It happened on February 2, 2021.
It happened on February 2, 2021.
J oe Biden was inaugurated on January 20, 2021. Less than two weeks later, on February 2, he issued the executive order that began the unraveling at the border in earnest.
The border crisis isn’t something that happened to President Biden. It’s not a product of circumstances or understandable policy mistakes made under duress. No, he sought it and created it, on principle and as a matter of urgency.
It wasn’t a second-year priority or even a second-quarter-of-the-first-year priority. The new president set out in his initial days and weeks in office to destroy what Trump had built, most consequentially in the February 2 executive order.
By then, mind you, there had already been significant action to loosen up on the border, including on his first day in office.
The February 2 action was called, preposterously, the “Executive Order on Creating a Comprehensive Regional Framework to Address the Causes of Migration, to Manage Migration Throughout North and Central America, and to Provide Safe and Orderly Processing of Asylum Seekers at the United States Border.”
The order repeatedly used the words “root causes” and “comprehensive,” never a good sign in immigration policy. It emphasized an effort, as the document put it, to “enhance lawful pathways for migration to this country” and revoked a slew of Trump rules, executive orders, proclamations, and memoranda. The sense of it was that there is nothing that we could or should do on our own to control illegal immigration; rather, we had to fix Central America instead.
“We cannot solve the humanitarian crisis at our border without addressing the violence, instability, and lack of opportunity that compel so many people to flee their homes,” it intoned. “Nor is the United States safer when resources that should be invested in policies targeting actual threats, such as drug cartels and human traffickers, are squandered on efforts to stymie legitimate asylum seekers.”
The order called for better identifying of potential refugees into the United States, using parole to let more migrants join family members in the United States, enhancing access to visa programs, and reviewing whether the U.S. was doing enough for migrants fleeing domestic or gang violence, among other things.
And it put on the chopping block numerous Trump policies that had helped establish order at the border, from Trump’s expansion of expedited removal, to his termination of a parole program for Central American minors, to his memorandum urging the relevant departments to work toward ending “catch and release.”
Most importantly, it went after two of the pillars of Trump’s success at the border: the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), or so-called Remain in Mexico, and the safe-third-country agreements with the Northern Triangle countries that allowed us to divert asylum-seekers to Central American countries other than their own, where they could make asylum claims.
The order directed the secretary of homeland security to “promptly review and determine whether to terminate or modify the program known as the Migrant Protection Protocols” and the secretary of state to “promptly consider whether to notify the governments of the Northern Triangle” that the asylum agreements were being terminated.
After a few fits and starts thanks to legal challenges, Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas indeed ended Remain in Mexico. Although he now wants to present himself as an innocent bystander to Biden’s border policy, he killed the policy knowing exactly what he was doing.
“After carefully considering the arguments, evidence, and perspectives presented by those who support re-implementation of MPP, those who support terminating the program, and those who have argued for continuing MPP in a modified form, I have determined that MPP should be terminated,” he said in a memo.
He acknowledged, by the way, that the policy “likely contributed to reduced migratory flows.”
For his part, Antony Blinken indeed moved promptly. On February 6, he announced the end of the asylum agreements: “In line with the President’s vision, we have notified the Governments of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras that the United States is taking this action as efforts to establish a cooperative, mutually respectful approach to managing migration across the region begin.”
And just like that, the carefully crafted suite of Trump polices that had given us control of the border were demolished.
It didn’t require esoteric knowledge of border policy to realize how this would play out. During the transition, Trump officials warned of a catastrophe if Biden followed through on his promises, and in April 2021, the Washington Post ran a piece headlined, “At the border, a widely predicted crisis that caught Biden off guard.”
Now, the February 2 memo feels almost like an artifact from another era, as the open-borders orthodoxy begins to show cracks. The White House is considering measures to try to curtail illegal immigration and calling on sanctuary cities to cooperate with ICE, while New York City mayor Eric Adams criticizes aspects of his city’s sanctuary regime.
The executive order, though, is a stark reminder that — in terms of the harm to the country and political damage to President Biden — they did it to us and to themselves. It’s all there in black and white, a prelude to a disaster that has roiled the country and could well play an outsize role in Joe Biden’s losing the presidency.