The NPR Politics Podcast - White House Message To Migrants: "The Border Is Not Open"

Episode Date: May 8, 2023

As a major pandemic-related immigration policy is scheduled to end, the Biden administration is warning the tens of thousands of migrants hoping to cross into the U.S. via its southern border that they should instead apply for asylum using the government's app or through a processing center in their home countries.This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, White House correspondent Franco Ordoñez, and national political correspondent Mara Liasson.The podcast is produced by Elena Moore and Casey Morell. Our editor is Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Unlock access to this and other bonus content by supporting The NPR Politics Podcast+. Sign up via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Abby in Columbus, Ohio. It's Nurses Week and I'm headed home from my shift at the local children's hospital where I had to say some goodbyes to my amazing patients who will be discharged before I come back for my next shift later this week. This podcast was recorded at 1.06 p.m. on Monday, May 8th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I'll still be super excited to send kids home after a long hospital stay. Okay, here's the show. Those are sweet goodbyes. Yeah, for sure. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Frank Ordonez. I also cover the White House. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. The Biden administration is going to be wall to wall with one message this week.

The U.S. border is not open. With the pandemic-era Title 42 rule ending this Thursday, which allowed them to quickly deport people, even asylum seekers, without the usual processes. Officials are expecting more than 10,000 people a day to attempt to enter the United States in search of a better life. Franco, this message is aimed squarely at people hoping to enter the United States. Stay where you are. Yeah, that's for sure. I mean, they're really kicking up the messaging this week. I mean, on Friday, Secretary Mayorkas was on the border saying the border is not open. And I had calls with senior administration officials on Friday as well, and they're telling

me they're going to repeat and repeat and repeat in almost daily briefings that the border is not open. And they are going to make sure that they keep repeating that. I mean, what they really want people to do is take some of the new legal pathways to enter the country. And they've kind of created new pathways to do that. They've opened processing centers in Central America and South America, and as well as they have this app now that will make it easier for them to apply for an appointment. You know, the Biden administration, they have two primary goals. One is to counter the narrative being spread by human smugglers who are kind of basically lining up business on this change. But they also actually want to counter the political message by Republicans,

who the administration argues is actually helping encourage more migrants to arrive on the border with all this open border talk. So the Biden administration has known that Title 42 would go away for a long time. And they tried to end it sooner, but then they faced legal challenges. So are they ready for what comes next? They say they are. They say they've sent 1,500 National Guard troops to the border to kind of free up Border Patrol agents so they can do more of their work. They've boosted capacity to detain migrants. They're also working on plans to make it harder to seek asylum.

But critics, of course, say they're not ready. And by the way, it's not just Republicans who are criticizing. Many Democrats from the border regions are criticizing this. And also Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who used to be a Democrat, now an independent, she has been very active in criticizing and saying the Biden administration should have done more. And she was on CBS's Face the Nation this week being interviewed by Margaret Brennan. So while it's wonderful that the administration is announcing things like a 1,500 troop deployment and these new

processing centers, which will not be operational by next Friday. Those are good things. Those are aspirational. That's not the same as operational. Rent the buses, hire the drivers, build the soft-sided facilities so that we can process individuals. We need more holding capacity. I mean, let's be realistic here. And that's what's not, we're not prepared for that. And that's frustrating, Margaret. And the reason why it's frustrating is because I know that that means that the sheriffs in our southern border are going to be bearing the brunt of it. I mean, essentially what Sinema's saying there is that her state is the one who's going to be one of the most affected. And she's actually teamed up with North Carolina Republican Senator Tom Tillis to introduce a bill that would essentially extend Title 42 for another couple of years. So they are definitely working hard to try to get a message out there.

Mara, Kyrsten Sinema's state is Arizona, which is not just any old state. It happens to be a state that decides control of the Senate and decides control of the White House. Right. It's a really, really important battleground state. It happens to be a state that decides control of the Senate and decides control of the White House. Right. It's a really, really important battleground state. And what's interesting about the politics of this is when you talk to the White House, they'll say, well, obviously, they have to get the border under control. That's a big measure of Joe Biden's competence. But they say that the voters they need to get in 2024 are just not concerned about immigration. And it's true. If you look at our recent NPR-PBS NewsHour Marist poll, only 3% of Democrats think immigration is a top issue, and only 11% of independents do. But if they're not

worried about the politics, what you just heard from Kyrsten Sinema and what you're hearing from Ruben Gallego, who's planning to run against Kyrsten Sinema for the Senate, is the politics are really important to them in Arizona. Franco, I do want to go back to what is replacing Title 42. When it goes away on Thursday, what is there? What is there is Title VIII. And the administration talks a lot about Title VIII. It kind of sounds like Title 42, but it is not Title 42. It is basically returning back to the immigration code as it was. Now, there are some key differences that are important to note. Title 42, you could essentially turn away almost every asylum seeker who arrived at the door. There were exceptions. The Biden administration was not turning away children, for example. Under Title 8, you know, the regular immigration code, these people are going to be able to seek asylum.

They're going to be able to talk to an asylum officer and claim a credible fear. And if they do do that, they're actually going to be allowed to stay in the country for a certain amount of time until their hearings. They can have a chance to kind of plead their case legally. And that can take a long time. Now, the administration is trying to make some changes to kind of make it harder for that. They want to like limit if you do not go through a port of entry, then you cannot seek asylum. That's something that is kind of being finalized. They're also upping removal flights. So they are taking steps to kind of try to address this and make it harder to seek asylum and make it easier to remove people. But it is much, much different than being able to just kind of do a wide swath of removals as they've been able to do for the last few years. So they're increasing the capacity of flights to remove people? They're increasing the capacity to detain people on the border in detention centers, and they are increasing the number of flights to remove people back to either their countries or

back to Mexico. One key thing here is that, you know, there has been a demographic shift as we've talked about and the people who are coming to the United States before it was a lot of Central Americans. First it was Mexicans, then it was Central Americans. Well, now you have people coming from Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua. These are authoritarian countries which do not have the best relations with the United States. And because of those kind of diplomatic challenges, it makes it harder for the United States to remove people back to those countries. All right. We're going to take a quick break. And when we get back, the potential for a humanitarian crisis. Here's a piece of advice if you're ever on the White House beat.

