Environmental, economic, and political factors have created the perfect storm for another potential southwest border crisis.
Immigration hawks and analysts are warning that illegal immigration at the southern border is likely to surge after President-elect Joe Biden takes office, as a confluence of factors, both economic and environmental, has pushed migrants to attempt to enter the U.S.
Already Biden’s team has begun to walk back some of his campaign promises to undo a number of President Trump’s immigration policies on “day one,” showing concern over an anticipated influx of migrants as natural disasters and the coronavirus have wreaked havoc on a number of Central American countries.
Ken Cuccinelli, deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, predicts just by virtue of immigrants seeing Biden as more welcoming to migrants than Trump that the new administration is “likely to have their first humanitarian crisis” caused by the Democrat “effectively telling people he’s going to have an open borders policy.”
As the Trump administration winds down, DHS officials are working to safeguard a number of the president’s regulatory changes and to continue making progress on the southern border wall, Cuccinelli says.
“We continue to build wall at a furious pace,” he said in a recent interview with National Review. “We’re at about 415 miles and counting. The contracts are in place to go beyond January 20 so that will continue until it is somehow legally stopped.”
He expects the Biden administration to face some difficulty in attempting to undo Trump’s executive orders.
“They can’t just automatically be done as we’ve seen when this president has tried to do that,” he said. “He was sued and stopped frequently. So, they now have to live with all that case law all those left-leaning activist judges put in place.”
Judges have kept Trump from discontinuing DACA, carrying out a new rule on welfare use by prospective legal immigrants and not renewing the Temporary Protected Status work-permit program for certain illegal immigrants.
“I think you can fully expect to see a lot of litigation, if a Biden administration attempts to undo substantial parts of the Trump agenda, and I think you’ll see us succeed in court, again, largely because of the precedents put in place during the Trump administration. The tables will be turned in the courts,” Cuccinelli said.
He added that the president has achieved “the greatest level of cooperation from the biggest illegal immigration countries: Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador.”
Jake Sullivan, Biden’s pick for national security adviser, told Spanish wire service EFE that the Democrat “will work to promptly undo” Trump’s deals with Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador that allow U.S. authorities to transfer asylum seekers to those countries.
Should that relationship go away, the government would face a “sudden inability of the system” to house migrants.
“People don’t realize that more than 2,000 people a day are coming across our border illegally,” Cuccinelli said. “The reason nobody really notices it is because we can repatriate 85 or 90 percent of them very quickly right now under Title 42.”
Title 42 is the public health order that allows U.S. agents to forgo normal asylum procedures and quickly return most migrants to Mexico, a policy designed to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus inside border stations and detention centers.
The order has kept facilities from being overcrowded, but after a judge ruled recently that the Trump administration cannot apply the CDC order to unaccompanied child migrants, a backlog has begun to form, Cuccinelli said.
“When you combine that possibility, with what is likely after the holidays to be a flood of what amounts to Joe Biden illegal immigrants, that’s going to cause very serious problems for the whole system,” he said.
Border crossings had been on the decline through most of 2020, but recently detentions of unauthorized migrants along the Arizona-Mexico border has begun to tick up. Detentions in October were up 30 percent over September.
Sarah Pierce, a U.S. immigration program policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, told National Review that while she and most other experts are predicting an uptick of immigration at the southern border, the current upward climb is more indicative of repeat tries than increased migration.
“Before the CDC order was in place, for example, if you had migrants arriving at the southern border from El Salvador, and they came in and didn’t qualify for asylum, they would be placed under expedited removal, which means they be quickly deported back to El Salvador,” she said.
Title 42, which has allowed the U.S. to expel roughly 300,000 migrants since it was put in place in March, has also increased recidivism.
“So part of that optic that’s happening at the southern border is a little bit artificial, because it’s just individuals who have been pushed back to Mexico under the CDC order, and they’re trying to get across the southern border and get detained again,” Pierce said.
But she added that if she were part of the new administration, her first immigration priority would be to prepare for a surge at the southern border.
“For many years now, we’ve seen increasing numbers of humanitarian arrivals at the southern border, especially families and children and we’ve seen time and time again, how our resources and procedures at the southern border are ill-equipped to handle these populations,” she said.
She added that there is a “more alarming” uptick of unaccompanied child migrants due to the Title 42 court order.
“We already saw an uptick in children arriving before that, now that they can’t be expelled and instead have to be treated under the TVPRA, which allows them into the country to apply for asylum to apply for different benefits, it’s very likely that we’re going to continue to see them arriving at the southern border.”
Lora Ries, a senior research fellow for homeland security at the Heritage Foundation, echoed this prediction, telling National Review a Biden administration could easily find itself slammed by surging immigration, reminiscent of what the Obama administration faced in 2014 and 2016 when an influx of migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras made their way to the border.
