The Daily - How Biden Lost Americans’ Faith in Immigration

Episode Date: December 15, 2025

A New York Times review of President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s actions on immigration showed that decisions he and his closest advisers made created an opening for a more aggressive Trump administration agenda.Christopher Flavelle, who interviewed more than 30 former Biden administration officials who worked on immigration and border policy, explains how Mr. Biden fumbled the immigration issue, and what the Democratic Party can learn from his missteps.Guest: Christopher Flavelle, a reporter for The New York Times.Background reading: How Mr. Biden ignored warnings and lost Americans’ faith in immigration.Read four takeaways from The Times’s reporting on Mr. Biden’s immigration record.Photo: Paul Ratje for The New York TimesFor more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.  Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Kittrow-F. This is the Daily. Over the weekend, there were two deadly shootings on opposite sides of the globe. In Australia, at least 15 people were killed on Sunday when two gunmen fired on a crowd that was celebrating the start of Hanukkah on a beach in Sydney. This is a targeted attack on Jewish Australians, on the first. day of Hanukkah, which should be a day of joy. The authorities described the shooting as an act of terrorism and said it was carried out

by a father and son. An attack on Jewish Australians is an attack on every Australian. It was the latest in a series of anti-Semitic attacks across Australia, and in the hours after Saturday's shooting, several Jewish leaders said their warnings about escalating violence had been ignored. Among the victims was a Holocaust survivor who died shielding his wife from gunfire and a rabbi who organized the event. Meanwhile...

Today is a day that the city of Providence and the state of Rhode Island prayed would never come. In Providence, Rhode Island, a gunman burst into a classroom at Brown University on Saturday and started shooting, killing two people and injuring nine. The shooting contained a particularly American wrinkle. For at least two Brown students, it was their second school shooting. It's surreal, you know, already having to have done this once. This is the second time. Back in 2019, Mia Tretta was shot in her stomach by a school shooter

when she was a freshman in high school in Santa Clarita, California. On Saturday night, Tretta, now a junior at Brown, was studying in her dorm room when she learned that the same thing was happening all over again. this time at our college. But we got what felt like hundreds of texts saying that there is an active shooter. Stay inside, stay where you are, run, hide, fight. As Treda told my co-host, Rachel Abrams, she had chosen to attend Brown because she felt a sense of safety on its campus.

And my whole sense of safety and innocence and childhood was taken away on November 14th of 2019 at Saga's High School. And trying to reclaim any of that back, I felt like I could do that. of Brown, and now it's just been taken away again. That's all we know for now about both of these shootings. We'll keep you posted as we learn more. Today, as Democrats debate how to counter President Trump's aggressive crackdown on immigration. and try to win back voters with their own vision. We look back at why former President Biden

let the border get so out of control in the first place and how he underestimated just how much the problem would come to define his presidency. My colleague, Chris Flevel, takes us into his investigation of how Biden fumbled the issue of immigration and what his party can learn from his missteps. It's Monday, December 15th. Chris, you've spent much of this fall taking a forensic look back at what many consider to be one of the Biden administration's biggest failures, its immigration policy.

Under Biden, immigration at the border surged to record numbers. Many say it costs Democrats the election in 2024 and set the stage for the immigration. crackdown that we're in the middle of right now. I want to just start by asking, why look back on that policy in this moment, a year after Biden left office? So this moment looks a whole lot like 2020, right? You've got President Trump in the White House enacting really aggressive strategies in terms of arrests and deportations of migrants. You've got really, really strong anger from Democrats and others in response to those policies, and you've got Democrats as a party

trying to figure out what position to take. That's exactly what was happening in 2020 as Joe Biden was first campaigning for the presidency and then deciding after winning what to do as presidents. He responded to those same pressures by charting a really aggressively counter-campaign being the anti-Trump. And we saw, with the benefit of hindsight,

