Biden’s Achilles Heel

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Immigration has become a major political issue in an election year likely to see a rematch between former Republican President Donald Trump and his Democratic successor, President Joe Biden.

The unprecedented chaos at the Mexican-American border and in major American cities that has been caused by the Biden administration’s immigration policies has moved to the centre of political debate and public awareness.

Immigration is Biden’s Achilles heel. “He is right up against the ropes on this,” said Tony Payan, the director of the Center for the United States and Mexico at Rice University’s Baker Institute in Houston

In his first days in office in 2021, Biden rolled back several Trump-era policies, including halting construction of the Mexican border wall; restoring refugee acceptance levels; ending a pandemic pause on immigration processing; and scrapping a travel ban from a group of mainly Muslim countries. 

Over the past three years, the Biden administration has effectively rewritten immigration law, creating an entirely new stream of quasi-legal immigration under the rubric of “parole.”

This gives migrants permission to stay in the country temporarily while an application for admission is considered. Biden has used it to grant temporary stays to more than a million people who have either come from unstable countries or successfully obtained an immigration appointment through an app. These people are dispersed across the country and supported chiefly by state and local governments and government-funded NGOs.

As of September 2023, an estimated 3.8 million have entered the United States. Of these, 2.3 million have been given Notices to Appear (NTAs) before an immigration court, which could allow them to stay in the U.S. in a “twilight status” for years before a court date.

Of the rest, an estimated 1.5 million are illegal immigrants who snuck across the border or overstayed their visas and remain, with the government having no idea of their whereabouts, and with Democratic-dominated “sanctuary cities” actively thwarting the ability of federal immigration officials to identify and deport them. Undocumented migrants are sleeping on streets across the country, and city resources are overwhelmed.

The state of Texas, where the shallow Rio Grande River serves as the border between the U.S. and Mexico, has come under particularly recurring scrutiny over efforts to curb border crossings. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, has sent more than 100,000 migrants on buses to Democratic-led cities, even as frigid conditions set in during the winter. Previously, he had strung up razor wire on the border and installed buoy barriers on the Rio Grande.

On Jan. 12, three migrants drowned in the Rio Grande, which deepened the feud between Texas state authorities and their federal counterparts. The Biden administration complained that Texas national guardsmen had prevented federal Border Patrol police from reaching the river to try to rescue the three migrants.

The incident occurred after Abbott had effectively blocked U.S. officials from accessing a wide swath of land in the border town of Eagle Pass, including Shelby Park, used by border officials to process migrants. Shelby Park lies in a major corridor for migrants entering illegally from Mexico and is at the centre of Abbott’s aggressive attempts to stop them, known as Operation Lone Star. 

Hundreds of protesters from around the country reached the small Texas town of Quemado, about 30 kilometres northwest of Eagle Pass, on Feb. 3 to vent their frustration over illegal immigration. The protest group, called “Take Our Border Back,” began its multi-day drive earlier in the week in Virginia.

At the rally, vendors sold shirts, flags and hats promoting former President Donald Trump, who has motivated his base voters with calls for more restrictive border practices.

There are Republicans who even claim the Democratic Party changed its immigration policy when its leaders began to hope that they could “import” voters to compensate for the loss of voters that Democratic policies were alienating.

In a speech Jan. 31, Republican House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson told Congress that “We have a catastrophe at the southern border. It is because the border has been deliberately opened wide that we see the terrific horrors that are taking place across the border right now.”

The border crisis, even more than dissension over the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, might prove to be Biden’s downfall this November. From the viewpoint of the anti-immigrant protestors, every migrant entering the country in effect provides a citizen’s vote for Trump.