Donald Trump is no policy thinker. He doesn’t write white papers or, presumably, read them. But there is perhaps no issue that Trump is more clear-eyed about than immigration.
What’s his goal? Less of it—less illegal immigration, and less legal immigration, too.
As president, Trump overpromised and underdelivered. For example, there’s no wall, and not just because Mexico refused to pay for it. But he still concretely shifted immigration policy, making America less welcoming by design, which his base understood and appreciated.
But that doesn’t mean the rest of the country appreciated it. During his presidency, most people felt that Trump was too cruel, too full of mean things to say (“shithole countries”) and even meaner things to do (separating families at the border). Trump’s lawyers argued that soap for regular bathing was not technically something they had to provide to children separated from their parents. The public reacted with anger. In 2020, Gallup reported the highest support for increased immigration since they started surveying the issue in 1965.
In the 2020 campaign, Joe Biden sought to capitalize on the rise in welcoming sentiment, promising to “immediately end Trump’s assault on the dignity of immigrant communities.” During the final presidential debate, Biden promised to propose legislation that would create “a pathway to citizenship for over 11 million undocumented people” and scolded Trump for his family separation policy. Biden was elected with a mandate to make our immigration system kinder and gentler than the one Trump had engineered.
This mandate has vanished. After more than 8.8 million migrant encounters by border agents during Biden’s presidency—with at least 2.4 million people from that surge allowed into the country, more than the population of 15 states—Americans have grown exhausted with hearing about motels, recreation centers, and parks being used to house the rush of migrants. Many of these migrants have court dates years in the future to adjudicate their claims to asylum, and many won’t show up on their appointed date anyway. Polls show public approval of Biden’s immigration record hovering around an abysmal 28 percent.
In recent months, Biden, as good a political observer as any, has shifted rightward on immigration. He promised to shut down the border if given the power to by Congress, only for Senate Republicans to tank the deal their own negotiators fought for. Now, Biden is reportedly looking into executive orders that echo Trump’s past policies but hasn’t committed to anything yet.
We’ve had two presidents with straightforward, achievable goals, which were not diametrically opposed but rather existed on completely different axes. Trump wanted to severely restrict immigration at the risk of inflicting cruelty, while Biden wanted to prevent cruelty at the risk of inducing skyrocketing immigration. Both of them succeeded in their initial goals, and were punished for it.
The Restrictionist
In the 2016 Republican primary, Trump easily distinguished himself, partly by breaking with conservative orthodoxy on several issues including trade, entitlements, and foreign policy. But on immigration, Trump distinguished himself as a true hard-liner, a man nobody else could one-up. Seeking to lead a party that had once been quite welcoming to immigrants under popular, conservative presidents like Ronald Reagan, Trump promised to build a wall on our southern border, conduct mass deportations, ban the entry of foreign Muslims, and limit legal immigration. It turned out to be good politics, at least in the short term. Trump assembled a new Republican coalition, one that sacrificed some suburban and educated voters while running up the score with working-class and rural voters, bringing him across the Electoral College finish line.
On Trump’s most outlandish promises, he either failed or just stopped trying. He only built 47 miles of new border wall and 33 miles of secondary wall, and updated 372 miles of old parts of the wall. (By wall, I mean fencing, not the “concrete going very high” that he had promised.)
Part of Trump’s failure was his own inability to communicate with Congress in any kind of consistent, coherent way. Democratic Majority Leader Chuck Schumer actually offered Trump a deal in January 2018 with $25 billion in wall funding, reversing years of heated anti-wall rhetoric, in exchange for permanent protection for undocumented immigrants who arrived as children, known as “Dreamers” and given temporary legal status in Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Trump snubbed the offer. Then in December of that same year, after the Senate passed by voice vote a spending bill to keep the government open, Trump announced that he wouldn’t sign it unless it contained wall funding, and openly welcomed a government shutdown. Democrats called the bluff, and a 35-day government shutdown ensued. After Republicans took a pounding in the polls, Trump climbed down and accepted a bill without wall funding, while asserting the right to divert Pentagon money to wall construction. That policy was soon hit with lawsuits and made its way through the courts with varying outcomes, with the money marked for the wall partially being spent until Biden took office and shut the program down. The wall went from a seemingly ridiculous promise to a restrictionist possibility to a mostly-failure, thanks to Trump’s unwillingness to compromise and his weak understanding of legislative dynamics.
As for Mexico paying for it? They didn’t contribute a penny.
