The Daily - Biden’s Border Dilemma

Episode Date: August 26, 2021

Early on in the Biden administration, it rolled out a two-pronged migration plan: A reversal of the most punitive elements of Donald Trump’s policy and rooting out the causes of migration from Central America, namely corruption.There is, however, a conflict at the heart of this approach. Calling out corrupt leaders could destabilize nations and encourage migration in the short term.We explore the calculus of the Biden administration’s migration policy. Guest: Natalie Kitroeff, a correspondent covering Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean 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: President Biden promised to attack corruption in Central America head on, but that goal has taken a back seat to cooperating on stopping migrants from the region.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily Watch. This summer, attempted border crossings into the United States reached their highest levels in more than two decades. My colleague, Natalie Kitchoeff, found that that has forced the Biden administration to choose between two major goals. Stopping migrants or stopping the root causes of their migrations. It's Thursday, August 26th.

Natalie, the last time we talked about immigration on The Daily, it was very early in the Biden administration. There was a surge of unaccompanied children trying to cross from Mexico into the United States, and it forced this new president to quickly develop a plan for the border. So tell us about that plan. So early on, the administration rolled out a two-pronged plan to address migration. The first part of it was they were going to do enforcement at the border, meaning trying to stop migrants from getting across. But this was going to be a different kind of enforcement

than what we saw under Trump. So Biden pretty quickly went about reversing Trump policies that Biden promised to undo. For example, they stopped immediately deporting young migrant children from Central America. They also did away with what was called Remain in Mexico, this program that, you know, had migrants who were applying for asylum in the United States wait in Mexico for months and months and months to do so. Biden did away with that. Essentially, they're rolling back some of

the most punitive components of the Trump plan. Exactly. And so the second prong of the approach, which is, you know, in many ways, a kind of more ambitious part of this policy, was what Biden called an effort to address the root causes of migration in Central America. The idea behind this effort was that the administration saw that the long-term solution to migration, the only way to stop these incessant cycles, was to fix the problems at home that kept driving people to the border. They wanted to deal with the systems

that people in Central America felt were so broken and so rigged against them. And for that effort, he turned to his vice president, Kamala Harris. Well, thank you, Mr. President, for having the confidence in me. In March, they do this press conference together. There's no question that this is a challenging situation. The idea was to spend billions of dollars on this, to really try to fundamentally change the calculus that drives people away from their hometowns.

While we are clear that people should not come to the border now, we also understand that we will enforce the law and that we also, because we can shoot them and walk at the same time, must address the root causes that cause people to make the trek. And what exactly was the plan to do that? How is this supposed to work? Well, there were a lot of areas of focus, obviously, because there's a lot of factors that are driving people to leave home in these countries, poverty, inequality, you know, economic systems that don't work for the poor. But one of the main focuses was corruption. And the reason for that, according to the Biden administration,

was that in these countries, if governments are perceived as not working for the people, for their own citizens, those people lose hope. That there comes a point at which they say, people lose hope that there comes a point at which they say, we're not getting water after a hurricane. You know, our mayor is stealing money that should be going to pay for schools. There is no chance that the people that are representing me in Congress and, you know, in the mayor's office, that they're ever going to really care about me. And I have no other option but to leave. have no other option but to leave. So the idea was they were going to go into these countries and somehow persuade them, work with them to fix endemic corruption as a way of kind of getting at that hopelessness, that feeling that my government doesn't work for me. So the thinking is if you can weed out corruption, you weed out one of the darkest

clouds that hangs over so many people who decide they can no longer live in these countries. Exactly. Okay, so that is the theory. What does actually stamping out corruption look like in action for Biden and for Harris? Well, first of all, it looks like another major reversal from what we saw under President Trump, who had really a kind of transactional relationship with Central America. The idea was that as long as Central American leaders tried to intercept migrants, he would kind of stay out of their internal business. So the idea was to set this tone early on that there was a new sheriff in town. So Vice President Harris travels to Guatemala City to meet with President Giammattei. They have this big press conference.

I mean, this is the moment in which the vice president is launching this effort. Thank you, Mr. President. And she delivers what is a pretty remarkable and stern speech. The president and I discussed the importance of anti-corruption. In which she very clearly says, we have to follow the money and we have to stop it. And that's what we intend to do. I can tell you, the United States will root out corruption wherever it is. And I want to emphasize that the goal of our work is to help Guatemalans find hope at home. And that is a major thing to say in Guatemala, in a place which has been kind of grappling with this issue now for years.

