The Daily - Another Crisis at the Border

Episode Date: September 27, 2021

Increasing numbers of Haitian migrants have been traveling to the border town of Del Rio, Texas, recently, in the hope of entering the United States.Border Patrol took action — in some cases, sending the migrants back to Haiti; in others, taking them into custody or releasing them as they await trial.Why did so many thousands of Haitians come to the border in the first place? And what was behind the Biden administration’s reaction?Guest: Michael D. Shear, a White House correspondent for The New York Times. Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: The U.S. is flying migrants back to Haiti and other countries as President Biden struggles to manage an immigration system already buckling under record migration.Haitians who lived abroad for years have been returned to a country that they barely recognize — often, they say, without a hearing.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, thousands of Haitians seeking refuge in the United States are being turned away at the border and deported without being given a chance to apply for asylum at a moment when their country is less stable and less safe than ever. Astead Herndon spoke to our colleague Mike Scheer about why that's happening. It's Monday, September 27th. So tell me what's been going on at the border along Del Rio in Texas. The crisis on the U.S. southern border deepens tonight. So about 10 days ago or so, the border in Del Rio, which is in Texas,

suddenly found itself kind of overwhelmed by a group of Haitians. There are those thousands of migrants who have set up this makeshift camp. Most of them had traveled from, some from Haiti itself, but many from different parts of South America where they had been living with the hope of getting into the United States. And within a matter of days, there are still more than 10,000 migrants, 12,000 migrants, 13,000. We're talking about nearly 15,000 migrants here. You know, what started out as a few hundred migrants had swelled to thousands. This is what the U.S.'s immigration waiting room looks like

in Del Rio, Texas. We're told that they've been sleeping on the dirt, surrounded by trash, out here in this hot Texas sun. Kind of hemmed in in this squalid makeshift camp. And with food and supplies constantly running short. Which then, of course, drew the notice of, you know, the administration, the border patrol, the people who have to figure out what to do about this. And thousands of Haitian migrants are now being deported. What they decided to do was to, in some cases, ship people back, put them on planes and fly them to Haiti.

In other cases, you know, put them on buses. Some were taken into custody. Some were released to come back for court cases later. And of course, the thing that really caught the attention of everybody was... Okay, I want to show you some unbelievable images shot near Del Rio, Texas. In the middle of all of this, where border patrol agents, some of them were on horseback,

chasing after Haitian migrants, grabbing them by the cuff of the neck, and in some cases using the reins from the horses to sort of catch them. Why are you whipping them? Why are you not offering care? You know, these images, they're so horrific. All of which generated a lot of attention and controversy on the way the administration responded to the situation. These horrifying images seem far more reminiscent of the Fugitive Slave Acts of the 1790s and 1850 and not 2021.

I am ashamed that this is how Americans are treating other immigrants. The world is watching. Right. It feels like kind of the image of the last week. We saw that Border Patrol on the horseback using those reins in this kind of like whip-like fashion and rounding these folks up. And that was shared far and wide. But why did so many thousands of Haitian migrants come to the border all at once in the first place? How did we get here? You know, it's always a challenge to sort of point to one reason. President Biden had recently extended a sort of designation for Haitians who are already living in the United States that allows them to live and work here legally for another period of time. These are largely Haitians that

had fled the devastating earthquake in 2010 and other political and sort of natural disasters in that country and had been living here under the protection of a law that is known as temporary protected status. And Donald Trump, during the last four years, had tried to sort of turn off that protection and send a lot of Haitians home. President Biden, when he came in, said, no, no, no, that's not, we're not doing that. We're going to extend the protections for these people. So one theory, I think, among administration officials and others who watch this is that, you know, Haitians who might have been living in South America, who had fled maybe the country in the

past, sort of heard about that decision by President Biden and thought, oh, well, if it's more lenient now, maybe I can come and I can stay in the United States too. Now, the truth is, the change that President Biden made would not have affected those people because it only applies to people who had already been living in the United States. But it's certainly possible that they misunderstood the implications of his decision and that that convinced folks to come. That's the theory number one, the kind of cause and effect that the Biden administration's change in the policy, specifically around folks who are already here,

that temporary protective status, that the word might have gotten out and encouraged people who were not in the United States to come here, even though it technically didn't apply to them. Right, exactly. And there is, I mean, the other thing to point to, I suppose, is that there obviously has been terrible times in Haiti recently. You've had another earthquake, you had political instability with the assassination of the country's president. So if there were Haitians who were living either in the country at the time or already in South America, but contemplating, gee, am I ever going to be able to go back to my home and, you know, kind of start over?

