RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Vaccination progresses at a pace exceeding his own pledges. The US president is touring the country, along with the vice president and their respective spouses, selling the benefits of the big economic stimulus package he has managed to push through.
Opinion polls favor him. Only one issue seems capable of souring Joe Biden’s political honeymoon: the crisis on the border with Mexico. Thousands of people, many of them minors, attracted by the shift toward a more humane discourse, are overwhelming the reception structures, despite the Administration’s appeals against these migrations.
The situation is affecting all political groups gravitating around Biden like a juggler’s plates. The most progressive sectors warn about the way in which migrant children are treated. Centrist Democrats fear criticism from voters wary of illegal immigration. And Republicans, in their search for a post-Trump north, are beginning to see immigration-focused attacks as their winning weapon in the crucial 2022 midterms, which will once again decide the majorities in Congress and the room for maneuver in the second half of Biden’s term.
Arrests for illegal border crossings, which were already at their peak numbers in a decade during the last months of Donald Trump’s presidency, have skyrocketed since Biden’s arrival in the White House on January 20th. February saw 100,000 arrests, a 28% increase over the preceding month. And in March, at a rate of 4,000 arrests per day, the total figure may be even higher. In addition, many of these migrants are unaccompanied minors fleeing poverty and violence in Central America.
The number of migrant children in US custody at the border tripled to 3,250 in the last week of February and the first week of March, according to federal documents. Minors must be moved to shelters, but these had occupancy restrictions due to the pandemic and, even after being lifted, are near overcrowding. In the meantime, many children are being held in substandard facilities, where by law they could only remain for three days.
However, the Biden Administration is reluctant to speak of a crisis. “The situation we are currently facing on the southwest border is difficult. We are addressing it. We are keeping our borders secure, enforcing the laws, and remaining true to our values and principles,” Alejandro Mayorkas, Secretary of Homeland Security, explained in a statement.
Mayorkas acknowledges that the country “is currently tracking more individuals at the southwest border than it has in the last 20 years.” “We are deporting mostly single adults and families. We are not deporting unaccompanied minors,” he adds.
Biden’s team stresses that Trump’s policies, such as dismantling legal immigration channels and abandoning funding and investment in the region, contributed to this situation and condition the short-term response available. “The previous administration completely dismantled the asylum system. The system was destroyed, facilities were shut down, and children were cruelly expelled into the hands of human traffickers. We have had to rebuild the whole system,” Mayorkas explains. “The previous administration disrupted the legal avenues that had been developed for children to safely, efficiently and orderly come to the United States, and also cut off international aid to the northern triangle of Central America.”
But, to critics, it is clear that the new administration was unprepared for the consequences of the shift in tone at the border, at a time when the situation in Central American countries driving their citizens to flee has only worsened with the pandemic. Now, Biden’s responses focus on the very short term – as a problem that can be solved by expanding the capacity of reception facilities – and the very long term – with aid to the countries of origin that will allow for improved living conditions that will deter citizens from migrating. But the concern of many Democrats lies in the medium term. This is when the 2022 legislative elections will take place, in which the Republicans can reap the fruits of the discourse of fear, particularly in states with white populations and depressed economies, where Trump seduced voters in 2016 with a nationalist message.
To lose in 2022 the fragile majorities that Democrats now hold in both houses of Congress would disrupt, among many other things, Biden’s immigration policy project. Despite controlling both Houses, the party is currently realizing how delicate it is to push forward any legislation on the issue.
While working on a very ambitious bill that would allow undocumented immigrants to be granted citizenship in 8 years, Democrats in Congress are poised this week to pass legislation to protect the so-called “dreamers”, people brought to the country illegally by their parents when they were minors. But in a Senate split by 50 senators from each party, even with the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Harris, it is not guaranteed that they will succeed in passing it.
Source: El Pais