Make sure you have three or four questions already in your head at any given moment when you are in the same room with the president. Because you don't know when spur of the moment he will call your name on live television and you will have to ask him a question. Political interviews. Sometimes they strike at a moment's notice. Sometimes you prepare for weeks and go in with pages of notes and questions. And then if all goes well, none of that makes its way into the actual interview. And then you just have a real conversation with somebody. The art of the political interview in our latest bonus episode available now. A reminder, those episodes come out every two weeks as a thank you to our NPR Politics Podcast Plus supporters. Learn more at plus.npr.org. That's plus as in P-L-U-S dot N-P-R dot org. was this really terrible story out of Brownsville, Texas. A group of mostly migrant men at a bus stop

outside of a homeless shelter where migrants have been staying were mowed down by a vehicle, a Range Rover. Now a man has been charged with eight counts of manslaughter, and it's still not clear whether this was a terrible accident or whether it was on purpose. But this all comes at this really fraught time and at a moment when there are real questions out there about the possibility of a humanitarian crisis. Now, as more people might be coming, Franco, do you have a sense of what they might face and, again, whether the U.S. government is ready to handle all these people? I think the example in Texas just speaks to kind of like just the anxiety and tensions that are going on right now in this week, because it really is a tense moment. What's going to change is the possibility of more chaos at the border. I think there is big concerns.

Even when I spoke with the administration on Friday, they are expecting a lot of uncertainty. They're telling Americans through the press, through folks like us, that it's going to be a challenge for the coming weeks. But they assure or at least they argue that they have a good plan in place, but that it's going to take some time to kind of work out some of those kinks. There's definitely going to be a problem, but they have more numbers down there. They have more detention facilities. They're upping the, you know, they're upping the flights, as we were saying before. But there's no question, it's going to be difficult, and it is going to be a very serious political battle. I mean, we were just talking about Kyrsten Sinema. There's a lot of Democrats who are very concerned about this.

And, you know, we'll I mean, we're going to be taught. I feel we're going to be talking about this for a while. Yes. And also like the humanitarian aid organizations, the nonprofits, the religious groups that are in these border towns trying to help people. They're also raising alarms, saying, we don't know if we can handle it. Yeah. I mean, that's the big thing that's going on. There's so many resources that are needed for this type of situation. Look, I mean, I do think we need to be clear that this is not the first time that there has been a migration surge that has challenged a president. This has happened over and over and over again.

I mean, every president since, you know, in the last decade, certainly since I've been up here in Washington, each president has faced this, including former President Donald Trump. And, you know, with his strong rhetoric and his measures, it was still a challenge and a big challenge. But again, this is kind of a new challenge in that kind of the new way it's doing. When I was talking with the senior administration officials on Friday, one of the things that they pointed out is at least in the past, they had working relationships with the countries that they could send these individuals back to. They don't necessarily have that type of a relationship with Venezuela and Cuba and Nicaragua. They have reached an agreement with Mexico to continue taking more migrants from some of those countries.

But it is going to be a big challenge. And there are a lot of questions whether the administration has the capacity to do what they need to do, because there are thousands and thousands of people on the border kind of waiting for their chance. Well, and the numbers were lower during the Trump administration, but they were high, so high that the former president fired his Homeland Security secretary. Kirstjen Nielsen. It was a really big deal. I mean, I still remember former President Trump coming to the mics and talking about how they have to get rid of the entire asylum system to get rid of judges. I mean, really strong rhetoric, always strong rhetoric. But even with President Trump and his strong measures, there was still a migration surge. This is just an ongoing issue that's going to continue. Mara, we have talked about this on this pod and last week you talked about it as well,

that this could become a competence issue. Yeah, it could become a competence issue for Biden. But also, this is a red-hot political issue that, believe it or not, has a policy solution, but not a political solution. You've heard about too big to fail. Well, this issue is too politically advantageous for Republicans to solve. Republicans would argue it's also too politically advantageous for Republicans to solve. Republicans would argue it's also too politically advantageous for Democrats. Well, I don't know if the situation at the border advantages Democrats. I would say right now the politics are definitely in Republicans' favor because immigration is something that really energizes their base.

But there is a policy solution. It's a comprehensive immigration bill that would marry border security with some kind of increased legal immigration that would satisfy employers. There is a big labor shortage in this country, but also do something, provide a path to citizenship for certain immigrants who are here undocumented in specifically DACA recipients. Those are people brought here as children without papers. And there have been many bipartisan efforts. The latest probably also doomed effort is the Kyrsten Sinema-Tom Tillis bill, which would marry some kind of a path to citizenship with more border security. But the politics right now are just not advantageous to something like that being passed because that would remove it as a political issue in an election year. And it's just too powerful an issue for Republicans. I mean, I find it also interesting that you're seeing Biden is a lot less concerned about criticism from his left flank than his right flank. This is a problem from the right.

And the White House does not think they're going to lose votes if they are too tough on the border. They might lose votes if the border is too chaotic. Well, I think we will be watching to see this week and in the weeks to come how chaotic it gets. And we're going to leave it there for now. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Frank Ordonez. I also cover the White House. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.