The Journal. - Why Biden Is Cracking Down on Asylum at the Border

Episode Date: June 6, 2024

President Biden unveiled a last-ditch effort to lower illegal crossings at the southern border this week. The move focuses on asylum seekers, and the policy is similar to one that former President Trump tried in 2018. WSJ’s Michelle Hackman describes the policy and tries to answer the question: why now? Further Reading: -Biden Issues Executive Actions on Immigration: What to Know  Further Listening: -What the End of Title 42 Means for U.S. Immigration Policy  -What Trump's Immigration Restrictions Could Mean for the Economy  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the biggest issues for voters heading into this election is illegal migration along the U.S.-Mexico border. Here's our colleague Michelle Hackman. We've been living through a few years of unprecedented numbers of illegal crossings at the southern border. And it's been fraying Americans' nerves. It's, you know, become basically the top political issue. Actually, our own Wall Street Journal poll showed in February that voters rank immigration as their top concern, even above the economy and inflation. And why is this issue so important to voters? It's a good question, Kate. You know, we've talked to voters about this.

And the thing that they say is that they feel like something that they have seen happening on the border for years is now affecting them personally. So they really get upset when they start to see large numbers of immigrants, you know, who don't have homes and are homeless in places like New York City. you know, who don't have homes and are homeless in places like New York City. And then they talk about, you know, they associate sometimes wrongly immigrants with also drugs coming across the border, which do move separately, but voters link in their heads and they're saying, we need to shut down the border and stop it all. This week, President Biden made a move. He put in place a new policy aimed at deterring illegal border crossings. The simple truth is there is a worldwide migrant crisis.

And if the United States doesn't secure our border, there's no limit to the number of people may try to come here because there's no better place on the planet than the United States of America. Biden's ban is a sign of just how important immigration will be in this election. So Republicans feel like it is their best weapon against Biden. And it has made the Biden administration more desperate to do something and show voters that they are doing something that could sort of turn the tide on the issue. that they are doing something that could sort of turn the tide on the issue.

Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Kate Leinbaugh. It's Thursday, June 6th. Coming up on the show, why Biden is taking action at the border. Attention all soccer fans. From Orlando to Los Angeles, take to the fields of the USA for your next vacation. Ready to kick off? Discover exciting games and events. Plus, find amazing hidden gems in cities full of adventures, delicious food, and diverse cultures. You'll love it so much you'll want to extend your stay beyond the matches.

Get the ball rolling on your soccer getaway. Head to visittheusa.com. During his administration, Biden has repeatedly urged Congress to act on immigration policy. We've had all these political discussions. a bipartisan group of senators even started negotiating a bipartisan solution on the border late last fall into the winter because crossings were so unbelievably high. It took them four months. They released something finally in February after, you know, sort of months of backdoor negotiations. And as soon as it came out, Republicans came out against it.

They said it was too soft. The bipartisan deal would tighten asylum rules and allow for partial border shutdowns while increasing enforcement and opening some new avenues for legal migration. Biden is gushing out and pushing out. It's not designed to stop illegal immigration. It's designed to continue the invasion of America while sending billions of dollars to Ukraine and other countries.

But just hours after the bill was released, leading Republicans in the House said, nope, we don't want it. We have no real chance here to make a law. After this bill failed in Congress, the White House had to come up with another plan.

So Biden has talked about doing this for months. It started after the Senate border deal collapsed. You know, Republicans kept saying Biden has the power to do this by himself. And Biden was sort of in a bind because he kept saying, no, I don't have the power to do this myself. But then his advis advisors came up with this idea, and they've sort of debated the legality and both the operational realities for months until it came out this week. Biden's executive actions are aimed

at a specific category of migrants, people who cross the border illegally and ask for asylum. Why focus on asylum seekers specifically? It's a good question. The big problem we have right now is that people are motivated to come to the United States because they see through friends and on social media that when other people come and claim asylum, and this is not universally true, but it's true enough, that when they claim asylum, the border is so overwhelmed that the border patrol is essentially forced to release them into the United States for the court system to then decide their

asylum case years later. That's an attractive option for you if you're living in a place like Central or South America, where you're living under the threat of gang violence every day and fearing your life every day. You want to get yourself to the United States and feel immediate safety. And it matters less to you down the line sort of what a legal process looks like. What's the history of asylum? Asylum dates back to World War II. There's a really famous incident in the late 1930s when a boat of Jewish refugees came to the United States, the USS St. Louis, and we turned that boat away and sent all those Jews back to Europe. There was a lot of regret about that after World War II

that we had done that and sort of taken similar actions. And so the international community came together and came up with this idea of refugees and asylum. The specific idea of asylum was to ensure that a country couldn't just pick and choose which refugees they thought were desirable. It sort of gave people the individual agency to say, I am in danger, my life is in danger, I'm being persecuted. Get themselves across a border to another country and then say, I need protection. That's exactly what's happening at the southern border. Migrants from all over the world are crossing into the U.S. illegally and claiming asylum. In May, for example, Border Patrol arrested about 3,500 migrants crossing illegally a day. Now, Biden is trying to lower that number. Under the new rules, if Border

Patrol records an average of 2,500 illegal crossings per day over the course of a week, a ban is in place. Anyone who was detained on those days who is claiming asylum is immediately eligible for deportation. How will this work in practice? I don't think we totally know, Kate. So what's going to happen to migrants who still attempt to cross the border illegally is that if they ask for asylum protection, they're going to be told you're not eligible. They will be eligible for a much narrower sort of protection that people get if you are under imminent threat of death,

if you're sent home. Let's say you have an arrest out and the government is saying, we're going to capture you and kill you at the airport. It needs to be sort of that level of dire for us to even grant that protection. It's really, really hard to get. Most people will not get it, which will make them immediately deportable. Michelle says this is where things get tricky.

