“four years ago, the Trump administration had already burst its banks with sensational, revealing and damaging leaks. The Washington Post had reported the dodgy phone conversations between President Donald Trump’s pick for national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. An executive memo about reestablishing CIA “black site” prisons had appeared in the New York Times. Trump advisers candidly—though anonymously—gossiped with the New York Times about the president’s “impetuous,” impulsive ways and his reliance on “alternative facts.” And a confidential White House request that the FBI publicly discredit reports of Trump campaign connections to Russian intelligence seeped onto CNN.
In comparison, the Biden White House has been as tight as an airlock on the International Space Station.”
…
“What’s been Biden’s no-drip secret? To begin with, he ran a relatively leak-free presidential campaign, mirroring the leak-avoiding practices of the Obama administration, in which he served. As one prone to gaffes, it probably wasn’t easy for him to zip it, but it has seemed to become second nature to him. Running his campaign from his basement, Biden didn’t feel the need to leak to place himself in the news. If he wanted attention, he could command the press corps’ focus quickly and efficiently. The lesson extended to his staff, which tended to keep traps shut and not fill the blanks with anonymous comments for insistent reporters. In December, Biden press secretary Jen Psaki made this covert strategy overt when she promised the new administration would speak with one voice, a direct dig at the back-stabbing and duplicitous leaking that typified the Trump presidency.”
…
“The Trump administration leaked so copiously because he had assembled not a team of rivals to serve under him but a team of enemies, who used the press to fight their policy battles and wage psychological warfare on each other in public. For example, the Javanka faction in his White House advanced a personal PR agenda separate from the president’s, and their White House enemies were forever leaking information about the power couple to disable them. Biden, who has no analogous warring factions, has had an easier time keeping the peace.
Trump both craved and reveled in these internal death matches, something you can’t imagine Biden doing. Trump was forever calling his kitchen cabinet of corporate titans and irregulars like Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, Rudy Giuliani and Sean Hannity for advice and gossip, and those conversations tended to leak. Biden, on the other hand, tends not to go off-site for counsel; his closest advisers have been the same people for decades, and they’re installed physically close to him in the West Wing. With fewer people in fewer places tasting the unadulterated Biden, less gossip flows to reporters. Finally, Trump was notorious for not keeping up on his reading. If an aide wanted to direct his attention to some issue, often the best way to do so was to get it to his boss on TV, leaking the material to reporters so Trump would see it on cable news. This put Trump on both the supply and the demand sides for leaks.”
…
“In his 2018 book, The Trump White House: Changing the Rules of the Game, journalist Ronald Kessler maintains that Trump managed the news by calling reporters and feeding them inside dope that he insisted be attributed to “a senior White House official.” Kessler continues, “In other cases, the media has picked up reports on what Trump himself has said to his friends.”
The most reliable non-Trump spigot for leaks was top adviser Kellyanne Conway, Kessler wrote, and her example inspired others in the White House to leak. The more Trump aides leaked and the more they got away with it—remember how one midlevel Trumpie wrote an anonymous New York Times op-ed about the Trump White House and then a whole book?—the more they did it. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say there were more leakers than non-leakers in Trump’s universe.”
“There’s the crisis of unaccompanied minors arriving in the U.S., of too few beds to house them and of family separations happening in Mexico. There’s the crisis of an asylum system that’s broken, and that has become, with most other legal routes into the country severely restricted, America’s de facto immigration system. There’s the crisis of overflowing communities on the Mexican border, populated by people expelled from the U.S. There’s the crisis of immigration courts that take too long; of virtually no work visas available for Central Americans; of economies in Honduras and Guatemala that have been ravaged by Covid-19, a recession, and two hurricanes within the past year; of the misconception all this can be solved by better enforcement at the border; of a political system in the U.S. that seems unable to rise to the enormity of the challenge.
Right now, the number of unauthorized immigrants crossing the border is lower than it was in the early 2000s. It’s lower than in 2019”
…
“What there is not is a crisis of migrants — at least not yet. There’s not a crisis of large numbers of unauthorized migrants staying in the U.S., as we saw in 2019, 2016 and 2014. There have been periods where the government took people in and released them into the U.S. in large numbers. That’s not happening right now because of the [pandemic-era] public health order, which allows the U.S. to expel people more quickly.”
…
“Every time we beef up enforcement, or do something slightly more draconian, it works for a while, and then, sooner or later, people find a way around it. Enforcement works if it pushes people into real legal [immigration] channels. But if there are no legal channels, then people will just keep finding their way around enforcement.”
…
“Every two or three years, we get a spike of migrants coming to the U.S.-Mexico border. Yet we deal with this each time as though it’s a separate incident that can be controlled, rather than looking at the larger forces at play. There’s something long-term here that we should deal with. So maybe it is a crisis, but it’s within a larger crisis that needs to be managed and has been going on for a long time.”