what the result was. was huge surge in border encounters, massive shift in public opinion against Democrats, and ultimately Donald Trump returning to the White House again on a campaign against migrants and an open border. So I think the question of why did things go so badly and what did Democrats learn is actually really relevant right now and it's very timely because that question of what does the party stand for and what do Americans want for the border and immigration remains fundamentally unresolved. So that's why I went back and spent months looking this question of why did Biden and his close

aides make the decisions they did. And what I found was, surprisingly, a lot of those mistakes and blowback was preordained and warned and they did it anyway. Preordained how? What do you mean by that? So let's go back to the summer of 2020. You're now approaching the height of the campaign. Joe Biden is seeking the presidency on a platform of being much more welcoming towards immigrants. As this is happening, I learned. Some of his advisors began circulating a memo with a really important warning. This memo, which we got a copy of, said that combined with everything else it was going on,

the pent-up demand for migration under Trump, the economic devastation from COVID. On top of that, Mr. Biden's own promises and his more welcoming tone, they warned, could produce a really serious surge in border crossings. And reading that language today, it's remarkable how on the nose it was. That memo said, quote, at the U.S. border, a potential surge could create chaos and a humanitarian crisis overwhelm processing capacities and imperil the agenda of the new administration. These warnings did not go over well with Biden's campaign team, but these advisors kept on raising this through the ranks of the organization

until finally after Biden had won election. He got a briefing from the people who worked on this memo. And I'm told during that briefing that the president-elect and Kamala Harris, the vice president-elect, seemed to grasp that this was a problem, but they wound up ignoring those recommendations. to change course. Just so I make sure I understand this, you're saying that very early on,

even before Biden won, there were advisors who wrote this memo, who eventually carried out this briefing, warning about the perils of immediately doing everything he said he would during the campaign. But Biden and Harris ignored them. Explain why.

Yeah, look, the why is epic, right? The first part of the why is politics. It's worth remembering what the mood was in 2020. This was the height of Black Lives Matter. This was a moment in American history when there's a real belief, especially among Democrats, that there was a racial reckoning underway. And it seems as though the political calculus was they couldn't turn their back on that. They couldn't in that atmosphere decide they would get a little more aggressive on border enforcement. That's the external why. The internal why, the staffing choices in the Biden administration early on,

reflected this idea that it was both politically sound and morally necessary to focus on how to help asylum seekers and not to focus as much on enforcing the border. So that's the pressure he's facing. But what does Biden himself think of this issue? One of the really strong throughlines from almost all of my interviews with more than 30 people who worked in the administration on border and migration issues is that none of them felt like they really understood what Biden's own views were. In fact, they weren't sure he held strong, clear views and positions on immigration and the border. There were a few things he clearly cared about. One was he didn't want to see kids held in these difficult conditions at border patrol stations. He didn't want to be seen as doing anything like

what Trump had done in terms of forcing migrants to remain in Mexico while they were waiting for claims to be heard. But beyond that, one of the strongest criticisms I heard was that Biden as presidents did not set sort of broad strategic goals. There was a sense that he just didn't like talking about this issue. One person told me that Biden's body language changed. You could tell he was uncomfortable when he was talking about migration. Fascinating. He was physically uncomfortable talking about it. But it sounds like to the extent that he was thinking about the issue, he does have sympathy with the side that believes there's a moral imperative to reversing the signature pieces of Trump's immigration crackdown. And we know that once in office, that's exactly what Biden does.

So describe that. Describe that. Describe what happened. Yeah. Joe Biden, the first day he was in the White House made good on what he had promised to do during the campaign. He reversed almost all of Trump's signature policies. He said he would stop building the wall. He dramatically reduced the scope of arrests inside the country for migrants. He ended or tried to end what they call the remain in Mexico policy, forcing migrants to wait while their cases were heard. He stopped sending kids back over the border under the public health rules for COVID.

