Razor Wire on the Rio Grande - Pt. 1
By nearly all accounts, there is indeed a migrant crisis along the US-Mexico border, and a solution is desperately needed.
[Note: This is Part 1 of a 2-part series. Read Part 2 here.]
Over the course of President Joe Biden’s term in office, the state government of Texas — particularly Texas Governor Gregg Abbott — has feuded with the Biden administration over immigration and border enforcement. That feud seemed to reach a boiling point last month when the Texas National Guard seized control of a roughly 2.5-mile area of the border town of Eagle Pass, Texas, along the Rio Grande, and blocked federal Border Patrol agents from entering the area.
In response to that move by Texas, the Department of Justice (DOJ) requested the Supreme Court to intervene. Shortly after that request, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Biden administration in a 5-4 decision. The government of Texas has more or less maintained its stance since that ruling, though it’s been pointed out that Texas hasn’t actually defied the Supreme Court in the way it’s been portrayed by much of the media.
This ongoing situation has brought the topic of immigration to the forefront of US politics. By nearly all accounts, there is indeed a migrant crisis along the US-Mexico border, and a solution is desperately needed — one which considers the real problems caused by unfettered immigration and also recognizes the humanity of the people attempting to immigrate to the US. This issue is a complicated one, however, and that makes coming to a workable solution a difficult task.
A Mixed Bag
When it comes to immigration policy, the Biden administration has been far from consistent.
As a presidential candidate during the 2020 election, Joe Biden campaigned on reforming our immigration system — particularly many of the harsh policies put in place during the Trump administration. While Biden’s immigration policies have been a departure from Trump’s in some ways, there are also many similarities (more than either side would probably like to admit).
For example, critics of Biden pointed out early on into his presidency that thousands of migrant children were still being detained in overcrowded shelters with unsanitary conditions. In other words, like Trump before him, Biden continued to put “kids in cages”, as the media often described it during the Trump years, but after Biden was elected the corporate press began using much more mundane terms such as “overflow facilities”.
Changing the language used to describe these detention centers may alter public perception of them, but it does nothing to address the awful conditions that these children have to endure. This shift in phraseology despite any substantive difference taking place within these facilities highlights how the corporate media’s focus on the topic of detained migrant children was always more of a tool to criticize Donald Trump than it was ever an actual attempt to create awareness of the situation or bring about a change in policy.
The Biden administration has also added onto the the border wall despite Biden’s campaign promise that “There will not be another foot of wall constructed in my administration.” And the final example I’ll give is the Biden administration’s prolongment of Title 42, a Covid-era policy first enacted under Trump that allowed the federal government to immediately expel migrants, even those seeking asylum, in order to prevent the spread of Covid-19.
To be fair, if provided with more context (which I don’t have the space to get into here) someone in favor of immigration reform could make a good faith argument in defense of the Biden administration’s continuation of some of Trump’s policies, as even when reforms are attempted it still takes time for them to take effect or they often get held up by legal challenges. I mention these similarities mainly to point out the hypocrisy of many of the people who seemed to stop caring about this issue once Trump was no longer in office (and to a somewhat lesser extent, the hypocrisy of many Trump supporters who refused to condemn Trump’s policies but were suddenly appalled when Biden continued them), and to highlight the fact that electing a different president every four years does little to actually change the problems embedded in our system.
A major difference between Trump and Biden when it comes to immigration has been rhetoric — though, as we’ll get into in the second part of this series, that appears to be changing. While phrases and slogans matter much less than policy, rhetoric from the President of the United States can certainly have an effect on people, and I think the influx of immigrants we’ve seen during Biden’s term in office is an excellent example of that.
As mentioned previously, Trump was notoriously harsh on immigration in both rhetoric and policy. As a candidate in 2020, Biden ran on ending those policies, and he quickly proceeded to reverse many of them after getting elected. It reasonably follows then, that Biden’s rhetoric on the campaign trail and his initial actions on border policy probably incentivized many would-be migrants to travel to the US border, as they might view his term as a good opportunity to try to enter the country. That’s only one factor out of many that likely goes into making such a decision, but it’s a factor nonetheless.
It didn’t take long for there to be inconsistencies in the rhetoric the Biden administration put out, though.
“I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border,” Vice President Kamala Harris said during a trip to Guatemala in the summer of 2021. “Do not come. Do not come.”
Given the massive amount of immigration the US is continuing to see to this day, it seems as though the Biden administration’s early shift in rhetoric failed to have the desired effect. Now, with immigration once again dominating political discourse — in an election year, no less — and with the Biden administration being unable to deny the reality at the border, it appears that Biden’s stance on this issue is beginning to overlap with Trump’s more and more.