Though Trump was mostly talk when it came to the wall, he did substantively change American immigration policy. Almost immediately upon entering the Oval Office, he slapped a travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries (though by leaving off many large nations such as Indonesia, Egypt, and Pakistan, the executive order was far different than the “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” he pledged to impose during the campaign.) The travel ban survived court challenges and vehement criticism to become a popular law.
Trump was also heavily influenced by his doctrinaire immigration restrictionist senior adviser, Stephen Miller, on a range of policies.
Influenced by Miller, Trump slashed the refugee ceiling by 80 percent, reducing the numbers of refugees we accept by more than 65,000 per year. (Refugees are authorized for permanent resettlement after a lengthy vetting process, whereas those seeking asylum typically arrive without advance notice and before adjudication of their claims.) He prosecuted people for immigration offenses at a record clip, nearly 100,000 in 2018 alone. Though his deportations fell far short of his lofty promises, he still managed hundreds of thousands per year. His “Remain in Mexico” policy sent 70,000 migrants back to wait in Mexico for their asylum hearings.
Trump’s biggest and most impactful immigration achievement was Title 42. Nicknamed “a Stephen Miller special” by a disgruntled aide, the policy equipped a rarely used, little-known section of a 1944 law empowering public health agencies to prohibit migration for the purposes of preventing infectious disease outbreaks. In March 2020, the Trump administration, via the CDC, invoked the policy, which was instantly used to turn away hundreds of thousands of potential migrants who otherwise could have stayed in the country while awaiting their asylum cases. Importantly, the Biden administration kept Title 42 in place as encounters at the border started to surge, and by the time the policy was finally sunsetted in May 2023, it had been responsible for 2.8 million migrant expulsions.
Trump delivered for immigration restrictionists, but his perceived cruelty was too much for most Americans to bear. His “zero tolerance” policy at the border, also driven by Miller, announced in April 2018, separated 5,500 children from their parents. Ostensibly, children would only be separated while their parents were detained awaiting trial, but there was no process for reuniting them. (One recent report estimated that 1,000 children were still separated from their families.)
The policy was viewed as inhumane and cruel, and it became very unpopular. One highly covered poll from June 2018 showed that 66 percent of Americans opposed the separations, even when respondents were told that the policy was meant to discourage illegal border crossings. The Trump administration, attempting to save face, first blamed it on Barack Obama before tabling the policy two months after it was announced. But the moral stain lingered into the 2020 election.
Under Trump, America became a less welcoming place, through simple measures like lowering the refugee cap, through creative means like Title 42, and through cruel moves like family separation. Restrictionist hard-liners rejoiced, and those who cared about America’s image as a friendly nation of immigrants worked furiously to unseat Trump and elect his successor, Joe Biden.
The Optimist
Biden came into office knowing that Americans wanted a less cruel immigration system, and he acted immediately to try to grant them one. Biden instructed his Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agencies to eliminate the words illegal alien and assimilation and replace them with undocumented noncitizen and integration. On Day 1, he revoked Trump’s travel ban, reaffirmed America’s commitment to DACA, ended the redirection of funds toward border wall construction, and put a 100-day pause on deportations. He also created a task force to reunite families separated under the Trump administration and rescinded the order that caused family separation in the first place. He quickly suspended and then terminated “Remain in Mexico” over fears that the migrants were being mistreated and victimized while they were waiting.
In addition, the Biden administration lifted the refugee cap from 18,000 to 125,000 and launched Welcome Corps, a program allowing small groups of Americans to sponsor refugees in their communities. Biden limited the types of crimes that lead to deportation, instructing ICE to focus only on those who pose a large risk to public safety, like those convicted of rape, murder, or gang violence. Migrants convicted of low-level drug offenses, driving under the influence, simple assault, or money laundering would not be deported. Biden rescinded Title 42 in May 2023, putting an end to the pandemic’s massive changes in asylum policy. “Temporary Protected Status” (TPS), which protects migrants from potential deportation, was expanded under Biden to include over a million migrants.
The administration has also expanded humanitarian parole, which provides up to two years of legal status to migrants with financial sponsors. One parole program serves immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. A second focuses on Ukraine, and a third on Afghanistan. An even larger parole program was created for people who make border appointments ahead of time using an online app called CBP One. Despite the law allowing parole to be used “only on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit,” Biden has applied it to about a million migrants, and combined with DACA and the TPS expansions, 2.3 million migrants currently have temporary legal status in America and cannot be deported, yet are not on a path to permanent residency.
