“there are a lot of factors that have nothing to do with Biden pushing migration higher. However, the level of increase, and evidence from on the ground, make clear that Biden is also a factor. I’ll split the Biden effect into two related mechanisms: perceptions and policy.”
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“That migrants perceived their chances as better under Biden has been attested to by several interviews of migrants. They thought Biden would let them stay, but they were misinformed…and therefore sent back. Based on some of these interviews, it seems like some migrants have really gotten their hopes up due to Biden. That’s sad. Sad because these are false hopes, and sad because nothing Biden did should have given them that much hope. Smugglers have lied to people, telling them they could get across now, but they are usually returned in disappointment. One woman wailed while being sent back across the border, “Biden promised us!” But…he did not.”
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“did Biden’s foolish policies allow a massive surge of migrants? No. Biden’s role in total migration numbers is the perception of him being more open than Trump, which there wasn’t anything he could do about. On the influx of unaccompanied children, Biden policy did at least partially cause this because: by taking unaccompanied children into the country to process their claims while at the same time returning families to the border, he created an incentive for desperate people to send their children alone.
However, much of the jump in numbers isn’t the result of Biden coming or Trump leaving. The numbers follow seasonal patterns of migration. Seeing huge month to month jumps is misleading because it ignores that there are usually huge month to month jumps at this time of year. Comparing to 2020 is misleading because Covid-19 made it a suppressed year. The best comparison is to 2019, where we see migration following the same seasonal pattern under Trump.
The elevation above those numbers is likely caused by: pent up demand due to Trump and Covid restrictions keeping people out and at the Mexican border, people crossing multiple times because they’re sent directly to the border rather than being fully processed due to Covid protocols, push factors like two record breaking hurricanes and Covid, as well as the perception that Biden would be nicer to migrants.
As far as criticisms of Biden go, this has nothing to do with open border policies because Biden doesn’t have open border policies. This has nothing to do with Biden advertising himself as opening the borders because he has been doing the opposite. Big general criticisms that blame this surge on Biden are nonsense. Criticisms more focused on removing remain in Mexico or on allowing unaccompanied children across the border but not families, may be valid, but these policy changes didn’t cause the current surge in migration.”
Joe Biden’s immigration agenda overshadowed by migrant challenges in first 100 days Rebecca Morin. 4 29 2021. USA Today. https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/politics/2021/04/29/bidens-100-days-immigration-agenda-overshadowed-migrant-challenge/4821671001/ Biden to push citizenship for US illegal immigrants in speech despite surging border crisis Steven Nelson. 4 28 2021. New York Post. https://nypost.com/2021/04/28/biden-to-push-citizenship-for-illegal-immigrants-in-speech-amid-border-crisis/
“In sharp contrast to today’s undocumented population, “illegal” European immigrants faced few repercussions. There was virtually no immigration enforcement infrastructure. If caught, few faced deportation. All of those who entered unlawfully before the 1940s were protected from deportation by statutes of limitations, and in the 1930s and 1940s, tens of thousands of unauthorized immigrants like Nora O’Donnell’s grandfather were given amnesty.[viii] The few not covered by a statute of limitations or amnesty had another protection: until 1976 the government rarely deported parents of US citizens.[ix] There were no immigrant restrictions on public benefits until the 1970s, and it wasn’t until 1986 that it became unlawful to hire an undocumented immigrant.
In sum, from the early 1900s through the 1960s, millions of predominantly white immigrants entered the country unlawfully, but faced virtually no threat of apprehension or deportation. Businesses lawfully employed these immigrants, who were eligible for public benefits when they fell on hard times.”
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“[x] often in the context of racialized debates targeted mainly at Latinos. Researchers have documented how through the 1960s, racialized views of Mexicans shaped law and bureaucratic practice.[xi] Over the next decade, Congress: ended the Bracero program, which had allowed as many as 800,000 temporary migrants from Mexico annually to work mainly in agriculture; cut legal immigration from Mexico by 50%; and ended the long-standing practice that parents of US citizens wouldn’t be deported. Reducing lawful means of immigrating predictably led to a rise in unauthorized entries, which was met with calls for tougher enforcement.”
“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”
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“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.”
“the current wave of migration at the southern border is the result of a humanitarian crisis in Central America that has been years in the making.
Citizens of the “Northern Triangle” region — Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador — have long suffered from gang-related violence, frequent extortion, government corruption, and high levels of poverty. Over the past few months, though, another factor has added an additional push to make the dangerous journey north: continuing devastation from back-to-back hurricanes.