From Red States to Blue States
Since Biden first took office in 2021, the US has seen a massive increase of migrants trying to cross the the US-Mexico border.
As The Guardian reports:
In the last three years, the number of people attempting to cross the US’s southern border into the country has risen to unprecedented levels.
In the month of December 2023 alone, border patrol agents recorded 302,000 encounters…a new high. The monthly average from 2013 to 2019 was 39,000.
This is a serious problem — one which our current immigration system seems incapable of addressing. According to a recent report from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, the Immigration Court backlog surpassed 3 million cases in November 2023. To highlight how drastic of an increase that is, the first paragraph of the report states that “during November 2022, the backlog was 2 million. That means the case backlog has grown by a million cases in just the past 12 months.”
This ever-increasing backlog likely serves as an incentive for some to try to enter the US illegally. If one is unlikely to be processed and allowed in legally anytime soon, crossing the border illegally may seem like less of a risk than remaining in dangerous, crime-riddled areas along the Mexico side of the border — especially for anyone traveling with women and children. It may also serve to streamline the process, as crossing illegally and then immediately surrendering to US Border Patrol may get one’s information into the system sooner than they could have at a legal port of entry.
While waiting to be processed, many migrants are released into the US, which has put a strain not just on the federal immigration system but on local and state governments as well. This issue has primarily been felt by border towns, but that doesn’t mean it’s been confined to small towns along the southern border.
In an ostensible attempt to deal with overcrowded shelters along the border, the Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) “plans to transport migrants awaiting immigration proceedings from U.S. cities along the southern border farther into the interior of the country,” NBC News reported in the summer of 2022, citing internal DHS documents.
About a year later, the New York Post reported that the Biden administration had flown more than 200,000 migrants “to airports around the country,” citing data the Center for Immigration Studies obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
“In January [2023],” the Post article states, “Biden’s Department of Homeland Security began implementing the cornerstone of its current strategy: a series of new ‘lawful pathways’ measures designed to decrease the historically high crowds at the southern border before they become a political problem.” [How’s that been working out so far?]
The article goes on:
DHS cajoles tens of thousands of intending illegal border-crossers per month to instead go on the CBP One smartphone application, and make an appointment with US officials at land ports of entry instead of crossing illegally.
(…)
But one of the least noticed, mysterious and potentially most controversial of the new rechanneling programs that use the CBP One app allows migrants to take commercial passenger flights from foreign countries straight to their American cities of choice, flying right over the border — and even over Mexico.
It hasn’t just been the Biden administration moving migrants farther into the US, however.
In response to Title 42 finally coming to an end in 2022, Republican Governor of Texas Gregg Abbott began busing migrants from Texas to Washington DC as a way to bring the migrant crisis to the federal government’s doorstep (in one instance, Abbott literally sent buses of migrants right to Vice President Kamala Harris’ residence in DC). This led to the city reaching a “tipping point”, according to the office of Washington DC Mayor Muriel Bowser, which was one of the first glimpses the country got of the hypocrisy many Democrat mayors and governors have been increasingly showing on this issue.
Abbott began sending migrants to Chicago and New York City shortly after the initial buses were sent to DC, and Arizona’s governor, Doug Ducey, also a Republican, began sending migrants to Washington DC around the same time.
In a similar move that same year, Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, sent two planes of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, an island “Located off the coast of Massachusetts and long known as a posh summer destination for wealthy vacationers,” as CNN put it at the time.
By sending planes and buses full of migrants into Democratic-controlled cities and states, these Republican governors were trying to force many pro-immigration liberals and Democrats to reckon with the problems that mass immigration brings — problems which those same liberals and Democrats often scoffed at when they only affected border states. Sending migrants to these locations also served as a way to call these Democrat mayors’ and governors’ bluff, as many of these areas are sanctuary cities — meaning laws and regulations have been implemented in these locations which prohibit local law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration authorities.
Regardless of how one feels about Republican governors shipping migrants to blue areas (personally, I’m disgusted by this tactic, as it tends to treat migrants as nothing more than pawns used to score cheap political points rather than the human beings they actually are), it’s difficult to deny that in doing so these governors succeeded in bringing more attention to the problems faced by border states. They have also been successful in bringing liberal hypocrisy to the surface.
As this issue has grown — and as Democrats have been increasingly forced to deal with it — the rhetoric that has long been used by liberals and Democrats in support of immigration has been replaced by calls for the Biden administration to implement stricter immigration policies and border enforcement.
It appears there’s no longer a debate over whether a migrant crisis truly exists along the US-Mexico border, but now the conversation has shifted to what possible solutions there are to resolve this crisis. And due to the perceived inadequacy of the federal government’s response, Texas has taken matters into its own hands.
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