What they fail to do also says a lot about what their priorities are.
By Azmi Haroun and Erin Snodgrass | Business Insider | MAY 27, 2022 | Photo by Ross D. Frak
On the campaign trail in 2020, President Joe Biden made a promise: He told voters he would end the Remain in Mexico program on day one of his presidency.
But more than a year into the Biden-Harris administration, thousands of migrants a day are turned away from the US under the Trump-era program, which requires asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico for the duration of their immigration court cases.
Despite a brief suspension in the first half of 2021, protracted legal battles led to the program not only being reinstated in December 2021, but expanded as well. The ongoing battle over the policy has made it to the Supreme Court, where justices heard oral arguments this week over the administration's efforts to end the program once and for all.
Immigration experts say the measure, also known as Migrant Policy Protocols (MPP), creates dangerous and sometimes deadly conditions for asylum-seekers.
Similarly, immigration advocates spent the first 14 months of Biden's presidency urging the administration to end Title 42 — another Trump-era policy used to rapidly turn away asylum-seekers under the guise of a public health emergency measure.
On April 1, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced that the administration finally had an end date in sight. It would mean that families and single adult asylum-seekers who had been turned away time and again at the southern border since the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020 would have the opportunity to make a claim beginning May 23.
But the proposal has been met with resistance and confusion thus far – from all sides of the political spectrum.
A bipartisan group of senators introduced a new bill earlier this month that would block the administration from scrapping Title 42 without a specific plan in place to deal with massive numbers of migrants expected at the border. Then, a Trump-appointed judge this week temporarily blocked the administration from lifting the order, announcing an intent to grant several states' request for a temporary restraining order.
Meanwhile, recent reports suggest the administration itself is considering delaying the repeal to avoid an influx at the border ahead of November midterms.
A spokesperson for the US Department of Homeland Security told Insider that even a temporary restraining order on the repeal would restrict the agency's efforts to adequately prepare for Title 42's eventual expiration.
Once the policy is lifted, the spokesperson said DHS intends to "significantly expand" the removal of people who "seek to cross the border without a lawful basis to do so" and impose "long-term law enforcement consequences" on such migrants. As such, the spokesperson said it makes "no sense" that the states suing to stop the repeal would halt DHS preparations for "aggressive application of immigration law" come May 23.
But even if the policy is ultimately rescinded come May, for many immigration experts, the move will be too little, too late.
The administration's decision to exempt Ukrainian refugees from Title 42 amid the Russian invasion has only further frustrated immigration advocates fighting on behalf of the scores of Central and South Americans who have been waiting for years to seek asylum in the US.
Biden once pledged he would "reassert America's commitment to asylum seekers and refugees." But immigration experts say that promise has yet to materialize.
"The president promised a more humane asylum system and that has not happened," Lee Gelernt, deputy director of ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project told Insider in January. "We largely have the same border restrictions that we had under the prior administration for asylum seekers."
Last summer, Insider spoke to seven immigration experts, asking them to give the administration a report-card-style grade on its handling of the issue so far. The assessments of the Biden administration's approach to immigration at the time were varied. Three sources handed out failing grades, but others offered a "B" or even a "B+" for the fledgling president.
Insider spoke again to those experts and others, and found that their initial grade diversity had disappeared entirely; almost all eight sources brandished Biden with the same marking — and an abysmal one at that.