And the press, you know, leaps at this. They ask President Giammattei, so, you know, what about this? And he becomes very flustered in this meeting. He turns to them and he says, I'm going to return the question to you. How many corruption cases have I been involved in? I'll tell you it's zero. But in the background in Guatemala, there's a lot going on and it involves the president himself. What do you mean? Well, the Guatemalan

president, this guy who's being asked these questions at this press conference next to the vice president, is himself increasingly being implicated in allegations of corruption in the months leading up to this meeting. So in May, Guatemala's top anti-corruption unit searches the home of the president's former secretary, looking for information about $16 million that that same unit had found stuffed into suitcases in late 2020. Then a few months later, according to documents that we received,

a witness comes forward to this anti-corruption unit and says that he has information about the president negotiating a $2.6 million campaign contribution in exchange for maintaining government contracts. Hmm. campaign contribution in exchange for maintaining government contracts. And this becomes a real issue in Guatemala, and it's something that, you know, kind of sets up this trip as a pretty bold action on the part of the vice president. Right, because it means that Vice President Harris is not just delivering a theoretical message

about corruption and migration, she's delivering that message to a leader of Guatemala who has allegations of corruption swirling around him, and it almost seems like she's saying, standing next to him, yes, I mean you too. That's exactly right, and that's the way that it's received in Guatemala. She's very much

on the front lines of the fight. But things start to get a lot trickier there in the next few weeks. After the vice president leaves Guatemala City, another witness comes forward to the anti-corruption unit and he says that he personally delivered a rolled up carpet stuffed with packages of cash to the president's home. Oh, wow. And so this is one of the most powerful allegations yet against the president. It is yet another accusation of corruption that directly implicates the most powerful man in Guatemala. But just as the prosecutor who leads this unit is working on this case and compiling more and more evidence, he is, at the end of July,

abruptly fired. He's fired by the attorney general of Guatemala, who the end of July abruptly fired. By who? He's fired by the Attorney General of Guatemala, who the president of Guatemala has called a friend. This is someone who is very closely linked to the president. And this prosecutor flees to the United States with the evidence from the case and gives the evidence to law enforcement officials in the U.S. So at this point in Washington,

what it looks like is that Guatemala is thumbing its nose in the face of the United States that has just come to visit to say this fight against corruption is our priority. Guatemala is looking at them and saying, we don't care. We're firing our corruption prosecutor, and we're going to run the country the way that we see fit. Right. It would seem to very much undermine the message that Vice President Harris has just delivered in Guatemala City. So given that, how does the Biden administration respond to this conduct by Guatemala's president? Honestly, by not doing all that much. The perception in Guatemala and in the region is that there isn't really swift punishment. And it raises the question of just how serious the Biden administration really is about this fight against corruption and why it wasn't following through with harder, more serious punishment after delivering this speech in which Vice President Harris vowed to root out corruption at all levels.

What was it that was stopping them from doing that? We'll be right back. so natalie what is stopping the white house from going further in its efforts to stamp out corruption in a place like guatemala and what explains its pretty underwhelming response here well imagine that after these allegations come out, after the president fires this prosecutor, the administration announces a series of sanctions. They really intensely criticize the president. They pull visas for high-ranking officials. That could put the country in a really unstable situation with protests.

Who knows how the government would respond to these protests? situation with protests. Who knows how the government would respond to these protests? I mean, there are a lot of potential short-term costs in the eyes of the administration to destabilizing Guatemala. Right. And among those costs is that it could leave the country in a position where more people think that their only answer is to flee to the United States, which of course would undermine the entire point of this Biden-Harris plan. Right. And in fact, in July, the number of border crossings hit a more than two decade high. And this is in the heat of the summer months when you usually see these numbers drop because, you know, crossing the desert in the southwest is really dangerous.

And so the administration is looking at massive waves of people coming from this region to the border, and they don't want to do anything that makes that worse. But at the same time, anything that makes that worse. But at the same time, they believe very firmly that if you don't address what are the broken systems and the governments that lead these people to lose hope and leave home in the first place, you're never going to break the cycle. So their short-term goal of stopping these flows and their long-term goal of stopping the fundamental dynamics that lead to them in the first place, I mean, they're kind of at odds right now. Right. And if you're Biden and if you're Harris, those huge numbers that you just described are a further incentive not to punish leaders in a way that would rock the boat in a place like Guatemala and potentially destabilize it, leading to perhaps even more migration. But at the same time, not punishing corrupt leaders in places like Guatemala obviously just encourages them to be more and more corrupt. And the fact that they know that the U.S. won't hold them accountable means that the White House

is really never going to get anywhere when it comes to these long-term root causes of migration, such as corruption. Yes, exactly. This is the Biden administration's dilemma across Central America, where corruption honestly is only getting worse and worse. These countries are becoming less and less hospitable for their own citizens to live and feel their governments are working for them. I mean, in Nicaragua, President Daniel Ortega has arrested almost every single opposition candidate that would have run against him in the elections this year. In El Salvador, you have a president and a ruling party who have replaced the attorney general, dismissed five judges, replaced them.