Deporting someone isn't easy. You need a place to hold them until the deportation can happen. And the time it takes is dependent on the person's nationality. Deportation is sort of an act of diplomacy. You know, deporting a Mexican migrant is really easy. You just march them back across the border to Mexico. But other countries are a little more difficult. You know, they tell us we can't really take that many today. We'll take one plane a month. We'll take one plane a week. And so you see a sort of range of difficulty where there are some countries like Venezuela that are pretty openly hostile to working with

us at all. And other countries, you know, in Africa and China, where there are a lot of sort of logistical and paperwork hurdles to us deporting people. Now, our law says if you can't imminently deport someone, it's illegal to detain them indefinitely. And so eventually what the United States is going to have to do is release someone if they can't deport them. Do you think this policy will deter migrants? I think it's an open question. The administration definitely hopes it will deter migrants,

but if migrants are getting released into the United States and the word spreads that that's happening, it will not have the intended effect. Will it increase deportations? I think it almost certainly will increase deportations, but by how much, we don't know. The Biden administration was trying to deport a lot of people already. They might hit the limits of what you can do as the executive without more money and resources from Congress.

More deportations, fewer asylum seekers. If it feels like you've seen a policy like this before, it's because you have. That's next. So what's it like to buy your first cryptocurrency on Kraken? Well, let's say I'm at a food truck I've never tried before. Am I going to go all in on the loaded taco? No, sir. I'm keeping it simple.

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Visit td.com slash tdmortgagedirect. Now, there's a bit of a deja vu in this order. Do you feel that? There definitely is. So this almost exact policy was tried by President Donald Trump in 2018. Under this plan, the illegal aliens will no longer get a free pass into our country by lodging meritless claims in seeking asylum. At the time, Democrats talked about it as being completely illegal, immoral. When I saw that the president was going to have these rates, I mean, it was so appalling. It's outside the circle of civilized human behavior to just be kicking down doors, splitting up families.

Biden himself tweeted about it during the campaign, said we needed to restore our asylum system. And now here we are, six years later, and Biden is trying the same thing himself. When the Trump administration issued its ban in 2018, it was days away from a midterm election and caravans of migrants were heading north. Trump's order suspended asylum rights for those who crossed into the U.S. illegally.

But that order didn't get too far. There were multiple federal courts that immediately ruled that is a very basic violation of what it says in the immigration laws. You know, our asylum law says you're allowed to apply for asylum no matter how you enter the country. And the courts basically said, you know, if you're the president, you can't just issue an executive order saying, I don't like that law anymore and I'm not going to follow it.

Okay, but if this has been tried before and failed, why is Biden trying again? I think that's the ultimate question, right? Biden's own advisors warned him for months that this probably wouldn't stand up in court. It would be pretty hard to implement on the ground, that it wouldn't actually probably slow the releases of migrants into the U.S. that significantly, and that he decided to go ahead anyway speaks to how important it is for Biden to be seen doing something and get some credit

for doing something around the border. Is there any chance this could backfire for him? Absolutely. I think a really interesting comparison is Biden's move to cancel student debt. You know, it was a really similar scenario where Biden knew that what he was doing was pretty questionably legal. And indeed, the Supreme Court ended up ruling that it wasn't legal. And he decided to go ahead anyway, kind of on the gamble that voters would give him credit for trying. And I think that's what he's doing again. And we don't know if voters are going to give him credit for trying.

The Biden administration also says its asylum ban is different from the Trump version because of the way it can toggle on and off and because it has built in many more exemptions for humanitarian emergencies. And what has the response been from Republicans to this? Republicans are now saying this is too little, too late. You know, Biden should have done this years ago. Biden shouldn't have undone other Trump administration policies. I think there's very little acknowledgement of the fact that Trump did something largely similar. I think Republicans probably also recognize that Biden chose to do something that got struck down. And so probably won't have very long to live sort of in reality.

On Tuesday, Trump responded to this on social media. He said that Biden has been too soft on the southern border and is now, quote, pretending to finally do something. Michelle has reported that advisers to Trump are drafting strict immigration policies to have ready if Trump wins. Things like mass deportations and trying to expedite asylum hearings. What does this tell you about the kind of direction Biden is headed in with regards to immigration as we go into the election? the election. Biden definitely wants to position himself as the person in this race who has solutions on the border, who doesn't just talk about the border as a problem. That's why you've

seen him talking so much about the bipartisan border deal. He said that he supported it despite there being aspects of it that made him uncomfortable. But one other question to me is that Biden's team has been talking for months about something bold that Biden can do sort of to sugarcoat what he's done, to sort of be the upside to his tough talk on the border. And so I'm wondering if we're going to see some kind of bold policy idea come out ahead of the election, almost similar to what President Obama did in 2012 when he announced DACA. So this could just be the beginning of actions that Biden might take with regard to immigration. That's right. I think the administration is preparing a whole suite of actions, and they want there to be some upside for the immigrant community, not just tough talk. Where does this leave voters?

It's a good question. Again, most voters, I think, view illegal immigration as a problem they want to see fixed. Our own polling, again, has shown, interestingly, that voters are supportive of a lot of the tough talk. More than half of voters even support Trump's idea of doing a mass deportation campaign. But at the same time, voters are really supportive of things like increasing legal immigration, of things like providing a path to citizenship for, you know, the long-term undocumented living in the United States. term undocumented living in the United States. I think what it says about voters is that they want to see some kind of solution, no matter what it is. This is their top issue. That's all for today, Thursday, June 6th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal.

Additional reporting in this episode by Andrew Restuccia. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.