Hurricanes Eta and Iota, both super-powerful Category 4 hurricanes, made landfall in November 2020 within a two-week span, ripping through Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala. The storms brought torrential rain and resulting flash flooding and landslides. They left more than 200 people dead and another 5.3 million people in need of assistance, including more than 1.8 million children, according to Unicef’s estimates. Many families lost their homes, their belongings, and access to water and livelihoods.
The hurricanes delivered yet another shock to a region that already experienced the highest levels of violence and poverty in the world and was facing an economic downturn from the Covid-19 pandemic.”
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“In the four months since the hurricanes, recovery has been slow. Most families have left official shelters to return to their communities where rehabilitation work has started but living conditions and access to services and income have heavily deteriorated. More families continue to be pushed into poverty and, absent urgent action, more children are likely to become malnourished and drop out of school. Agricultural communities hit by the storm are also only beginning to see the impacts of last season’s crop failures.
All of this, experts say, is helping push migrants out of their home countries and toward the US.”
“Biden’s critics say his messaging is squarely to blame for the thousands of migrants coming now: But more than half a dozen asylum-seekers interviewed by POLITICO said they would make the trek regardless of who was in the White House. Some of their reasons: lack of job opportunities, concern for the safety of their family and devastation from last year’s back-to-back hurricanes that walloped parts of Central America.
For Reyes, the decision came after she received threats that Meylin and Freddy would be kidnapped and killed if she didn’t pay a fee to keep them safe. She said she knew the threats were real because her husband’s friend recently was kidnapped, tortured and killed even though his family paid the ransom. (Reyes did not discuss her husband’s whereabouts.)”
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“It’s also clear that the number of migrants crossing — including unaccompanied minors — has increased sharply with the start of the Biden administration.”
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“This isn’t the first surge of migrants arriving at the border. It happened in 2019 under Trump. It also happened in 2014 under former President Barack Obama.”
“Given just how secretive ICE is, Clusiau and Schwarz pulled off a small miracle by using their pre-existing relationship with an ICE spokesperson to embed themselves in the agency just when President Donald Trump assumed office. For the next three years, they followed ICE around the country, from New York to Texas to Arizona, watching agents conduct raids, debate enforcement tactics, and plot media strategy while blithely upending—and ending—lives.
The documentary, whose more incriminatory parts the Trump administration tried to suppress, opens with a pre-dawn ICE raid on undocumented immigrants in New York. The raid marks the first day of the weeklong Operation Keep Safe—whose actual purpose, contrary to its name, was to instill fear. One ICE agent gushes as he gets ready for action: “I love my job.” A Hispanic agent, on the first day of his job, is giddy: “It’s Christmas for us.” Another exults that the change of administration means “it’s a different world now” where the “floodgates have opened.”
But who exactly is getting sucked in? Not folks with serious criminal histories. ICE’s own records show that only 13 of the 225 people arrested during that operation had serious crimes on their record. The vast majority of those arrested either had committed minor misdemeanors, such as DUIs, or were that unfortunate breed called “collaterals.”
Collaterals are undocumented people who have committed only visa violations—akin to speeding in a rational world—but happened to be in the vicinity when ICE came looking for someone else. If any agent has qualms about going after them, those reservations dissolve as the pressure of filling arrest quotas kicks in. ICE agent Brian’s experience makes this abundantly clear. Just when he was expressing his distaste for the practice, he got a call from his supervisor, who tells him “I don’t care what you do” just “get me two” arrests.”
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“what’s jaw-dropping is to watch ICE agents openly bend and break the rule of law in the name of…enforcing the rule of law.”
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“By law, ICE agents can’t enter and arrest until they are asked in. So how did they obtain an invitation? By lying and identifying themselves as police. If someone protested on seeing who they really were, the reaction essentially was “Tricked ya!”. The agents then calmly go about the grim business of handcuffing dazed fathers (and sometimes moms) while ignoring the pleas of their shell-shocked spouses and wailing children.”
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“ICE and its sister agencies terrorize immigrants not just through its enforcement squads and detention camps, but by weaponizing its bureaucracy.
In recent days, reports have surfaced that immigration authorities—in an administration allegedly dedicated to slashing red tape—have quietly adopted a no-blanks policy that rejects visa applications if any part of a form is left unfilled. If someone does not have a middle name and skips that line, their petition gets thrown out. Ditto if they leave out the apartment number because they live in a house. The strategy is to make the process so hard for people who are trying to do it by the book that they abandon their quest to live in the United States.”