If the recent strife in that country convinced them that they weren't going to be able to go home anytime soon, maybe some of them saw the United States as a second option. And so some of them, the intent is to apply, for example, for asylum, saying that they deserve to have refuge here in the United States from the country that they left. Others, I think, are just hoping that they will be allowed to stay. The problem is that that runs headfirst into the interests of the Biden administration and the

government, which, you know, has as its sort of basic tenet that, you know, you don't come into the United States illegally. That's not the proper way. And so the United States has, even under the Biden administration, has a series of rules that allows them to determine what to do with people who just simply cross the Rio Grande and come into the United States. And many of those rules allow the United States at this point to just turn these people back, send them home. But we also know that there are legal ways of entering the country, like applying for asylum. So why are these people getting turned away? Well, I mean, it's complicated, but the Biden administration has kept in place a rule that former President Trump invoked at the beginning of the pandemic in the early days of 2020, a rule intended to be a public health rule that basically said, we have the authority to keep anybody out of our country if we think they're a potential threat to the public health of the United States.

That essentially overwrites the asylum rules that are normally in place. asylum rules that are normally in place. So when the Biden administration came in, one of the big questions was, would the Biden administration stop using that particular public health rule in order to keep the border more welcoming back to the way it had been prior to that, which allowed people to claim asylum? The surprising thing to many is that the Biden administration did not choose to stop using that public health rule. In fact, they kept it in place. Why is that? Well, the truth is that the administration understood that if they dropped that rule, they were going to be facing more surges like this across the border of people trying to get into the United

States. And until they were ready to deal with that, until they'd managed to rebuild the immigration system so that it could handle those increased numbers of people, they wanted to keep it in place. And that's sort of the reason. In other words, they're also worried about encouraging waves of migrants, just like President Trump was. So under Biden, this public health rule is still functioning as a policy of deterrence. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So at the end of all this, you have these, frankly, awful images of white men on horseback rounding up Black migrants in an effort to forcibly remove them from the country. And people and Democrats are left wondering, why are we seeing images in the Biden administration

that so many Democrats rejected under the Trump administration? Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. Look, this is a president, a presidential candidate, who called the former president's immigration approach inhuman. And when you look at the scenes that we saw over the last two weeks or so, it really does leave you with the same question. You know, how could you see the same kinds of brutal images, the same kinds of aggressive tactics being used against immigrants,

against migrants by this president. We'll be right back. So the big question is, why did the Biden administration treat the Haitian migrants this way? What have they said? Well, as it relates to the horses, they have essentially fallen all over themselves to apologize. Okay. Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, was the first out of the gate. We've watched the photos of Haitians gathering under a bridge, many with families, and the horrific video of the CBP officers on horses using brutal and inappropriate measures against innocent people.

Saying that this was horrible, saying that the images that we saw were unacceptable. What I saw depicted about those individuals on horseback, treating human beings the way they were, was horrible. Vice President Kamala Harris quickly echoed that. Human beings should never be treated that way, and I'm deeply troubled about it. We know that those images painfully conjured up the worst elements of our nation's ongoing battle against systemic racism. And in the days since, you've had both Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas echo that sentiment and the president himself. To see people treated like they did, horses barely running them over, people being strapped, it's outrageous. I promise you,

those people will pay. They will be an investigation underway now and there will be consequences. There will be consequences. They then also ordered an investigation into how it happened in, you know, the sort of procedural sense and whether or not there should be people held responsible. The mounted units are temporarily suspended. Are you considering eliminating them altogether? So we're going to take a look. Secretary Mayorkas was asked, will the use of horses be banned or prohibited forever more broadly along the border? And his response was, well, that's part of the investigation.

But at least in the short term, they did suspend the use of any sort of units on horseback in Del Rio. They clearly did not want any more of those images. I mean, I don't want to be too dismissive here, but it doesn't seem as if horses were the central question in that photograph. You know, folks were upset by the racial dynamics, by the forced deportations, by the use of the reins as a whip. What has the administration said about the larger questions, not just the use of horses? Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more, Ested.