…
“the immediate crises. Unaccompanied minors: [The federal government] made the decision to allow them in without yet having the capacity to be able to house all of them. In the immediate term, they just have to figure out bed space—it’s literally that. They can figure that out, they just haven’t yet in ways that meet the needs of a vulnerable population. That’s resolvable. There’s also a really big policy question with long-term play-out: An open-ended policy of taking in any minor and putting them in the long-term process in the U.S. is likely to encourage even larger flows [of unaccompanied minors] in the future.
[The federal government] needs to make sure they can continue to expel newly arriving families and adults to Mexico. Even though the Biden administration doesn’t want to, they need to do it to buy time. There are a lot of things they’d like to be doing on immigration policy that have nothing to do with the border. But as long as there’s a perception that they can’t control the border, they’re not going have the political space to do anything else. They need to be “tough” at the border right now and return adults and families to Mexico in an efficient way.
We need legal pathways for workers, and an asylum system that works, because we know some people are legitimately fleeing from violence. Those two things alone would make an enormous difference.
Our asylum system has become the catchall for everything. Either you can get to the border, convince people you’re being persecuted, and stay in the U.S., or nothing: You stay home, because there’s not a line for you to get into if you’re from Central America and want to come and work. That makes no sense. Asylum shouldn’t be used [to give] labor pathways. Where we should be headed is creating two different paths: one for people who clearly are motivated by the need to leave their home country because of safety, and another for people aspiring to make their lives better by making more money.
The way you fix the asylum system is by taking it out of the hands of the immigration courts and putting it in the hands of asylum officers at the border. Immigration courts are actually quite uneven because they’re political appointments, so their decisions tend to be all over the place depending on which judge you get. Asylum officers can make decisions quickly, tend to be fairly consistent, are efficient, and you can hire them much more easily.”
…
“we also need a legal pathway for people who want to come and work. For Mexicans who want to work in the U.S., there’s an actual line to get into. We don’t have that for Central Americans.
One of the reasons why Mexican migration [to the U.S.] went down so much after 2007 is that there are about 260,000 people every year who come from Mexico to work legally in the U.S. and go back home. In 2019, the comparable number [for Central Americans] was 8,000; last year, it was about 5,500. There really is no line for a Central American to get into. But people are coming anyway, so let’s give them a chance to come legally—at least some of them. It’s what we did with Mexico, and that has kept numbers [of unauthorized immigrants from Mexico] low because they’re getting what they need: a chance to make money.”
…
“The demand is constantly there for people to leave and come to the U.S., but the huge surges happen when people either have a greater motivation to leave or they think they have a greater opportunity of getting into the United States. In this case, those came together.
Over the past year, there were two hurricanes in Honduras and Guatemala, plus the collapse of fragile economies because of Covid. And that created a huge demand for people to come north to the U.S. There was also an expectation around the transition to the Biden administration that made people believe that they could get in. And—probably more important than that—there is a reality that the U.S. does let some people in, particularly unaccompanied minors and some families.”
…
“At the border, our options are either you send people back quickly or you release them into the U.S. for the next two or three years, during which time their case goes through a very slow process in the immigration courts. What ends up happening is that if you’re released into the U.S., you almost certainly never go back [to your home country].
There’s a very reputable study that the [Department of Homeland Security] did where they looked at what happened from 2014 to 2019 with Central American and Mexican migrants. The Mexican migrants mostly got sent back pretty quickly. But 72 percent of the Central Americans who arrived between 2014 and 2019 were admitted into the U.S., and there’s no record of their departure. And if, in fact, you’re being allowed into the U.S. and there is no real process to figure out what happened to you, that’s a lousy system.”
“Buried in the news cycle around Biden’s gesture, however, is that the updated guidance does not, in fact, stop family separations. It just tells the state to use discretion.
Prosecutors should not rule out formally charging misdemeanor border crossers but instead “take into account other individualized factors,” wrote Wilkinson, “including personal circumstances and criminal history, the seriousness of the offense, and the probable sentence or other consequences that would result from a conviction.”
It’s certainly an upgrade from a zero tolerance approach, which, true to its name, was without any nuance or mercy. But it still gives the federal government wide latitude in deciding which mothers and fathers get to stay with their children, and expressly does not eliminate the possibility that they could be separated—perhaps forever—simply for crossing a literal line in the sand.”
“the international experience shows that a child allowance is not anti-work. The vast majority of countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development already provide an unconditional child benefit, and most have a higher labor force participation rate than the U.S. In fact, research suggests that parents receiving allowances actually work more: “After Canada enacted a national child allowance in 2006, employment rates for mothers actually increased across the board,” according to one report. In 2016, Canada increased its annual child allowance to $4,800 per young child and $4,000 per older child — and the economy added jobs.”
