Today, Explained - Biden at the border

Episode Date: February 17, 2021

President Biden says he wants to undo his predecessor’s immigration policies, so why are some of them still in effect? The El Paso Times’s Lauren Villagran and the New Yorker’s Sarah Stillman explain. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This NFL season, get in on all the hard-hitting action with FanDuel, North America's number one sportsbook. You can bet on anything from money lines to spreads and player props, or combine your bets in a same-game parlay for a shot at an even bigger payout. Plus, with super-simple live betting, lightning-fast bet settlement, and instant withdrawals, FanDuel makes betting on the NFL easier than ever before. So make the most of this football season and download FanDuel today. 19-plus and physically located in Ontario.

Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. A record-breaking 70% of the United States has been covered by snow, rolling blackouts also hitting the nation from Minnesota to Texas. I mean, the pictures we're seeing are incredible. Water that is frozen coming through ceiling fans in the ceiling. The entire state, for the first time in weather history, under that winter storm warning, we also had portions in West Texas that were under a blizzard warning.

The biggest story in the United States right now is the weather. It's really damn cold. Keep in mind, it is warmer in Moscow than it is right now in Dallas. It's so cold, people are dying in their homes. The brutal winter weather across the southern United States has now killed at least 21 people, left millions without power, and spun tornadoes in multiple states. And it's worth remembering in this historic winter,

there are thousands of people just waiting at the border. Immense migrant populations, which it's funny to say migrant because they're actually static. They've been there for a really long time now because they were thrust into this program called the Migrant Protection Protocol, or quote unquote, remain in Mexico. And these are folks who were seeking asylum in the US. They did it the legal way. They turned themselves into a border patrol agent or tried to cross an international bridge to present an asylum claim and were sent back to Mexico with a court date.

And those folks have been waiting months, in many cases now years, for court dates, but immigration court is closed. Lauren Villagran is an immigration reporter based at the El Paso Times in Texas, right across the border from Juarez. You know, Juarez is a difficult city. And if you don't know it, if you didn't grow up there, it can also be pretty dangerous, even for those who do grow up there. But, you know, folks who aren't from there stick out. And so, you know, they're fearful. They get assaulted. They get robbed. They get shaken down by police. So it's not easy. But these are people who made the decision, the gut-wrenching decision, to leave behind their homeland, which they may never see again, to leave behind family, in many cases fleeing for their lives from trauma, persecution, threats, and who have basically been making it in a place, you know, that has an incredibly high murder rate like Juarez.

Immigration reform was one of the pillars of the Trump presidency. You could argue it's where the former president found some of his greatest success. And the new guy wants to undo a lot of his predecessor's work. And on the show today, we're going to try and figure out how. Starting with the border, Biden's been in office for a month. Is anything different down there? So yes and no. I mean, I think that all of the intentions that President Joe Biden has laid out have given immense hope to migrants, but it's going to be, you know, a step-by-step rollout of what those actual policies are and how they're implemented. We got news last week that the Biden administration is going to

start processing some of these folks who have been caught in the net of the migrant protection protocol. Beginning on February 19th, the Department of Homeland Security will take steps to begin processing individuals who under the previous administration have been forced to remain in Mexico under the Migrant Protection Protocol. That is huge news. DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, estimates there are 25,000 people actually waiting. And so they're going to do a few hundred a day in a few different cities along the border. Basically, my understanding from what senior administration officials had to say at the White House last week is that they are going to test folks for COVID. They are going to process and parole them into the United States so they can go to their final destination and attend court hearings there. There will be some sort of alternative to detention, whether that's like a GPS ankle bracelet or some other method.

Folks are short on details, but this is kind of a first step, a first sort of policy implementation on the ground. And I'm really looking forward to going to Juarez soon to find out, you know, how migrants who are in the MPP program are reacting to this. This is really the news they've been waiting for, that they have done it the legal way, that they want to seek asylum, and they're

going to be given an opportunity to do so. And so the biggest difference here is that if you're seeking asylum, you can hang out in the United States and not be forced to wait it out in Mexico. If you already were enrolled in this particular program, now, there are other asylum seekers arriving at the border now. This is not for them. They are still being turned back by this process under Title 42. And what that does is that gives the CBP the authority to, when we encounter someone, to immediately return them back to Mexico. About 86% of those we apprehend, we've returned back to Mexico in about under two hours. Title 42 is this public health law in the U.S. that was used

starting in March last year to basically allow Border Patrol to turn back every single unauthorized migrant that arrives at the border to Mexico or to their countries of origin. That remains in force. If you cross the border, you can be turned back to Mexico or deported to your home country, voluntary returned is what they say, to your home country without any questions, even if you present an asylum claim. So some signs of change and other things are staying the same. Do you have any sense of how that's being received at the border? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of confusion. You know, migrants saw this amazingly hopeful message with the change in administration.

