Two Years of Biden’s Immigration Policies
10 actions and their impact
By Elizabeth Jacobs on January 31, 2023
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Elizabeth Jacobs is the director of regulatory affairs and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies.
January 21, 2023, marked the half-way point of President Biden’s first term and, after two years, his immigration record has a lot to say. Here is a review of Biden’s 10 most impactful actions with regard to border security, interior enforcement, and immigration benefits since he took office in January 2021.
Border Security
As CIS covered in its reports on President Biden’s first days in office, the Biden administration swiftly took action to rescind deterrence policies put in place by the Trump administration at the U.S.-Mexico border. As a result, the Biden administration has overseen an historic humanitarian crisis that has remarkably worsened with nearly each passing month. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has reported encountering over 4.1 million aliens at the southern border between fiscal years (FY) 2021 and FY 2022 (1.7 million and 2.2 million, respectively), not including an estimated 1.125 million aliens who were detected by officers but evaded apprehension (known colloquially as “got-aways”).1 Alarmingly, CBP reported encountering over 251,000 migrants at the southern border in the month of December 2022 alone, exceeding the number for any month in recorded history during a season when apprehensions should be at their lowest levels.2
Despite these figures, President Biden has failed to implement any policies to deter illegal entrants. Instead, his administration put forth reforms that are meant to hide mass illegal immigration from public view by accelerating the processing, transport, and issuance of parole to recent arrivals, under the banner of creating “safe, orderly, and legal pathways” for prospective migrants. Below is a recap of the Biden administration’s most consequential actions on the border.
Termination of the “Remain in Mexico” Policy. Immediately upon taking office, President Biden announced that he would suspend the Migration Protection Protocols (MPP, commonly known as “Remain in Mexico”) program, the Trump administration’s most successful deterrent to illegal entry. MPP was originally implemented in January 2019 by U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) then-Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. Relying upon authority in INA § 235(b)(2)(C), MPP allowed DHS to return certain (non-Mexican and non-UAC (unaccompanied alien children)) aliens caught entering the United States illegally or without proper documentation back to Mexico to wait for their removal hearings3.
https://cis.org/Report/Two-Years-Bidens-Immigration-Policies