“Starting with the fiscal year that begins on October 1, the United States will accept up to 125,000 refugees annually”
…
“This year the cap is set at just 15,000, the lowest single-year total since the Refugee Act of 1980 standardized the admission process. Reversing those cuts, and then some—the refugee cap was 110,000 in the final year of the Obama administration—was a signal of America’s “moral leadership” in the world, Biden said.”
…
“The idea that refugees are a uniquely dangerous national security threat is simply not based in reality. Since 1975, a grand total of 20 refugees have been convicted of terrorism-related offenses in the United States—in plots that have cumulatively killed three Americans, according to research from Alex Nowrasteh, director of immigration studies for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. Trump’s slashing of the overall refugee numbers also included a complete ban on admitting refugees from Syria, despite the fact that there has never been a terror attack on U.S. soil carried out by a Syrian refugee. Native-born Americans and foreigners with tourist visas are statistically far more likely to engage in terrorism on U.S. soil”
…
“while Trump’s actions did little to materially improve American national security, his anti-immigrant agenda did successfully mangle the process for admitting refugees to the country. Beyond the short-term harm to individual immigrants awaiting resettlement, Trump’s reductions undermined the institutional infrastructure at the nine nonprofit agencies that work with the U.S. government to resettle refugees. More than 100 resettlement offices were closed during the Trump years.”
“The Biden administration’s decision to pull the United States out of Yemen’s six-year-long civil war was a highly prudent act. But it’s merely a first step. Washington’s Middle East policy must be anchored in restraint and humbleness. This simply won’t happen until U.S. policy makers realign the U.S.-Saudi Arabia relationship with the realities of the world today—not on how the world looked during the Cold War.”
“the administration has tried to send a message to migrants: don’t come.
The Biden administration has been clear from the outset that the border is “not open” and that migrants should not come in an “irregular fashion.” The US continues to turn away the vast majority of arriving migrants under Title 42 of the Public Health Safety Act, with exceptions for unaccompanied children, some families with young children, and people who were sent back to Mexico to wait for their court hearings in the US.
In recent days, the message has gotten even sharper: “I can say quite clearly: Don’t come over,” Biden said in a recent interview with ABC. “Don’t leave your town or city or community.”
The White House has been amplifying that messaging with more than 17,000 radio ads in Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras since January 21. The ads have played in Spanish, Portuguese, and six Indigenous languages, reaching an estimated 15 million people. There have also been ad campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, including one that features a Salvadoran who made the dangerous journey north in 2010 at age 19 and was eventually deported after arriving in Texas”
…
“US messaging may play some role in determining whether people migrate, but it’s only one factor among many sources of information.
Migrants typically get information about the conditions on the border from people in their network who have successfully made the journey, rather than from top-down declarations from US officials. Smugglers have also sought to spread misinformation about the Biden administration’s plans to process asylum seekers. Immigrant advocates on the border have reported hearing rumors spreading that migrants staying in certain camps will be processed or that the border would open at midnight.
These rumors have survived on the hopes of people who have long aspired to migrate. Many of the people arriving on the southern border are fleeing dangerous or unlivable conditions and felt they had no choice but to leave their home countries.
They are primarily coming from Central America’s “Northern Triangle” countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, which for years have been suffering from gang-related violence, government corruption, frequent extortion, and some of the highest rates of poverty and violent crime in the world.
The pandemic-related economic downturn and a pair of hurricanes late last year that devastated Honduras and Guatemala in particular have only exacerbated those more longstanding problems.”
“President Joe Biden all but said during his first formal press conference on Thursday that the United States would likely extend its 20-year military campaign in Afghanistan for at least a few more months beyond the May 1 withdrawal deadline set by the Trump administration’s agreement with the Taliban.
That’s his prerogative, of course. But some experts and advocates of withdrawing say his stated reason for keeping US troops in harm’s way for a while longer — that in terms of sheer logistics, it would be hard to pull the remaining 3,500 US troops out the country by that date — is weak.”
…
“The choice facing Biden was always a tough one: Abide by the Trump-era agreement and leave by May 1 — risking the Taliban’s hostile takeover of the country as soon as the US departs and the reversal of progress on women’s and children’s rights that would inevitably follow; or violate the agreement and stay in order to pressure the Taliban to strike a peace deal with the Afghan government, risking more dead American service members in the meantime.
Neither is a great option, which may explain why Biden seems to have chosen a sort of muddled middle path: withdraw, but likely later this year — and make it look less like a strategic decision about the US’s role in the country’s peace process going forward and more like merely a function of logistical realities on the ground.”
