When Joe Biden was running for president, his campaign’s message, though not explicit, was pretty clear: The borders were opening again.
That has translated into a surge at the border as Biden’s policies have made it easier for immigrants to cross (especially after trying to gut border patrol, among other ideas). Those trying to cross the border have admitted they felt Biden was inviting them to come to America. Mexico, being a corrupt and largely failed nation-state, will definitely not do anything to help.
Well, here we are, 25 months after Biden took office, and his administration is finally trying something substantive to curb the surge at the border, according to Reuters.
U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration is developing a sweeping bill that would revamp the country’s asylum system to speed up the resolution of claims in large-scale processing centers at the border with Mexico, two U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials told Reuters.
The effort emerged from ongoing Biden administration discussions to reimagine asylum as border crossings have reached record highs and immigration courts face steep backlogs, said the two sources, who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. U.S. officials traveled to Europe last month, including a stop in the Netherlands, to examine systems there, they said.
Finally, something of substance for an administration that has barely offered a bandaid over the gaping wound that is our border. The ideas being proposed are not terrible, though they are obviously not going to be enough.
The legislation – which remains in a conceptual phase – could also include different procedures for asylum seekers based on nationality, with migrants from countries with typically higher rates of approval given more freedom of movement while they await the outcome of their cases, the sources said.
Those with better chances would potentially be housed in apartments or less restrictive settings than a detention center, the two officials said. Migrants deemed less likely to win asylum could be processed and deported quickly. In the 2022 fiscal year, for example, 53% of Chinese asylum seekers won their cases in immigration court while only 8% of Hondurans did, according to government data.
“It’s a total rethink of the approach and is not constrained by current laws,” one of the DHS officials said.
The thing to note, though, is that this bill is just a concept at the moment. There is no copy for anyone to thoroughly analyze or vet, much less send off to Congress. That makes it difficult to gauge whether or not these Biden administration officials are being serious or just trying to make it look like they are doing something.
But the fact of the matter is that the Biden team is still wholly unequipped to handle this crisis – hell, they don’t even want to call it a “crisis.” They insist that there is just a little issue at the border but that everything is otherwise fine. That makes it extremely difficult to take them seriously when they say they are working to fix an issue their own border patrol has been telling them is a chaotic mess for two years.