And he announced that he would put a halt on deportations for 100 days. Right. And what followed from signaling, a more welcoming stance toward migrants was, in fact, a huge surge at the border. Yeah, it was a disaster almost immediately. You could look at this as the first

of a series of major miscalculations that the Biden team made on immigration, failing to anticipate the scale of the numbers of the people who were coming. during the campaign and the transition as they prepared for these scenarios they said let's plan around the idea that the number of people crossed the border once Biden is in office will equal the worst year or the worst month under Trump and then just stay there and the reaction to that proposal was well it could never get that bad and sure enough by march of Biden's first year in office they had blown past the worst month of the first month of the first month of the first year. first Trump administration. And then not only did it stay at those levels, it kept on rising. So even the people whose job was to think, well, how bad could it be turn out to be incredibly mistaken? They just didn't imagine the geographic and numerical scale of migrants who would try to

reach the border. And when it becomes clear just how bad it is, what's Biden's response to the chaos? Biden and his team were focused on responding to the immediate crisis of children who were stuck in border patrol stations that were not designed for them. And so their emphasis, their goal in the moment was to find something to do with these children to move them somewhere safe that made sense for them. It was a real situation of trying to react to events and just sort of mitigate the damage. But there was no overarching vision of, well, what should the U.S. do on the border and securing the border? You're describing a sort of paralysis from the White House, no real policy-making vision from the top.

I have to ask, who is driving the car on this? If it's not Biden, then who's making the calls? One of the themes from my reporting was nobody was driving the bus. Over and over again, people who worked in this told me that part of the reason for the policy-making paralysis was there was during the early period. no single person who was specifically assigned responsibility to figure out and implement policy on the border and immigration. In the absence of that, you had different factions that had different views. You had people inside the White House who came from the world of immigration advocacy, generally more favorable to migrants and asylum seekers. You had people who came to this

from more of a national security mindset, and they tended to emphasize enforcement of the border, and they couldn't agree. And above all of that, you had this inner circle around the presidents that really thought, you know what, there's no win here. We're not going to get points for talking about this. Let's just not talk about it. I remember I was covering these issues at the time from Mexico City, and it was stark how the White House didn't want to speak to this, as you say. But everyone, else regular people were talking about it i mean they were concerned about what was going on yeah yeah and look to the degree that there was a logic here i'm told that the logic was if we just don't talk about it

maybe it'll resolve on its own and the first time i heard that from someone who'd been involved in these conversations i thought that's clearly crazy but there was some rationale behind it because that had happened in the past border surges in 2014 when biden was a vice president's in the Obama administration, surges under the first Trump administration. The border numbers had eventually subsided and public attention had moved on. And they hoped the same would happen again, but they were wrong. These numbers did not fade. Instead, the surge kept on getting worse and worse. Okay, so the White House wants to be silent on this. They don't want to touch the issue. Remind us, what's the reaction among Americans, among regular people to the waves of migrants that are now coming

in. Yeah, the polling data shows a real shift, and that shift goes in the opposite direction. It shows that more Americans are becoming worried about illegal immigration and the support for migrants is falling, seemingly in response to this perception of chaos at the border. And now, you would think that that polling data would be a red flag, but it wasn't because of still more political miscalculations. The administration, the people around Biden, were worried that if they got more aggressive on the border, on enforcement, they risked alienating Latino voters, who were an important part of the coalition that brought Biden to the White House. And beyond that, they figured that other American voters just wouldn't care that much.