And the administration is spending most of its time right now trying to convey to people that they should not come to the border right now, that nothing has changed. The Mexican president said as much. They serve me to communicate that not everyone can go to the United States and they will be regularized. The senior White House officials said as much. Due to the pandemic and the fact that we have not had the time as an administration to put in place a humane, comprehensive process for processing individuals who are coming to the border, now is not the time to come. And the vast majority of people will be turned away.

And with the exception of kind of reprocessing some of these migrant protection protocols, nothing has changed. You know, Sean, if you look at apprehensions and border patrol encounters at the border, they look really high right now, at least two-thirds higher than they were during the same months a year ago over the past three or four months. But the reason is this Title 42. People are crossing and being returned so quickly to Mexico that they cross again. So I was out with the Border Patrol two weeks ago, and agents told me, you know, when we process people, we see that they've crossed 10 times. The number that you're seeing right now of like 70,000 people a month encountered or apprehended at the border, despite the Mexican president and the American president warning that that's the last thing that they should do? Is there a sense that,

hey, the former president's not in office anymore. It's time to try and get back across that border again. Oh, yeah. I mean, the potential is absolutely there. And I think border cities are already starting to see an uptick in arrivals, more so in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas and the northern border state of Tamaulipas. We're seeing a slight increase here in Juarez, and there's maybe a slight increase in Tijuana, in the San Diego area. But this is really important every time there's a change in administration, not just from a Republican to a Democrat, but a Democrat to a Republican, any shift, potential shift in policy generates movement. And that's because the coyotes, the smugglers out there, they sell a line. For example, when the Trump administration arrived, Trump came in with a very hard line

on immigration and on what was going to happen at the border. You saw a huge influx of people. And why? Because smugglers were selling the line, the border's about to close, come now. Now, you know, it's the opposite, right? But what's also really important is you've never seen, at least not in my reporting career and in folks I talk to who have been doing this work even longer, you've never seen such a stark reversal in border policies. Typically, one administration shifts a little to the left, a little to the right. But this kind of massive swing from extremely hardline border policies to something more open, more accepting of immigrants and of asylum seekers, it is a big swing. So will smugglers be using that? You know, all signs point to yes,

and it's going to be incumbent on those who communicate with migrant communities to convey the message that things are going to change slowly. And it just sort of remains to be seen what policies is President Biden going to roll out to create a new orderly process? I don't think we know exactly what that's going to look like yet. Quick break, and then we'll dig a little deeper into the starkest reversal of border policies in the history of the republic. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family.

And Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an Aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it. You can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an AuraFrame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday.

And she's very fortunate. She's got 10 grandkids. And so we wanted to surprise her with the AuraFrame. And because she's a little bit older, it was just easier for us to source all the images together and have them uploaded to the frame itself. And because

we're all connected over text message, it was just so easy to send a link to everybody. You can save on the perfect gift by visiting auraframes.com to get $35 off Aura's best-selling Carvermat frames with promo code EXPLAINED at checkout. That's A-U-R-A frames.com to get $35 off Aura's best-selling Carver mat frames with promo code explained at checkout. That's A-U-R-A frames.com promo code explained. This deal is exclusive to listeners and available just in time for the holidays. Terms and conditions do apply. Okay, so we've got tens of thousands of people stuck at the U.S.-Mexico border.

The old president liked it that way. The new president wants to change it. But you can't just executive order your way out of a migration crisis. To find out what President Biden would have to do to fix this, to find out whether he can fix this, we got in touch with Sarah Stillman. She's a staff writer at The New Yorker. And we started with where we stand now, what the former president accomplished. Oh, wow. How long do you have? I mean, it's really hard to know where to start because this man went after every single facet of the

immigration system, everything from the proceeds, the rich people would illegally come here, which, you know, we saw the number of legal immigrants cut in half during the Trump years. But then we also saw this tremendous assault on every kind of humanitarian protection. So the asylum system, the refugee system, those were essentially shuttered. And then we saw a pretty constant onslaught against people who are living undocumented in this country. So everything from ICE raids to an increased anti-immigrant rhetoric, More or less exactly what the president promised from the very start of the campaign trail.

When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

But I speak to border guards. So he delivered. Absolutely. So I think one thing that's interesting about analyzing the Trump years is that Trump was an incredibly ineffectual policymaker in most arenas and he promised this whole deregulatory barrage.

