A political truism is that every party’s excesses tend to come back around in ways they don’t expect — and often don’t want.
For instance, conservatives opposed the Biden administration’s executive excesses when he pursued policies they didn’t support, like using an irrelevant emergency law to justify directing the executive branch to forgive student loans. To push back, conservatives sued the Biden administration, saying they violated a legal theory known as the major questions doctrine; the Supreme Court agreed, saying the doctrine constrained Biden from implementing programs without congressional approval. Now, that same legal theory could undo much of the Trump administration’s executive overreach.
During the Biden administration, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) was one of several Democrats who wanted President Biden to ignore a lower court order that would have reduced the availability of a popular abortion medication. A few months later, Ocasio-Cortez and Democrats were easily framed as hypocrites for going apoplectic over the Trump administration’s seeming indifference to federal court decisions.
Sometimes, the unintended consequence is less direct but even more impactful. One could argue no law is having a bigger influence on immigration issues in the U.S. than the Refugee Act of 1980, which allows migrants who make it into the U.S. to claim asylum based on well founded fears of persecution. The act passed Congress unanimously in large part as amends for America’s refusal to accept Jewish refugees during the Holocaust. Today, it might be the number one reason our immigration system is overwhelmed and beset by chaos.
Again: Every administration and party’s actions — even their words — reverberate in ways that are often predictable for people outside the beltway but not for those making the decisions.
As President, Biden countered Trump’s legacy by signaling — in word and deed — that the U.S. was much more open to migrants. Now, we are witnessing the repercussions of President Biden’s decisions.
Let’s establish that there was a problem.
I think some Americans, particularly on the left, still don’t quite grasp what happened during Biden’s time in office.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) recorded an all-time high in migrant encounters at the border under Biden — just shy of 11 million during his four years in office (and many were repeat crossers). In December of 2023, at the height of the migrant crisis, CBP recorded just over 300,000 migrant encounters at the border (seen as December in FY24 in the CBP chart). For comparison, last month, CBP recorded just under 7,200 encounters, the lowest monthly total to date. Data on known releases and “gotaways” during Biden’s term suggest that about 5 million of the immigrants who crossed illegally are still here. That is more people than the populations of half the states in America; it also does not account for the estimated 1.4 million migrants Biden helped gain legal entry into the country through a massive expansion of parole, which allows migrants to receive temporary legal status (more on this later).
This level of immigration — especially illegal — was unprecedented. Quite literally, it was the largest immigration surge in the history of the U.S., a country that has had many waves of immigration throughout its history. This surge pushed federal agencies to the brink and strained even major cities with massive budgets like New York. While stories of small towns being “overwhelmed” by the crisis were sometimes exaggerated, there’s no doubt some places across America were not prepared for such an influx and indelibly changed.
As we’re learning now, it is quite difficult to deport people who entered the country illegally en masse. That’s something Democrats should remember the next time they are in power: Stemming the flow of migration across the southern border actually helps you manage the whole system long term, and it reduces the need for future administrations with different tolerances to detain or deport people in ways you may find inhumane.
The surge of illegal crossings under Biden has also helped turn all kinds of immigrants into pariahs under the second Trump administration. Americans have felt these changes in their neighborhoods and cities. They’ve seen the stories on the news. I don’t just mean stories that exaggerate the prevalence of crime (and yes, immigrants are less likely to commit crimes); I mean stories about how schools are being overwhelmed, or how social services programs are being flooded with new applicants.
Chalking up this flagging sentiment toward immigrants solely as latent xenophobia misses these points. It also offends and disregards the people who are impacted, laying the foundation for Trump to implement aggressive immigration policies and keep public approval for them up even as he violates people’s rights and forfeits due process.
Biden’s policies exacerbated the problem.
If we can accept that immigration was a serious problem under the Biden administration, the next step is making the case that Biden’s policies were at fault. In Tangle fashion, I’ll share some caveats and counterpoints to the arguments establishing Biden’s responsibility, but I’ll make the case with three main points: 1) Biden ran on a more relaxed immigration-enforcement agenda, which sent a signal to all migrants that it was okay to come. 2) He spent a good chunk of his early presidency undoing many of Trump’s policies that had been effective on the border. 3) He introduced the humanitarian parole program alongside the CBP One app, which used executive power to help over a million migrants enter the country legally.
He ran on a more relaxed immigration enforcement agenda.
