Biden visits border for first time as critics condemn his migrant crackdown

President Joe Biden on Sunday landed in Texas to visit the US-Mexico border for the first time in his nearly two years as commander-in-chief, even as lawmakers and immigrant rights advocates have widely condemned his administration’s latest hardline response to the deepening humanitarian emergency there.

Biden – who is due in Mexico City this week for an international summit – made a brief pit stop in El Paso, a recent ground zero for the consequences of a US immigration system that he has readily acknowledged is deeply broken.

The reliably blue border city in blood red Texas has been struggling for months to triage thousands of stranded migrants and asylum seekers, many of whom have had little choice but to sleep on the streets in cold, rain, and squalor.

Biden greeted local politicians at the airport, including Texas’s hardline Republican governor Greg Abbott, who has courted controversy with his stringent border policies, including bussing migrants to Democratic cities in the north-east. Abbott handed Biden a letter that read in part: “Your visit to our southern border with Mexico today is $20bn too little and two years too late.”

Biden then later traveled to the Bridge of the Americas border crossing, where northbound cars lined up to cross into El Paso from Juárez, Mexico. Wearing a suit and his trademark sunglasses, Biden chatted to local law enforcement officers and watched demonstrations of bordering policing, including by a canine unit searching a car for contrabrand food items as well as other techniques for finding drugs or helping migrants in medical distress.

Biden, accompanied by several members of border patrol, then also visited a migrant welcome center and a stretch of the border wall that runs between El Paso and Juárez. The meetings took place with no press present aside from those watching at a distance. Biden answered a brief shouted question by promising more help for the border situation. “They need a lot of resources. We’re going to get it for them,” he said.

Biden’s first trip to the US-Mexico border since ascending to the nation’s highest office follows a record-breaking fiscal year of roughly 2.4 million migrant encounters there, amid a new normal of mass forced displacement because of regional instability, growing wealth disparities, climate disaster, and targeted persecution in various countries throughout the hemisphere.

It also comes mere days after the administration announced new changes to federal migration-related policies, which engendered immediate and intense backlash from pro-immigrant organizations and progressive members of Biden’s own party.

“For once, just once, I’d like to see this administration make the moral argument to the rest of the country that we need to put in place an effective, humane, accessible, welcoming, and compassionate system of protection at the border,” said Dylan Corbett, executive director of El Paso’s Hope Border Institute.

These latest policy developments, announced Thursday, include an even more severe crackdown at the US-Mexico border through the increased use of expedited removal, where migrants are rapidly deported without ever seeing a judge.

They also expand a highly criticized Trump-era practice that allows border authorities to quickly expel migrants and would-be asylum seekers back to Mexico or elsewhere, without even the chance to ask for asylum.

This controversial measure – which began amid the pandemic as an invocation of public health law but has warped into a cynical immigration tool – will now be deployed to target Nicaraguans, Haitians and Cubans for expulsion to Mexico, after a similar move against Venezuelans in Octoberwas followed by a significant drop in the number of people from that country arriving at the US-Mexico border.

The Biden administration coupled these heightened deterrence mechanisms, in part, with an announcement of more legal pathways for at least temporary admittance to the US for a limited number of Cubans, Nicaraguans, Haitians and Venezuelans who can afford to bankroll their own commercial travel, own an unexpired passport, and have someone stateside who is willing to sponsor their application, alongside other requirements.

Instead, Corbett excoriated the administration’s new approach as an entrenchment of “dangerous, ineffective, and inhumane policy” and equated the strategy to “a broken promise”.