Even before Joe Biden was sworn in as president, his administration was facing a full-fledged immigration crisis for Democrats.
After repeatedly promising to reverse the Trump administration’s strict immigration and border policies, the new Biden administration suddenly realizes that there are consequences. Biden’s message to future migrants, NBC News reports, is this: Don’t come – at least not yet. A senior transitional official of the Biden administration is quoted as saying that migrants “must understand that they will not be able to come to the United States immediately.”
But migrants are not waiting. Inspired by hopes of entering the United States under a more lenient Biden administration, a caravan of about 8,000 Hondurans is now heading for the southwestern border. On Friday, advanced elements of the caravan collided with Guatemalan soldiers on the border of the two countries, with two separate groups of more than 3,000 people who were forced to enter Guatemala. The caravan could reach the US-Mexico border in a few weeks.
The news should come as no surprise to anyone who has paid attention to Biden’s campaign rhetoric over the past year. When you promise to end – “on the first day” – a Trump program that requires Central American asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their cases are tried, effectively approving a return to past “capture and release” policies, it is It is perfectly reasonable for thousands of Hondurans to conclude that if they can enter the United States after Biden has taken the oath, they can stay.
Perhaps realizing this, in recent weeks, the receiving administration has struggled to temper its messages about the border in hopes of preventing a crisis. In late December, Biden said he would return Trump’s immigration policies at a slower pace than he had initially promised to avoid “2 million people at our border.” It will probably take six months, he said, to create a new system for processing tens of thousands of asylum seekers, and his team is “preparing the railings” to avoid an increase in illegal immigration this spring.
Well, I’m sorry, but it’s too late. Biden tore down the bumpers that Trump built when the president-elect promised to eliminate the current administration’s border policies – policies that had been effective in reducing illegal immigration and largely securing the border during the pandemic.
Now, retentions at the southwestern border are rising. In real terms, the number of single adults in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador detained in December is the highest in four years.
And no wonder: those countries were hit hard, not only by the pandemic, which decimated their fragile economies, but also by a devastating pair of hurricanes in November. Men looking for work in the United States are most likely the majority of the caravan in Honduras, the first of many such caravans we will see in the coming months as people desperate for work cross the border and seek asylum.
Under these conditions, Biden’s plea against migrants not to enter the US illegally will still be completely ignored – and Biden will have no one but himself.
John Daniel Davidson is the political editor of The Federalist and a senior member of the Texas Public Policy Foundation.