They thought that unless you live in a border state, this wouldn't be a real priority for you. And sure enough, that situation didn't last because eventually Texas found a way to make it a problem for the rest of that. the country. In April of 2022, Governor Greg Abbott of Texas figures out how to blow up this idea that Biden could ignore the border by starting a campaign to actually bus migrants from Texas to Washington, D.C., and effectively say to Biden and the Democrats, you cannot ignore this. We won't let you. We'll be right back. Describe this campaign, Chris, led by Governor Abbott, to bring this problem directly to Democrats' doorsteps,

and, as you said, make it impossible to ignore. Remind us how that all played out. The campaign started with one bus. In April of 2022, there was a bus that arrived from Texas to Washington, D.C. It pulled up near the U.S. Capitol. And we know from data we got from a public records request that that bus was carrying 12 Venezuelans, four Colombians, four Cubans, and four Nicaraguans. And it was the start of what became tens of thousands of migrants. from Texas, moved by bus over months and years to New York and Washington, Philadelphia, Chicago,

Los Angeles, eventually Denver. And the result was really remarkable. You had all of a sudden mayors and governors in democratically held areas saying, whoa, this is a problem for us. This is a problem financially. We've got to pay to find hotel rooms and shelters, these people. We've got a political problem. Our voters don't like seeing this surge of people on the streets. Publicly, the Biden White House is saying, come on, this is a stunt. You're using migrants as props. This is despicable. That was the public response. But internally, this campaign by Abbott was described to me as a turning point where people who worked for the administration began to think, you know what, we actually have lost this debate. This is the moment at which people are going to turn on us.

And it pushed the White House to at least say, okay, well, we can't do nothing. What are we going to do? And what do they do now that they finally started to wake up to this? Yeah. So in this year, 2023, the third year that Biden is present, this administration tried two big swings to reduce the sense of chaos at the border. One of them was a program to sort of take people. people from a handful of countries, Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, Venezuela, that had made up a big share of border crossers and say, you know what? Instead of rushing the border, we'll just let you

in. We'll have a program that's formal. You can apply. You can pass a background check and you can fly into the country. That will reduce pressure at the border. That was their first idea. And then second, they said, people who want to cross the border still. Okay, here's an app. CBP1 and you have to wait and make an appointment. Both those programs were intended to control the flow and reduce the sense of chaos. But by the one metric that mattered most, which was border crossings and border encounters, none of this worked. The numbers from that final few months of 2023 are incredibly clear. The border crossings had, by this point, tripled since Biden took office. They were reaching a core of a million people per month, just totally without any

kind of precedent. And that's when the Biden administration finally realized. they had to get much more serious and much more aggressive. And what does that look like, getting more serious and more aggressive? It's a few things. First of all, they decided to get on board with Senate talks that had begun a few months earlier, trying to look for a bipartisan deal to give the White House authority to effectively close the border to asylum applications. Also, at the very end of December, senior Biden officials flew.

down to Mexico City to meet with their Mexican counterparts and deliver a really tough message to Mexico saying, we need you to close your own southern border. Right. I remember that. That's the only way we're going to reduce number of people getting to the U.S. border. And that worked. The Mexicans took action and in response to that pressure really aggressively cracked down on their own border. And you see that in the numbers. In January of 2024, Biden's last year in office, those numbers had fallen, but not nearly enough. they were still facing much higher crossings that when Biden first came in office. And this is where the pressure gets even more intense. Because in February of 2024, that border bill that was moving

through the Senate collapses when President Trump, then candidate Trump, tells Republicans to vote against it. So all of a sudden, Biden faces a real dilemma. And the election is less than a year away. That's when they began looking at what you think of as the nuclear option, which is finally using the power that Biden had unilaterally of his own authority to effectively close the border to asylum applications, which he did in June of that year. And the thing that was amazing was it basically worked. The numbers plummeted almost right away. And so from a policy perspective, he had basically solved the problem. Yeah, Chris, help me understand this. I had this question at the time. I have this question now. Why did it take him so long to use exactly?

executive action to do this? You ask 20 people, you get 20 answers, right? One answer that I got was they just didn't believe it was right. This was not in keeping with Democrats' principles about, you know, respecting the dignity of migrants. They wanted to respect the law. They couldn't do it and wouldn't until they felt they had to. Another argument is they wanted to give Congress every possible chance to do this on their own and only when it was crystal clear, Congress wouldn't do it. Only then would Biden do this himself. Whatever it was, I think in hindsight, what's clear is it didn't work. They waited too long to get any meaningful benefit from doing this.