At the time, Obama received criticism from both sides: human-rights groups blasted the Democratic administration for locking up families and children and accelerating deportations, while immigration hard-liners disapproved of the allowance of tens of thousands of migrants to enter and remain in the country while their asylum cases made their way through the courts, which can be a years-long process.
Ries predicts immigration under a Biden administration will “largely resemble that under Barack Obama.”
“In which case, numbers of every category [of immigration] would go up,” she said. “Illegal immigration would increase.”
“Word has gotten out that Joe Biden would be much more lax in immigration enforcement and so smugglers use that to lure their next customers to cross the border illegally,” she said. “You also have other factors in place, including COVID, which has wracked the economies of Central American countries and Mexico. So many will be coming here to look for jobs.”
All of these factors have created the perfect storm and left the country facing “another potential southwest border crisis,” she said.
The question of when Biden will end the Migrant Protection Protocols, or “Remain in Mexico” program, will play a big role in how quickly migration will surge. Since the policy was introduced last year it has left some 67,000 asylum seekers to wait for their immigration hearings in Mexico.
The program has helped reduce the number of migrants attempting to cross the border and has encouraged thousands of migrants already at the border to instead head back home.
As the MPP is not codified by regulation, Biden would have the power to immediately repeal the policy.
“If he were to immediately end that it would certainly restart the caravans, and his homeland security would be overwhelmed,” Ries said. “He doesn’t want that. I don’t think he wants the visual and nor does he want the operational headache of dealing with that.”
Though Biden had promised on the campaign trail to undo the MPP on “day one” in office, top advisers to the president-elect said last week they will not immediately roll back asylum restrictions at the Mexican border and other Trump immigration policies as it would take time to undo the “damage” wrought by the current administration.
Sullivan told EFE that Biden will not immediately move to end MPP, saying that while it has been “a disaster from the start and has led to a humanitarian crisis in northern Mexico,” that putting the new policy into practice would take time.
“If and when he ends it, I think we would see tremendous numbers at the border,” Ries said. “And then therefore asylum numbers quickly jump because of it. So, I think we’ll see gradual increases up until the point he removes MPP, and then it would jump considerably.”
Susan Rice, Biden’s incoming domestic policy adviser, recently told EFE that the president-elect will not immediately end Title 42, either, due to public health concerns.
“Our priority is to reopen asylum processing at the border consistent with the capacity to do so safely and to protect public health, especially in the context of COVID-19. This effort will begin immediately, but it will take months to develop the capacity that we will need to reopen fully.”
“Processing capacity at the border is not like a light that you can just switch on and off,” she said.
Migrants and asylum seekers “absolutely should not believe those in the region peddling the idea that the border will suddenly be fully open to process everyone on Day 1.”
“It will not,” Rice said.
While the administration plans to “take some steps to change policies right away,” she said, “others will take time to put in place.”
“The situation at the border will not transform overnight due in large part to the damage done over the last four years. But we are committed to addressing it in full.”
This follows a report from NPR that many on team Biden believe immigration activists have become too “adversarial” with policy demands that make the team “uncomfortable.”
Biden’s transition team denied the report.
“This starts with restoring order, dignity and fairness to our system and day-one actions to restore due process to give families the opportunity to seek asylum, reinstate DACA, and introduce immigration legislation that includes a pathway to citizenship,” the transition team said in a statement, adding that Biden is “committed to having an open dialogue with groups across a wide spectrum to ensure his administration is meeting the needs of the community.”
Ries cautioned that DACA “undermines the rule of law” and “stirs up the next group of illegal immigrants,” as does Biden’s promise to pass a general amnesty for the full population of undocumented persons who are in the U.S., a group that could be anywhere from 11 million people to over 20 million, she said.
“That just kind of rings the bell for future illegal immigrants, who then know that if they just can get into the U.S. and wait, they will eventually get a green card also,” she said.
Rice and Sullivan told EFE that Biden will make good on his promise to immediately introduce legislation to create a path to citizenship for those in the U.S. illegally.
Officials from Biden’s transition team said in December the president-elect will suspend deportations from the U.S. interior while it “sorts out” new policies for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Additionally, Biden has said he wants to increase the annual refugee admissions ceiling to 125,000 in one year, higher than President Obama, who raised that figure to 110,000 during the height of the Syrian conflict.
Ries said raising the ceiling would loosen vetting standards as government staff would struggle to hit that number operationally. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has lowered the refugee ceilings each year. It now sits at its lowest point, at 15,000.
“A Biden administration would have to make a difficult choice: if they are going to end MPP, the caravans will resume, the asylum claims will jump, the backlog will balloon. He cannot also raise and meet a refugee ceiling to 125,000,” she said. “It’s just operationally not feasible.”
“He would need to find a middle ground that’s manageable and that doesn’t forego good security vetting and doesn’t water down the benefit to just reach an arbitrary number that sounds good, but you’re not really helping those truly in fear,” she said.