America’s Border Crisis Is Already Here
The Biden administration’s new deterrence measures are a step in the right direction, but they won’t be enough on their own.
Counting down the days.
Photographer: Paul Ratje/BloombergBy dispatching 1,500 active-duty troops to the southern border, President Joe Biden hopes to contain a looming migration surge after the lifting of pandemic-era immigration restrictions next week. The deployment follows the rollout of new initiatives to process asylum claims away from the border and increase deportations of migrants who try to enter the US illegally. In many respects, the administration is adopting tactics that Biden himself denounced when they were used by Donald Trump. The scale of the crisis has left Biden with little choice.
The administration’s urgency stems from the May 11 expiration of Title 42, which allowed for the expedited removal of asylum seekers on public-health grounds and has been responsible for more than 2 million expulsions over the last three years. With the pandemic subsiding last year, the administration moved to stop using Title 42, but failed to replace it with a workable alternative. Biden compounded the problem by allowing exceptions to Title 42 for various groups and reversing other Trump immigration policies like the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), which required asylum seekers to stay on the Mexican side of the border while their claims were adjudicated.