Explain that. Where are voters on this? Why didn't it work? Why didn't it convince people that they were on the right track? Yeah, there's two ways of thinking about why it didn't work. One is just the calendar was so unforgiving, right? At this point, you're five months away from Election Day. voters, to the extent they've been paying attention, have lived through three and a half years, almost, of border crisis.

So that idea, that perception that Biden and Democrats favor open borders is really cemented by this point. But the other argument is, even after taking the step, they wouldn't brag about it. They did not go out and say, look what we did. And I'm told by senior Democrats, that view persisted, that view of, if we're talking about immigration, and talking about the border, they're losing. And so they decided not to focus on it, even at the end, once they effectively solved the problem, that inherent foundational skittishness remained.

I want to just talk about everything you've told us. It is really hard to overstate the significance of it, the significance of the fallout of Biden's miscalculations on immigration. Obviously, it led to Trump's return to office in part, and that has totally transformed the country. But there is this potentially deeper, longer-lasting impact that you point to in your reporting, which is that it actually helped lead to this right-word shift

in the American public's views of immigration. Can you describe that for me and just help me understand how durable you think that shift is? The honest answer, of course, is no one knows how durable that shift. that shift is there is polling data that has come in since Donald Trump came back to the White House showing that some of the intense unease about immigration that really spiked by the end of the Biden years, that unease has softened a bit and those numbers have receded to sort of the pre-Biden levels. But what that doesn't account for is anecdotally and based on conversations with people

who work on this, there seems to be a real sense of lingering anger among American voters, Democrats, Republicans, the sense that people remain collectively a little bit scarred by what they saw when Biden was president. The question you're pushing on is, are Democrats going to swing the pendulum back to more permissive immigration policies now that there is a backlash against Trump? Or are they going to look back at what Biden did and say, look, these are mistakes that we don't want to repeat. And, I mean, you talk to these folks. Do you have any clarity on that? I see no evidence from the reporting I did that Democrats have answered that question.

I don't get the sense that they have figured out what the lessons are from the Biden years and what they should say on immigration going forward. And I think the challenge that Democrats face is actually the same challenge facing Republicans, which is being squeezed between two extremes, We know that the Trump-style approach of extremely aggressive crackdowns can work at reducing border crossings, and it can satisfy some portion of Americans, but there's a real pushback, right? It sure seems like many American voters are uneasy about the severity of the Trump approach. On the other hand, as we saw in the last four years, a lot of Americans are uneasy with the perception of open borders and the challenge for moderate. Democrats or moderate Republicans will be trying to find a third approach. But even if they can figure out what that is from a policy perspective, can they get American voters to accept it?

And maybe the room for new ideas, something closer to a more welcoming approach, is for the foreseeable future closed politically because of that lingering anger from the Biden years. And And so maybe the real legacy of Joe Biden on immigration is that people's willingness to give immigrants the benefit of the doubt or even give Democrats the benefit of the doubt is, at least for now, gone. Well, Chris, thank you. Thank you. We'll be right back.

Here's what else you need to know today. Syrian and American officials confirmed that a gunman who killed two U.S. Army soldiers and an American interpreter on Saturday was a member of Syria's security forces who was set to be dismissed for his extremist views. The attack, which officials said was carried out by ISIS, claimed the first U.S. casualties in Syria since the country's strongman leader Bashar al-Assad

was ousted from power a year ago. President Trump has vowed to retaliate. Today's episode was produced by Mary Wilson, Nina Feldman, Jessica Chung, Ashtathervedi, and Eric Kruppke. It was edited by M.J. Davis-Linn and Patricia Willens. Contains music by Dan Powell, Pat McCusker, Alicia E. Teut, and Marion Lazzano, and was engineered by Chris Wood. That's it for the Daily. I'm Natalie Kittrow.

See you tomorrow.