Comparing Trump’s and Biden’s vastly different immigration policies

President Trump

Deterrence has been the immigration policy of choice for both parties for decades, but Trump and his closest aides — particularly anti-immigration hardliner Stephen Miller — have taken it to unprecedented extremes.One of Trump’s favorite targets has been asylum, which he calls “a hoax.” He suggests that because most pass the first step — a credible fear screening, set by Congress to be a low bar — but ultimately, only about 25% win asylum, that means most claims are fraudulent.

In reality, Trump and his officials have waged war on the asylum system because they are trying to bar primarily Central Americans fleeing countries ravaged by corruption, violence, poverty and climate change, who, once at the border are by the design of U.S. law difficult to kick out.

U.S. law grants migrants the right to seek asylum, regardless of how they enter the United States. The federal statutes center on “non-refoulement” — not sending people back to countries where they’d probably be persecuted, harmed or killed, based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or particular social group.

U.S. asylum law, conceived of primarily post-WWII, is clearly outdated. Yet Trump’s policies to end it have been consistently met by court challenges. These tactics have included separating families or making them wait for U.S. immigration court appearances in dangerous Mexican border cities; indefinitely detaining others with no chance of bail or parole despite having broken no laws; and, most recently, in the name of “public health,” rapidly “expelling” nearly every migrant, including unaccompanied minors, with no chance to seek asylum, no coronavirus testing and no way to track what happened to them.

So Trump has gone around the courts and Congress with his executive actions, leaving perhaps the biggest bureaucratic tangle a Biden administration would be left to undo, with an even more backlogged immigration court system and inevitable future spikes in migration.

Trump’s pattern of testing institutions and fundamental assumptions about governance with his immigration policy has played out with mixed results.

On perhaps his most infamous policy — family separation — Trump issued an executive order in 2018 to stop the policy his officials still maintain was not a policy amid worldwide outcry, just before a judge ordered an end to the practice and ultimately, required the government to reunite families. And yet, authorities continue to separate families.

Even after a June Supreme Court ruling rejected the administration’s effort to rescind the popular Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, Trump is defying the court and attempting to run out the clock, according to legal experts and lawmakers, refusing to accept new applications and limiting renewals.

Although the president has expressed some sympathy for young immigrants and continues to claim that he’ll propose sweeping comprehensive immigration reform — potentially including a pathway to citizenship for certain immigrants — the Miller camp of his administration has always held sway.

Recently, Trump issued memos freezing most new green card applicants and barring most categories of family- and employment-based immigration through after the election, while sparing large swaths of the agricultural and healthcare industries determined to be essential in the coronavirus response. The administration has also implemented new “wealth test” policies to keep out poor migrants, rejecting those who might use, or whose U.S. citizen children might use, public benefits.

Research shows that immigrants strengthen the economy and typically don’t compete with U.S.-born workers for jobs or lower their wages, and many of the affected industries, as well as Trump officials themselves, have advocated for more immigration, not less.

The administration has sought to restrict citizenship, raising fees for naturalizations and slowing processing of hundreds of thousands of potential 2020 voters while at the same time ratcheting up funding dedicated to vetting and rooting out fraud.

One of Trump’s first moves was to issue his “travel ban” targeting travelers from many Muslim-majority countries, citing national security concerns. Though the ban prompted chaos at airports and the White House, the Supreme Court ultimately upheld a third version of it.

He’s gone on to threaten hundreds of thousands more people already in the U.S., including Venezuelans, Salvadorans and Nepalis, by curbing Temporary Protected Status. And refugee admissions are expected to fall below even the ceiling of 18,000 that the administration set for 2020, the lowest level ever under the modern refugee system, though Miller and others have pushed for zero.

These moves harken back to Trump’s comments in the Oval Office in January 2018, when amid a bipartisan standoff over Dreamers, Trump asked: “What do we want Haitians here for? Why do we want all these people from Africa here? Why do we want all these people from shithole countries?”

He added, “We should have people from places like Norway” — a predominantly white country.

Another of Trump’s early executive orders made every immigrant in the country illegally a priority for arrest, in contrast with Obama’s use of “prosecutorial discretion” to prioritize those with criminal records. And yet, beyond the border, immigration arrests and removals by Immigration and Customs Enforcement have fallen under Trump — though the proportion of those deported without criminal records has more than doubled, according to MPI.

Trump’s acting head of ICE — one of many unconfirmed top officials at a Homeland Security Department riddled with vacancies and wracked by ever-shifting political priorities — recently announced his retirement, reportedly in part over frustration from the White House after the agency announced it would scale back enforcement amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

As Trump has gone through half a dozen Homeland Security heads in less than one term, calls to reform the government’s third-largest agency are growing, particularly after the president dispatched heavily armed, unidentified federal officers from DHS to cities across the country undergoing protests against police brutality and racism.

The militarized response in American communities — at the same time as the Trump campaign is fomenting fear in “law and order” ads demonizing Democratic-led cities — follows Trump’s deployment of the military to the border just before the 2018 midterms, where they remain.

He’s also still operating under a “national emergency” declaration, by which he’s redirected billions in federal funding, including from the Pentagon, toward turning his “build the wall” campaign catchphrase into a reality.

And yet, according to Customs and Border Protection’s June status report, only “three miles of new border wall system [have been] constructed in locations where no barriers previously existed.” There are 657 total miles of barrier along the U.S.-Mexico border, according to the report — 654 built by his predecessors, mostly Obama.

Mexico has not, as Trump promised, paid for the wall; but under threat of tariffs, the administration has cajoled Mexico into taking asylum seekers the president doesn’t want in the U.S. and escalating its own enforcement. The administration also leveraged potential visa restrictions and aid cuts to Central America into sign-offs from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras to take asylum seekers who are not from their countries.

While those agreements were put on hold amid the pandemic, the Trump administration is pushing the Northern Triangle governments to resume — despite the fact that the U.S. has deported scores of migrants who got the coronavirus in U.S. detention, worsening its spread.

If the aggressive push to tick off the last of Trump’s political priorities on immigration amid a pandemic is any indication, another four years would cement the door shut.