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If the text below reads like a Twitter thread, that’s where it comes from. It’s a response to arguments from New York Times columnist David Leonhardt making some sweeping mischaracterizations of what happened at the U.S.-Mexico border during the Biden years.
Leonhardt’s words go a long way toward cementing in place a growing view in elite opinion that Democrats lost the election because Joe Biden’s administration was “too soft” on migrants. According to this view, the administration failed to crack down out of fear of offending “the groups”—in this case, migrants’ rights defenders.
In fact, Biden was never “soft” and the groups were disillusioned from the get-go. His revocation of a few of the most severely anti-migrant Trump policies does not explain why migration increased during his term. Leonhardt’s inaccurate claims risk pushing moderate Democrats—who read and cite him—into adopting much of Trump’s approach to the border and migration.
Here’s the thread, which is getting massive numbers on Twitter because of a boost from New Republic writer Greg Sargent.
We need to address this notion that Biden somehow swung the door open to migrants. He kept in place the harshest ban on asylum ever: Title 42. It just didn’t deter a migrant population that changed dramatically.
During Donald Trump’s term, 90+ percent of migrants were from Mexico and Central America (blue, green, brown, yellow in the chart below). If you were a migrant from those countries, your probability of being released into the United States after apprehension didn’t change much after Biden’s inauguration.
(An exception is unaccompanied children from Central America: Biden stopped Trump’s practice of expelling them, alone, back into their countries regardless of protection needs. The moral argument for doing that is self-evident, and it didn’t move the needle much overall.)
Migrants may have found Biden’s initial moves and rhetoric encouraging? But Biden kept in place Stephen Miller’s Title 42 expulsions policy, which shut down asylum for everyone who could be deported easily. Ending “Remain in Mexico” didn’t matter, Title 42 had eclipsed it.
This chart shows that the Biden administration continued applying Title 42, expelling people as vigorously as possible (orange). But yes, the chart shows a decline in the _percentage_ of people being expelled in 2021.
That is not Biden being soft-hearted toward migrants. Instead, it reflects a historic change in the migrant population: new nationalities began arriving in ways unimaginable before 2021.
Just as Joe Biden was being inaugurated, the world’s borders were opening up post-pandemic. So did new migration routes like the Darién Gap.
The U.S.-Mexico border became accessible to people from very distant countries. South America and beyond. This had never happened before. By 2023, Mexico and Central America were just 55 percent of migrants at the border. By early 2024, one in nine were from Europe, Asia, or Africa.
You may have noticed that these countries are far away. It’s costly to deport people to them—if it’s even possible diplomatically—because you have to fly them. More had to be released into the U.S. interior to seek asylum.
Expulsions across a land border are way cheaper than by air. Under Trump, Mexico agreed to take back Title 42 expulsions from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. The Biden admin worked on Mexico to agree to take expelled people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
Biden expanded Title 42! It was a huge crackdown, especially on Mexicans and Central Americans (blue). But the overall flow of people from distant countries (green) was even larger, more than Mexico could absorb on its own.
When Title 42 ended, Biden placed a ban on asylum access on everyone who passed through a third country and didn’t get an asylum denial there. But the same challenge remained: people from distant countries who are hard to return. Numbers kept growing.
In late 2023, in yet another Biden crackdown, the admin leaned on Mexico to intensify its own efforts to block migrants crossing the country. It is unprecedented for Mexico to have sustained a migration crackdown for this long; they usually erode after a few months.
And then in June, Biden put in place an overall ban on asylum access between ports of entry, which lowered numbers further.
A common media question is “why did Biden wait so long” to ban asylum, a right enshrined in U.S. law. Because it’s probably illegal to do so? Because blanket bans on entry don’t apply to people who are already on U.S. soil, as courts told Trump?
In sum, it’s hard to argue that Biden did much to make the border more open for migrants. Those from Mexico and CentAm faced similar low odds of avoiding expulsion, compared to Trump. Those from elsewhere are harder to remove—but they are a new phenomenon Trump never faced.
This thread is already too long, so it doesn’t discuss the enormous human cost of these asylum denial policies, which WOLA and others have documented at length. That whole vital line of argument doesn’t seem to have much sway with the “Biden wasn’t harsh enough” crowd.
See also:
- Chart: Border Patrol Apprehensions by Country at the U.S.-Mexico Border Since October 2013
- Biden-Era Border Patrol Apprehensions Hit New Low
- A Drop, Then a Long Plateau: the June 5 Asylum Restriction’s Impact on Migration
- CBP Reports that January Border Migration Dropped Sharply
- December 2023 Set a New U.S.-Mexico Border Monthly Migration Record