Every question that we have asked over the last few days, they've turned back to the very narrow, specific question about these images of border agents on horseback. And that's what they want the story to be about. But frankly, here you have a group of people who are coming to the United States saying that they need refuge. And the response from the Biden administration has been incredibly aggressive. It is to basically say, you don't have a place here. And for thousands of them, we're not even going to let you make the case that you should be here. We're going to deny you the chance to apply for asylum. We're going to put you on a plane and we're going to fly you back to Haiti. No questions asked. Well, why aren't they addressing these policies that don't give migrants a chance at applying for asylum? Why aren't they allowing them to make that case

for coming to the U.S.? Well, look, I think the answer to that is a complicated one. Even the advocates who are criticizing the administration are somewhat sympathetic to them for the pickle that they find themselves in, right? We have an immigration system in the United States which has been broken for decades. The best way for people to come into the United States is to come in legally, and there are legal programs that you can apply to. The problem is those programs are backlogged.

Not backlogged for a few weeks or a few months, but in some cases decades because this country has not put the resources into clearing out those backlogs. backlogged for, you know, a few weeks or a few months, but in some cases, decades, because this country has not put the resources into clearing out those backlogs. And then, of course, Donald Trump made the system even worse on purpose, right? The entire approach was to sort of dismantle the immigration system, essentially putting up a procedural wall that basically said, look, we don't even have the infrastructure to process people into the United States. And so that's what President Biden was given when he arrived here. And, you know, the truth is that they're sort of stuck. If they simply stopped rejecting people,

if they said, yes, come, you know, apply for asylum, the great likelihood is that you would have tens of thousands of people coming over, trying to get into the United States in a system that has no way of processing all those people. Right. There's the individual problem of the photo, the kind of PR problem of it. And then there's the larger problem you're identifying, which is an immigration system

that has stymied presidents, Democrat and Republican. You have what Donald Trump did, as you said, to intentionally make that system harder. But I also remember, you know, President Obama was criticized by a lot of immigration activists who coined him as the porter in chief, which seems to fly in the face, again, of what a lot of Democrats said. It's that difference, as you said, between the words and making the policy change. Well, and I think that's one of the things, too, that has gotten President Biden into a little bit of trouble here is the expectations game, right? You had in the wake of President Trump's presidency, you had President Biden coming in and essentially saying, I'm going to be 180 degrees different from President Trump.

I am going to be the guy that makes the system humane. And the problem is that what you see in the last couple of weeks is really an example of this intense debate among the president and the sort of people closest to him and sort of in that inner circle. You've got one set of people saying, look, we have to continue to be aggressive and harsh at the border to send a message of deterrence, because if we don't, we're going to be overrun. You have another set of people who are sort of playing to his compassionate side,

saying, look, that's not who we are. We can and should be more welcoming and trying to process them in. And I think part of the reason you see a kind of chaotic application of the policy over the course of the last eight months of his presidency is because I think he's pulled in both directions. So I feel like you're describing a tension within Biden that's playing out in the Democratic Party largely. There's folks who want to send that message of deterrence, and there's folks who want to project empathy when it comes to immigration, and that Biden has been trying to thread the needle between those two issues. But in this case of these images,

you know, what had spread far and wide, what we saw on the border, that kind of complicated it for him. I mean, look, I will say that Republicans have a role here too. And the administration officials that I talked to over the last number of days have repeatedly reminded me that President Biden proposed a sweeping piece of legislation on his first day in office, as he promised to do on the campaign, that would have massively overhauled the immigration system in the country, that would actually clear up a lot of the backlogs that we talked about. It would streamline the system, would put a lot more resources into the legal ways that people could come into the country. And, you know, the Republicans have blocked it and it's going nowhere on Capitol Hill. And so, you know, the White House reminds us that there is a sort of a political dynamic in Washington, which,

of course, that also is at play here. So this is not the administration's first choice, is what they're saying. They're saying that they have pushed for that immigration reform, as President Obama did previously, but that because Republicans are blocking it or because they can't get it out of the Senate just with Democrats, that their first option has been taken from them. So the Trump administration, Donald Trump himself, made no, didn't hide the fact that they didn't want these people here. They didn't like these people to be here. And so they erected policies against them coming. The difference, I think, that the administration would say is our motivation is different. We actually do want these people here, but we're sort of in this terrible spot where we