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“One of the most heart-wrenching stories in Immigration Nation shows how the immigration bureaucracy chews up and spits out Carlos Perez. As a police officer in El Salvador, he offered intel on Salvadoran gangs to the New York Police Department. When the gangs found out, he and his wife fled, at one point swimming across a river with their two toddlers strapped to their backs. The precise details are a bit fuzzy, but it seems Perez sought asylum and was released into the country with work authorization, which he dutifully renewed on a regular basis. But his lawyer forgot to file a formal petition—something that occasionally happens because these migrants are too poor to buy quality representation and don’t have the language skills to navigate the byzantine system themselves. Many years later, when ICE realized this, it took Perez into custody. And after some months, ignoring his pleas that he’ll be killed if he returns home, sends him packing back. The fact that he had risked his life to help American law enforcement counted for nothing against his trivial lapse in paperwork.
At one point, we see him calling his family from a detention camp prior to deportation. He poignantly gives his son, a teenager who has to prematurely step into his dad’s shoes, instructions on making car payments and other such business. The ICE supervisor, who had total discretion over Perez’s fate, admits that Perez was trying to play by the rules. But in the end, he says, he gets “an inherent kind of satisfaction—I won’t say ‘joy’—in removing people who don’t belong in the country regardless of public sentiment.”
After Perez’s deportation, his son drops out of school, cashes in his meager savings, and tries to support the family. “I’ve lost all faith in the U.S. government,” he mourns.”
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“And then there is the 63-year-old Guatemalan woman—petite, frail, terrified, and the furthest thing from a threat to the United States—who fled her country with her 12-year-old granddaughter. According the grandmother, an MS-13 gang member took a fancy to the preteen and demanded that grandma let him marry her or he’d kill them both. The two traveled for 10 days by land to reach the U.S. border and immediately turned themselves in at a port of entry, exactly as legally required. The granddaughter was released from detention after two months to join her mom, who lives in the U.S. The grandmother, however, was held in detention for 17 months—illegally, her lawyer claims, since she met the test for being released into the country while her asylum petition was considered. But she was a pawn in the Trump administration’s deterrence game, so the rules didn’t matter.
Her petition was eventually rejected. Before her lawyer could file an emergency appeal—as is perfectly in keeping with the rules—she was deported in the dead of the night. She wasn’t even allowed a phone call to bid her granddaughter good-bye.”
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“Story after story in Immigration Nation shows how the government systematically games and breaks the rules to keep immigrants out. Yet one ICE agent smugly tells unauthorized immigrants, as he leads them to the bridge back to Mexico, to “try to do it the right way” next time, because, the right way is “always the best way.” He seems oblivious to the fact that even before Trump arrived on the scene and gutted legal immigration, few options to come in the “right way” existed for low-skilled migrants: Every administration since President Lyndon Johnson has been slamming doors in their faces.”
“The Trump administration has started forcibly collecting DNA samples from immigrants in detention and sending that information to an FBI criminal database called the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) for permanent storage. Officials say this is a crime-fighting move. In reality, it is mass surveillance.
In 2005, Congress passed the DNA Fingerprint Act, requiring genetic testing of anyone arrested for a federal crime, regardless of whether they’re eventually charged and convicted. The Supreme Court approved this gross invasion of individual privacy in Maryland v. King (2013), ruling 5–4 that the law did not violate constitutional protections against illegal searches and seizures because the original arrest had required probable cause.
The DNA Fingerprint Act gave the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) latitude to exempt noncitizens from being sampled. There’s a very good reason for that: The vast majority of these folks are detained not because they have committed serious crimes with actual victims but because a harsh Clinton-era enforcement law vastly increased detentions for nonviolent immigration-related offenses. The Obama administration used this latitude to exempt immigrants from DNA sampling unless they were charged with another crime or were awaiting deportation proceedings. DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano pointed out at the time that taking DNA from the 30,000 immigrants who were then detained would pose “severe organizational, resource and financial challenges”—not to mention distract from actual crime-fighting.
The detained population has grown larger still, yet the Trump administration is arguing that these logistical concerns are outdated because the collection of DNA samples has become easier and cheaper. Customs and Border Patrol has gone ahead and launched pilot programs at several immigration centers around the country. Government estimates suggest that once the program is fully implemented, such centers will be sending 748,000 DNA profiles to CODIS every year. That’s more than the entire state of New York has contributed in more than 20 years”