority is to restore order within the United States after Trump’s departure. Therefore, Biden, not only in his own name, but also through his vice president, Kamala Harris, and his DHS Secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, frequently discouraged these refugees in press conferences to not cross the U.S.-Mexico border into the United States “right now”. To achieve this, he reached an agreement with the three countries, granting them a larger amount of relief than before, up to $310 million.
For many immigrant rights advocates, the money was not just a measure of humanitarian aid; it was also a deterrent to those countries to stem the flow of migrants, akin to hush money at the national level. During the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, they all used this approach to try to control the number of Central American refugees entering the U.S.-Mexico border. In fact, for the nationals of these Central American countries, this assistance will not prevent them from choosing to enter the United States.
According to a study on violent conflict and migration, one of the reasons that international aid to these countries is often ineffective in changing the situation in these countries is because of the lack of targeting of these economic aid measures. In addition, in the face of advancing economic conditions, people with family members in the U.S., or with a certain level of disposable income, will instead take advantage of relief assistance to migrate to places that they believe offer more equitable opportunities in order to choose to live a better and more stable life. Surveys on the origins of these refugees further support this claim: these data show that most Central American refugees entering the United States do not come from the most transportation-wise disadvantaged and impoverished areas of these countries.
Irregular climate activities are increasing every year due to global warming. Because the Northern Triangle is in the middle of a hurricane belt, similar refugee flows are likely to intensify and grow in size. Biden himself and Congress should be clear that it is impossible to stop undocumented immigrants from entering the U.S. through the border, and that what needs to be done is to actually confront the crisis directly through potential reform measures and will take a series of political measures to build a more humane immigration system.
To solve the problem, it is necessary to first recognize the scale of the problem. To gain political support for their policies within the United States, Biden and members of his administration have time and again assured everyone in press conferences and interviews that the border problems and crisis are gradually being resolved. This is what Biden and members of his administration are saying even as the number of people crossing the border exceeds 170,000, already the highest number in two decades. Such an attitude has begun to receive increasingly negative feedback in areas close to the border; Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas, whose district is on the U.S.-Mexico border, has even publicly refuted and rejected Biden’s claims about the border in interviews, arguing that the crisis is far from being solved.
Cuellar’s fears are by no means unfounded: In several U.S.-Mexico border cities, smugglers and cartels are transporting these undocumented migrants in droves across the border. Some of them will pass through tunnels under the border wall, some will break the fences, and some will take great risks to cross the swiftly flowing Rio Grande. Many local residents are gravely concerned about the increase in illegal border crossings, which has led to a recent massive increase in law enforcement presence and high-speed pursuits, as well as a rise in security incidents. To make their dissatisfaction with the current situation even clearer, many had already made a political choice ahead of this year’s refugee influx, voting in the 2020 election for Trump, who once referred to Mexicans as “rapists.”
And in cities like Tijuana, Mexico, which borders the U.S., there are many asylum seekers who still feel they are being left behind. Since Biden was elected president, more and more encampments have begun to appear in these cities, and many of them are expecting a decree from the president that will allow them all to enter the United States. These camps are always in danger due to unsanitary conditions, drug use and gang entry, and multiple asylum seekers awaiting immigration court have died from gang violence.
How Can this be Resolved in the Long Term?
Nicole Narea, a reporter for Vox, argues that focusing directly on violence as a driver of refugee presence could reduce the volatility of border crossings and be an important step toward building a humane immigration system. In the Northern Triangle, an increase in homicides is the most significant reason for the mass influx of unaccompanied children across the border. Because the governments of these three countries are so corrupt, assistance at the national level will likely not directly address the immediate problems in these regions’ societies. A 2014 study by the U.S. Agency for International Development showed that community-level interventions can reduce homicides at the street level by 50 percent. The U.S. government’s special envoy to the Northern Triangle has also publicly stated that, in addition to government leaders, talking to social issue groups and members of the private sector in the region, as well as the media, has been a focus of his work.
Next, as the pandemic’s situation continues to improve in the United States, driven by the vaccine, Biden will likely also choose to lift the existing repatriation policy based on public health policy, thus alleviating the large number of refugees stranded in Mexico. Today, the Biden administration is only able to receive information on 250 asylum seekers per day, which is far from enough for the current number of refugees. This situation means that if the border congestion is to be resolved, then restructuring the immigration court system so that more judges can handle and manage asylum applications is essential and a far safer and more humane measure than forced deportation. In the view of the UNHCR, the U.S. government is now fully equipped to provide basic rights to refugees while protecting public health.
As for the growing number of minor children at the border, the U.S. already ensured their safety through the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act in 2008: if the children are not from Mexico, they must be transferred within 72 hours to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. They will then be transferred to a shelter or relative living in the United States and assigned a specific date in immigration court to legally secure their stay in the United States. This crisis, in which the ORR briefly failed to secure water or sanitation after a large number of minors entered the border and some of them stayed for well over three days, is a sign that the Biden administration needs to invest more at these levels; henceforth, using more resources than the Border Patrol and refugee resettlement offices, and using FEMA-administered agencies as resettlement sites may become the norm.
Beyond that, one of the most important parts is to use diplomacy to work with Mexico and other Central American countries to stop the smugglers and the huge influence the cartels have in the process. Mexico, the country through which many Northern Triangle asylum seekers must travel, is Biden’s most important buffer. Mexico’s ability to restrict immigration gives its government significant leverage on an issue that is a political weakness for Biden. In exchange for sending large quantities of vaccines, Mexico closed its borders with Guatemala and Belize in March and deployed troops and police to control the movement of refugees within the country. Although Biden and Mexican President Lopez Obrador have not agreed on much, only such mutual assistance can have the potential to solve the problem.
The U.S. government is not unilaterally capable of stopping immigration from the Northern Triangle, but the U.S. can certainly regain the initiative in the immigration discussion by pursuing a more people-centered policy that allows the process to flow and normalize and is no longer seen as a “crisis” in the credibility of the American public and the credibility of undocumented immigrants.