don't have a system that can sort of properly handle them. And so we're sort of hamstrung and have no choice but to keep some of these harsh policies in place. I mean, I think the question, before you jump in instead, because I know that this would be your question, you know, the question is, what's the difference? In the end, if you're a Haitian or if you're a migrant from Guatemala, if the end result is you get shown the door and sent back to your home country without ever getting the chance to apply for asylum, I'm not sure the particular motivation

really makes that much difference. I have a kind of politics-y question here, because I also know that Democrats have been worried about how some of the most important portions of the electorate, folks who determine the midterms in the House, feel about immigration and about increasing the number of migrants. How much is politics playing a role here in looking ahead to the midterm and presidential elections, just as much as it's a real concern that the system could be overrun? I mean, I think everybody in Washington on all sides is trying to figure out how this plays.

The Republicans have clearly made a decision that they think seizing on the fact that there are still record numbers of migrants trying to come across the border, they think is a political negative for Biden and for Democrats. They want to use this as a political kind of wedge issue. And, you know, if you look back to the 2018 midterms and the 2020 elections, like there isn't a whole lot of evidence that the sort of harsh immigration message really worked very well for Republicans. It actually, you know, kind of cost them a bunch of seats in 2018.

But everybody, to your point, everybody's focused on it. Right. So there's not universal evidence that Republicans have been successful in motivating the public around kind of anti-immigration policy. But there is some evidence that Republicans has been successful in convincing Democrats that taking a harder line on immigration might be a better political option. Well, that's right. But you also have to remember that the Democrats aren't a monolith either, right? And so some definitely, maybe most, don't want to be associated with the kind of rhetoric that was commonly associated with President Trump, the virulent, xenophobic stuff.

But there's also a lot of evidence that, you know, a lot of Democrats also aren't so keen to just throw open the borders, right? I mean, they have interests in jobs and not wanting other competition. There's safety and security. And so there's a real kind of effort among Democrats politically to not shrug their shoulders at what I think most Americans, even maybe most Democrats, recognize is important, which is some control over the border that doesn't just let anybody in who wants to come in.

like a disjointed response from the Biden administration to these images kind of nicely reflects where the Democratic Party is on these immigration issues. They are against brutality. They don't want to see the image of the Border Patrol agent on horseback rounding up this Black migrant. But to the question of the system and how the system should change, there's less uniformity on exactly what direction that needs to go. Yeah, and I think that's right. But I think that whenever a moment like this happens, and the images that we saw of the folks on the horseback become so prominent, I think the danger for, in this case, the Democratic Party and the Biden administration, is that the kind of one image, you know, doesn't sort of really represent that debate inside the administration of how they're operating.

And I think that's what they're worried about is that ultimately, when people think of Joe Biden and how he's handling the border, do they think about that sort of thoughtful debate? Or do they think about the folks on horses? And I think, you know, both politically and substantively, that's one of the issues that they're going to have to deal with going forward. It makes more sense why the response to that image is to ban the horses, I guess, is because while that might not answer the overarching question of the problem, that does answer what the public might be most outraged about, which is seeing the problem. Yeah. And as you said, I think before, Ested, it's the thing they can do. which is seeing the problem.

Yeah, and as you said, I think before, it's the thing they can do. It's the thing that they can do in the short run. A lot of these other solutions, to the extent that they exist, will take time and will take money and are subject to debate. But telling somebody that you're not going to be able to ride a horse anymore,

that's something they can do pretty quickly. Well, thank you. I appreciate your time. Thanks. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. In the closely watched election to replace Angela Merkel as Chancellor of Germany, the Social Democratic Party, whose candidate is Olaf Scholz, has narrowly defeated Merkel's party, the Christian Democratic Union,

whose candidate is Amin Lachet. Scholz, Merkel's finance minister, campaigned as an heir to her legacy in a nod to her popularity after 16 years in office. And New York says that tens of thousands of healthcare workers will not meet the state's deadline for mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations, potentially forcing hospitals and nursing homes to rely on the National Guard or out-of-state medical workers to deliver care. To keep their jobs, most New York health care workers must receive

their first dose of the vaccine by midnight tonight. But as of last week, 70,000 workers had yet to do so. Today's episode was produced by Eric Krupke, Luke Vander Ploeg, Robert Jimison, Caitlin Roberts, and Alexander Lee Young. It was edited by Paige Cowett and Larissa Anderson, engineered by Chris Wood, and contains original music from Marion Lozano and Dan Powell. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily.

I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.