Even before Joe Biden takes office as president, his administration is facing a fully democratic immigration crisis.
After repeatedly promising to reverse the Trump administration’s strict immigration and border policies, the incoming Biden administration suddenly realizes that there are consequences. Biden’s message to potential migrants, NBC News reports, is this: Don’t come, at least not yet. A senior transitional official in the Biden administration says migrants “must understand that they will not be able to enter the United States immediately.”
But migrants do not wait. Inspired by the hope of entering the United States under a more moderate administration of Biden, a caravan of about 8,000 Hondurans is currently heading to the southwestern border. On Friday, advanced elements of the caravan collided with Guatemalan soldiers on the border of the two countries, with two separate groups of more than 3,000 people forcing their way into Guatemala. The caravan could reach the US-Mexico border in a matter of weeks.
The news should come as no surprise to anyone who has paid attention to Biden’s campaign rhetoric over the past year. When you promise to end, “the first day,” a Trump program that requires Central American asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their cases are tried, effectively supporting the return to the “capture and release” policies of the past, it is entirely reasonable for thousands of Hondurans to conclude that if they can enter the U.S. after Biden has sworn an oath, they can stay.
Perhaps realizing this, in recent weeks, the incoming administration has struggled to temper its messages across the border in hopes of averting a crisis. In late December, Biden said he would reverse Trump’s immigration policies at a slower pace than he initially promised to avoid “having 2 million people on our border.” It will likely take six months, he said, to create a new system to prosecute tens of thousands of asylum seekers, and his team is “setting the railings” to prevent an increase in illegal immigration this spring.
Well, I’m sorry, but it’s too late. Biden overthrew the railings Trump built when the president-elect promised to end the current administration’s border policies, policies that had been effective in curbing illegal immigration and securing the border during the pandemic.
Now, apprehensions at the southwestern border are rising. As can be said, the numbers of single adults from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador captured in December are the highest they have been in four years.
And no wonder: these countries have been hit hard, not only by the pandemic, which decimated their fragile economies, but also by a devastating pair of hurricanes in November. Men looking for work in the United States are likely to make up the majority of the Honduran caravan, the first of many such caravans we will see in the coming months when people desperate to work cross the border and seek asylum.
Under these circumstances, Biden’s request to migrants not to enter the U.S. illegally will still be completely ignored, and Biden will have no guilt other than himself.
John Daniel Davidson is political editor of The Federalist and a senior member of the Texas Public Policy Foundation.