Biden's Off-Beat Dance Around Immigrant Detention Policy Leaves Public Confused and Frustrated
The Biden administration is under fire again for what critics say is over-promising and under-delivering on immigration. Although immigration was a key theme of Biden’s campaign1, the administration continues to uphold Title 42, defend the practice of not providing bond hearings to detained migrants in front of the Supreme Court,2 and as of Tuesday of this week, USCIS had approved only 160 parole requests from Afghans overseas and denied 930 applications out of 40,000, according to Camilo Montoya-Melnick at CBS.
Also new this week was the arrival of new immigrant detainees at Berks County immigrant detention center in Pennsylvania, which had previously been emptied of detainees back in March 2021. ICE had said at the time that Berks would remain operational, but news this week that a few dozen women had arrived at the Berks facility shows just how temporary the reduction of detained populations can be. (Berks was never “closed” officially, but it was empty.) Local immigration attorneys who have represented families at Berks for years are forced to gear up again for the intensive work of representing detained migrants in removal cases.
By the way, shout out to Laura Benshoff at WHYY for her reporting on this. Give her a follow over on Twitter.
The Washington Post editorial board was particularly scathing yesterday in their criticisms of the Biden administration’s failure to close immigrant detention centers, writing:
“Mr. Biden correctly believed that privately run migrant detention centers, overseen by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, should be shut down — he said so clearly as a candidate for president. Soon after taking office, he signed an executive order to phase out the use of private prisons for federal inmates, but stopped short of fulfilling his promise to do so in the case of migrant detainees.
The administration’s weak-kneed wavering on fulfilling the president’s promise is unacceptable. The least it can do is insist on decent conditions and health care for the migrants incarcerated in private facilities. That’s not a big ask; it’s a minimal expectation in a civilized society.”
The failure to close immigrant detention centers feeds into larger criticisms of the Biden administration’s immigration policies. There is a sense from immigrant rights organizations looking back on one year of the Biden presidency that the administration has missed key opportunities to deliver on campaign promises. The American Immigration Council, for example, cites “unfulfilled promises”. Immigrant rights organizers, too, have been particularly vocal about Biden’s “failure to deliver.”
The New Yorker recently published a more sustained inside look at how one White House official, Andrea Flores, grew increasingly exasperated with the Biden administration’s failure to take advantage of opportunities to improve immigration, despite the obviously constrained conditions of Congressional gridlock and federal court orders. This confirms the impression that I get from people working more closely on policy issues and affirms the Washington Post’s characterization of Biden as “weak-kneed”.
The Migration Policy Institute recently argued that Biden has done more on immigration than the public acknowledges. Indeed, there are some examples of progress on particular issues. This week, for instance, the Department of Homeland Security launched a new web portal to make it easier for military veterans who have been deported to find information about applying to re-enter the country. As a veteran myself, I see that as the right thing to do. But after the Trump administration’s full-court press on immigration policy changes, immigrant rights advocates are—justifiably, I believe—expecting more.
Observations from the available evidence suggest that the VOA’s assessment of Biden’s immigration policy as “incoherent” may be the most accurate. It’s hard to tell where the administration stands, defending indefinite detention in court one day then taking a critical stance against detention the next in order to justify what Stef Kight at Axios claims could be a potentially massive expansion of the DHS’ immigrant monitoring program known as ‘alternatives to detention.‘
So what is the Biden administration’s position on immigrant detention, or immigration policy more generally? It’s very hard to see any underlying principle guiding these policy changes. Perhaps this is all the result of some three-dimension chess strategy, polling, and focus-grouping. I don’t know, because I am (thankfully) not in the world of political strategy-making. But from where I sit and from what I am hearing, Biden’s immigration policies are doing little more than leaving people confused and frustrated.
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See the Biden campaign’s immigration page here: https://joebiden.com/immigration/.
See the ACLU’s position on Garland v. Gonzalez here: https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/the-biden-administration-is-on-the-wrong-side-in-this-crucial-supreme-court-immigration-case.