…
“while there are legitimate logistical challenges to pulling out US troops by that tight deadline, some experts I spoke to aren’t convinced that’s what’s really driving Biden’s foot-dragging.
Most analysts and even top congressional Democrats acknowledge that, at this point, the US can’t withdraw from Afghanistan safely by May 1, even if Biden were to order that today.
The main problem isn’t removing the service members themselves, but rather all of their equipment, from the landlocked country. America and its allies could leave things like vehicles and guns behind as part of a hurried exit, but then the Taliban or other terrorist groups could use them for their purposes.
“It takes a while to do [this] methodically and well,” said Jonathan Schroden, an expert on the war at the CNA think tank in Arlington, Virginia.
But some experts and advocates for withdrawal cite two reasons for why Biden’s rationale rings hollow.
First, the timing: “If what he wanted was the fastest possible out, that could have been the order in January,” said Andrew Watkins, the International Crisis Group’s senior analyst for Afghanistan
Simply put, the administration is surely aware of how long a safe withdrawal takes. Biden, then, effectively made the decision to keep troops in the country beyond the deadline by not making a decision until he’d passed the point where that was possible.
Second, some say that despite its harsh rhetoric demanding “all foreign troops…withdraw on the specific date,” the Taliban probably wouldn’t consider it a violation of the agreement and start targeting American troops even if the US hadn’t gotten every last person or piece of equipment out of the country by May 1, as long as Biden had announced his order to withdraw and it was genuinely underway.”
…
“Put together, experts say Biden’s case to the nation for why the US should remain in Afghanistan a little longer doesn’t hold up. Biden’s true intention, they divine, is that the president and his team believe their long-shot push for a diplomatic solution to the 20-year war requires prolonging America’s military presence.”
…
“So why didn’t Biden just say that during the press conference?
Some experts said the US may still be working to agree to an extension with the Taliban, and openly stating America will remain beyond May 1 to keep the insurgents at the table wouldn’t play well until there’s an understanding. Plus, citing logistical concerns might draw less backlash from the American public than extending the military presence in search of an unlikely peace deal.”
“The Trump administration was able to reshape America’s trade policy in large part because it simply decided to ignore anything that punctured its manufactured reality about how tariffs work.
Economic data show that American businesses and consumers—not China—are overwhelmingly paying the cost of the tariffs? Send Peter Navarro out to do some television hits where he baselessly claims otherwise.
Thousands of American companies are lining up at hearings to explain why the tariffs would hurt their bottom line? Give Wilbur Ross a can of tomato soup and let him explain that those added costs are actually no big deal.
Farmers are getting gutted by the trade war? Send them fat checks, deny that your policies were to blame, and inadvertently create a new, expensive aid program that will be politically difficult to unwind.”
…
“the Biden administration seems determined to keep the circus going a while longer. Take, for example, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo doing her best Navarro impression during an interview earlier this month with MSNBC. Asked about whether the Biden administration would roll back the Trump tariffs on steel, aluminum, and other goods from China, Raimondo argued that “the data shows that those tariffs have been effective.”
Have they? Raimondo was careful to avoid saying exactly what the tariffs have been “effective” at accomplishing, but the actual data would suggest the answer is not much—except, of course, raising prices for American businesses and consumers.”
…
“The fundamental problem is the same one that Trump, Navarro, Ross, and others spent the past few years trying to hand-wave away: Tariffs simply create more losers than winners. The U.S. steel industry, for example, employs about 141,000 workers. But there are more than 6 million workers in manufacturing businesses that consume steel. The tariffs are meant to protect the former group by imposing higher costs on the latter, much larger group.”
…
“Through its first 50 days in office, the Biden administration has given no indication that it is interested in providing relief to American businesses beset by Trump’s tariffs. If anything, Democrats in the White House and Congress appear to be entrenching those policies.”
“After months of confirmation hearings, the vast majority of President Joe Biden’s top advisers are in place. Biden made history with a number of his picks, constructing a diverse Cabinet that’s reflective of America.
According to an NPR analysis, white men made up 32 percent of Biden’s Cabinet picks as of early February, with women accounting for 45 percent of the group and racial minorities accounting for 55 percent. Biden has more women and minorities in his Cabinet than former Presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama included.
Stepping back from the overall data, there are several historic firsts. From the first Black secretary of defense to the first Asian American US trade representative to the first Native American interior secretary, Biden has often chosen heads of his agencies that will bring their lived experience to the job.
Much of Biden’s Cabinet looks familiar: It’s stacked with former Obama officials, covering issues from the economy to foreign affairs. But Biden also tapped Cabinet picks from state and local government, including North Carolina environmental official Michael Regan for his EPA administrator, Connecticut education official Miguel Cardona for education secretary, and Mayor Marty Walsh of Boston and former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, for the secretaries of labor and transportation, respectively.”