And he did that in most realms, in the realm of civil rights and the environment, just constant deregulation. But he also hired people who had an incredibly keen grasp of how bureaucracy works. And when it came to immigration, in particular, Stephen Miller, who was put at the helm of that, was a very, very, very good operator. And he knew how to do the big stuff that Trump loved, the kind of theatrical anti-immigrant policies. Like, we saw family separations, and we saw, you know, the claims about the big border wall that was going to be built, and, you know, all that stuff that was trumpeted, you know, the Muslim ban in the first week of his presidency. But then we also saw this huge accumulation of tiny, small board changes to the immigration policies and almost every sort of facet of immigration regulation

that also had really profound effects. And I think a lot of that stuff got less coverage because it sounds really boring and it's hard to illustrate the human drama of it. But I recently wrote a piece for The New Yorker that told the story of this lawyer named Lucas Gutentag. He's a law professor at Stanford and Yale, and he and a team of, I think, upwards of 60 law school students embarked on this project across the last four years to log every single administrative change, every single policy change under Trump to immigration. And they found upwards of 1,059 changes to the immigration system. Over a thousand, and I'm guessing most people can only think of

like a half dozen or a dozen off the top of their heads, but there's just tons of small stuff that change too? There's a lot of examples that are just small one-off policies, like for instance, same-sex partners of U.S. diplomats can no longer, or under Trump, can no longer receive diplomatic visas. Or, you know, the State Department in 2019, they updated a particular form to say that people's social media handles would be collected from foreigners who are trying to get visas. So that those social media posts could be examined and interrogated and often used against them. Another good example of a small change that could be consequential is that they changed the U.S. citizenship test. So they essentially doubled the number of questions for people who are going through the naturalization process. And they also kind of politicized some of the questions.

You know, one of the shifts of the question was like, who do members of Congress represent? And it used to be all people who live in their given jurisdiction, and it was changed to all citizens to demarcate. Okay, like, we don't care about those of you who are not here as citizens. So that's just another example. switch back to how things used to be. But I wonder how much of it has been changed in a more sort of lasting, permanent, difficult to undo way? That's a really good question, because I think part of what we saw under Trump was this massive expansion of an aggressive use of executive authority. So not just executive actions, but all these other regulatory mechanisms. I think libertarians sometimes call it regulatory dark matter, the stuff that happens through kind of internal memorandums and internal directives and even just something as small as a change in the guidebook for a border patrol officer or for a asylum officer. And so, you know, one thing that

is very helpful to Biden is that just the way it was easy for Trump to come in on day one and issue all these executive orders, the Biden administration can essentially do the same and already has started to do the same on many of these policies. I think the tougher stuff is, in some respects, there's the massive accumulation. That means that you need people who are as every bit as devoted as Stephen Miller was to effectuating the undoing of these policies as he was to effectuating the doing of the policies. Yeah, we've actually covered some of the reversals via executive order on the show, but some stuff is obviously harder to undo that way. And that makes me wonder, is there anything Biden's going to keep around? Anything the Biden administration thinks the former administration did right or is stuck with? Look, I mean, we're already seeing that in ways I would argue are pretty troubling. Look at Title 42 expulsions. That was something that was created during the

pandemic by the Trump administration. The Trump folks leaned very heavily on the pandemic as an opportunity to further effectuate their anti-immigrant policies, and in particular, as it regarded refugees and asylum seekers. And so we saw them essentially create these black box sites. They were holding people in hotels at the southern border and then subjecting them to expulsions that weren't even conventionally deportations as they're known, because a deportation is actually a legal process through which you go through a set of systems and get deported. These were just straight up, we're going to hold you in this black box, including children, including unaccompanied children, and then just send you right back across the border without any attempt to even

give you some kind of legal due process. The Biden administration has actually announced that they are going to continue with Title 42 expulsions. And so it raises a pretty big human rights question to my mind and certainly to people who are challenging it in the courts. Right. And our guest Lauren mentioned Title 42 in the first half of the show. Are there any long term changes that aren't pandemic related that will still be, you know, super hard to undo? I think I should acknowledge we've seen a similar issue in the refugee resettlement context because, you know, there are some long-term consequences to these Trump-era policies that can't be just undone with the snap of a finger. And refugee resettlement is a very good example because the way that we work our resettlement system in this country is that you've got a lot of smaller groups

on the ground locally across the country who help people come here. Once refugees have been given a spot to resettle, these groups help them and get their funding based on the number of refugees they resettle. And so, you know, at the end of the Obama years, we were slated to resettle, I think, around 110,000 people. And by the end of the Trump years, they had set that bar at 15,000, and they weren't even meeting their low bar. And so what that meant is that the end of the Trump years, they had set that bar at 15,000 and they weren't even meeting their low bar. And so what that meant is that a lot of the resettlement groups lost their funds and many of them had to close their doors altogether. So I think it was something like 38 percent of the refugee groups on the ground lost their resources and need to be