He's pursuing a constitutional reform that would extend term limits. And in Honduras, the president has been accused in U.S. court of being linked to drug trafficking. And the United States is not following through with its threat to stamp out corruptions. And so the leaders of these countries in Honduras and El Salvador and in Nicaragua must think to themselves that what Kamala Harris said in that speech in Guatemala is more words than a real threat. That's the sense that I'm getting when I talk to people in the region. I mean, they're trying in the administration very hard to do both things. They are trying, but the action that is following their efforts has not

been enough to meaningfully suggest to the people running these countries that there's going to be any real retribution for the stuff that they're doing. So it remains to be seen how all of this will play out and whether the calculus will change either for the Central American leaders or for the Biden administration. But for right now, for the presidents of Central America, it certainly seems like they are calling the Biden administration's bluff. So Natalie, if this second prong of the Biden-Harris immigration plan, which is fighting the long-term causes of it, like corruption, if that's not quite working yet, that makes me wonder about the first prong, which is enforcement at the border. And as we have talked about, the Biden-Harris people don't want their enforcement to be as harsh as the Trump administration's approach, and they've rolled back some of his most controversial programs. But overall, is that resulting in an approach that is less effective at reducing border crossings than the Trump administration's approach? And should it therefore change? So the Biden administration itself has made clear that

it wants to avoid a crisis at the border. It wants to avoid that kind of chaos, right? And by that standard, it would be hard to argue that what they're doing on enforcement has worked up until now. And when I talk to people who are making this trip north, they say that part of the reason is that they view the Biden administration as more welcoming. And there is this question swirling within the administration around Washington around whether maybe President Biden removed some of these Trump policies so quickly that it signaled to people who were in Central America and in Mexico that there was an open door in the United States. And the reality is that the decision about whether to become more harsh on enforcement, it's actually being made for them right now, because it looks like the Supreme Court has

ordered the administration to restart that Remain in Mexico program, which means that now there's really going to be no choice. Which means that now there's really going to be no choice. The administration is going to have to go back to this Trump era policy that basically told migrants, you will not seek asylum here. You have to wait in the dangerous border towns in Mexico. And so where does all of that leave the Biden administration? I mean, it leaves them in this really tough spot in which their long-term strategy of rooting out corruption in Central America, dealing with these governments and with the problems in these countries, is just going to take a really long time to pan out. In the meantime, they have this short-term crisis at the border that's demanding their attention right now and making it really tricky to take those kinds of actions that would really bring that fight against corruption to bear in these countries.

And so the balance between the short and long term goals on migration, I think it feels for a lot of people in the administration that those are out of whack and that they really don't have at this point the luxury of time to pursue what they thought was going to be a strategy to get at these root causes, to get at the real fundamental drivers that lead people to take the journey north. And so for now, they just need to deal with the border. Well, Natalie, thank you very much. Thanks, Michael. We'll be right back. Transcription by CastingWords who want to leave the country. As the August 31st deadline for a total U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan approaches, Secretary of State Tony Blinken said that about 1,500 U.S. citizens remain in the country and that about a third of them want to be evacuated.

We're aggressively reaching out to them multiple times a day through multiple channels of communication, phone, email, text messaging, to determine whether they still want to leave and to get the most up-to-date information and instructions to them for how to do so. Blinken said that some of the Americans who remain in Afghanistan may choose not to leave the country, but that the government will keep seeking to contact them. The pace of evacuations continues to grow.

On Wednesday afternoon, the U.S. said it had flown more than 19,000 people out of Kabul in the previous 24 hours. But security at the airport remains a challenge. hours. But security at the airport remains a challenge. Late Wednesday, the U.S. warned Americans to stay away from the Kabul airport, citing security threats. Today's episode was produced by Rob Zipko, Sidney Harper, and Asta Chaturvedi. It was edited by Rachel Quester, Dave Shaw, and Larissa Anderson, and engineered by Chris Wood. Original music by Dan Powell and Marian Lozano. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro.

See you tomorrow.