rebuilt in order to take in the number of refugees that Biden has promised he will start to take in. I'm approving an executive order to begin the hard work of restoring our refugee admissions program to help meet the unprecedented global need. It's going to take time to rebuild what has been so badly damaged. But that's precisely what we're going to do. This executive order will position us to be able to raise the refugee admissions back up to 125,000 persons for the first full fiscal year of the Biden-Harris administration. Knowing just a fraction of what you know on this issue, it just seems so obvious that what the country really needs is comprehensive immigration reform and administration after administration has,

you know, tried and failed to accomplish that. Is this just a pipe dream at this point when the federal government can't agree on stimulus checks in a pandemic or whether the coup was a coup? Yeah, I wish I could say we'd had a functional Congress in a long time. That's not something we've seen for a little while. So I can say that part of why the Obama administration developed a lot of forms of executive action to try to move on these issues is that it was the only way they were seeing to actually push things forward. So DACA is a very good example of an executive action that actually had a profound impact on people's lives, but was also kind of vulnerable because it meant that a next administration could come and yank it back. And I think it's similar on a lot of the protections we need to see rebuilt for asylum seekers and for refugees. We can't just keep doing all of this stuff by executive action because it leaves people very vulnerable. I can give you a really concrete example from some recent reporting. You know,

I mentioned that I followed the track of Lucas Gutentag, who was a law professor, creating a massive database of all of these immigration changes in the Trump years. And right before Lucas got involved in that project, he was actually working at the tail end of the Obama administration. He was within DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, and he was working on some executive action reforms around detention and the way we treat immigrants in detention. And one of the things, one of the very, very last things he worked on in the Obama administration was this last-minute push to try to get through these protections for people who are in detention who were really vulnerable, whether they were LGBT folks or whether they were pregnant or had serious disabilities or were

elderly. And so, at the very end, they used this special tactic, like a memorandum, a seven-page memorandum that was going to protect all of these detainees and let them get out of detention while awaiting their cases. Indeed, when Trump got into office, he in fact issued the opposite. He rescinded the policies that were going to protect pregnant women in detention. And I wound up going to El Salvador and met the friends and loved ones of this woman named Camila Diaz. And she was a transgender asylum seeker from El Salvador who had fled soon after Trump was elected, tried to get to the U.S. border, made it there, sought asylum. And while she was in detention, was facing horrible, horrible abuse from ICE, from the detention guards. And finally, she told an immigration judge,

like, I just can't do this anymore. This is hell for me, and just send me back. And so she was sent back to El Salvador, and soon thereafter, she was killed by the police, the very people who she said were going to kill her. So that's just one very concrete example of how the things that you can try to get through, try to get done in executive action

can be easily yanked back and that can have really clear consequences, including, in this case, life or death. I do think that it's really important to not rewrite history and not pretend that we haven't been at moments in even the very recent past, such as in the Obama years, we actually saw, we actually got very close to passing comprehensive immigration reform. And absent Boehner's refusal to let that actually go before a vote, we actually did see a real potential moment of moving forward on something that we're going to have another moment to test, which is, you know, Biden has put forth the support for a pretty sweeping comprehensive immigration reform bill. In our first 100 days, we will send an immigration bill to Congress,

reinstate DACA, repeal harmful and discriminatory policies like the Muslim ban. And during our administration, we will repeal indiscriminate enforcement policies that tear families apart and make us less safe. And I think that's why one of the biggest tests for this administration will be, do they put their weight truly behind this immigration bill? And can Congress find a way to make meaningful reform happen, whether it's on that immigration bill or whether it's on many of the others that are going to come down the pipeline?

Should we have clear legislation in place that prevents family separations, that ensures asylum seekers' rights in a way that isn't so ephemeral, that protects the refugee resettlement pipeline in a way that's more systematic than what has previously existed? And then we should also acknowledge there's a huge other set of changes that are pretty uncharted territory, which is the way in which climate change is going to be affecting migration. We saw Biden put forth an executive order saying he wants his administration to look into that. And it was one of the first times, or I think the first time, that we've seen a president acknowledge the potential role of climate migration and ask for a specific inquiry into it.

But how do we really reckon with a world where people aren't just fleeing political persecution and things that we've previously recognized as categories of protection, but they're also fleeing a climate that is no longer tenable? I mean, that's just one example of the many, many things that Biden's going to have to face and that a pretty ineffectual Congress is going to have to figure out a way to reckon with. Sarah Stillman. You can find her reporting at thenewyorker.com. The White House and congressional Democrats are close to finalizing a bill that would overhaul U.S. immigration policy. CBS News says details might be announced as soon as Thursday. Of course, it would need unanimous Democratic support and at least 10 Republican votes to get through the United States Senate.

I'm Sean Ramos for them. This is Today Explained. explained.