Partly as a result of (or at least in tandem with) Biden’s gentler immigration policies, there has been a massive surge in illegal migration to the United States. From February 2021 to January 2024 there have been 8.8 million migrant encounters by the CBP. This is completely unprecedented. No single year during Obama’s presidency saw even a million encounters, and Trump’s worst three-year period totaled about 1.7 million.
Biden has unquestionably made the country more welcoming to migrants. But he’s been greatly punished for it. His deportation pause was blocked by the judiciary within six days. His changes to the deportation qualifications enraged rank-and-file ICE agents. His parole for the 450,000 migrants who set up CBP One appointments in advance at ports of entry has incentivized more people to make appointments, but it doesn’t seem to have taken any bite out of the millions of migrants still coming across illegally between ports of entry.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott stoked public backlash by transporting more than 100,000 migrants to other cities, and other migrants moved to places on their own. Vast resources have been spent to house them. Recreation centers, motels, and public parks have been repurposed. Mostly progressive urbanites and their mostly progressive mayors have grown increasingly frustrated with the federal government and Biden. The media spotlight has intensified, and public opinion of Biden’s handling of immigration has tanked. Polls consistently show voters caring a great deal about immigration, and trusting Trump far more on the issue.
In response, Biden has tried to triangulate, attempting some restrictive reforms even as he establishes new legal pathways to entry. On the eve of Title 42’s expiration, he announced plans to establish screening centers in Latin America to help stanch the flow. On the day Title 42 expired, Biden announced a change to asylum rules (called Circumvention of Lawful Pathways) that would make the vast majority of migrants (around 88 percent) ineligible for asylum. The executive order was immediately challenged by the ACLU before being struck down by a federal judge; it has been allowed to stay in effect by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals until a final ruling is issued. However, the new program has barely been used because border security resources are so strained, only being applied to around 7 percent of new migrant encounters in the first few months of the rule.
Biden committed himself in late January to a real reversal if Congress agreed to pass the restrictive bipartisan bill Senate negotiators produced. If passed, the bill would have automatically shut down the border—anyone found crossing would be promptly removed—once the average number of border crossers surpassed 5,000 a day. (As America is already well over that threshold, the crackdown authority would have been triggered immediately.) Asylum requirements would tighten, ICE detention capacity would be increased, the CBP One parole program would end, hundreds more ICE employees would be hired, and single-adult asylum seekers would be detained rather than released with court dates.
Biden wholeheartedly supported the deal. But even before the text of the bill was released, the bipartisan negotiators were thrown under the bus by Republican leaders, starting with Trump, who pushed Republicans not to make a deal. Next came House Speaker Mike Johnson, who declared the bill “dead on arrival.” Before we could even find out if that was true, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and almost every Senate Republican voted to filibuster the deal, which had been chiefly negotiated by Republican Senator James Lankford, no centrist himself.
Less than a month after the bill was killed, news leaked that the Biden administration was considering executive orders intended to slow down the rate of illegal immigration. The most significant of these potential orders would use Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act to bar migrants from crossing the border without using ports of entry—if they are found between ports of entry, they’ll be turned back, rather than turned loose with court dates years in the future. Since the large majority of migrants have crossed the border without using ports of entry in the past year, such an action would presumably be quite helpful, if border agencies have sufficient resources to carry it out, and if they’re able to get past lawsuits likely to come from the ACLU and other progressive groups. (Trump tried using 212[f] in 2018 to do the same thing, and it was blocked first in federal court in California, with the block being upheld in the Ninth Circuit, and then upheld again by the Supreme Court.) To be clear, though, the executive orders do not exist yet, and there’s no clarity as to when or whether they ever will.
Trump wanted to severely restrict immigration at the risk of inflicting cruelty, while Biden wanted to prevent cruelty at the risk of inducing skyrocketing immigration. Both of them succeeded in their initial goals, and were punished for it.
Biden’s zigzagging on immigration makes sense from a man who managed to stay in the political center for 36 years in the Senate and eight as vice president. Trump is not undergoing any reversals, and by tanking the bipartisan border bill, he is handing Biden a golden opportunity to take up the mantle of a centrist on immigration, someone neither cruel nor willing to accept chaos. But Biden has to act fast, act decisively, and communicate effectively—and he’s running out of time.
After three years of policy whiplash, I do not know what Biden actually thinks about immigration policy, only that he does. He keenly but clumsily observes, and so far, he seems to only get punished.
Trump, on the other hand, acts first and observes second. Now campaigning for president, he once again talks a big game, promising to carry out the “largest deportation operation” in U.S. history. He has promised to end birthright citizenship for children of illegal immigrants, reinstate “Remain in Mexico,” somehow revive Title 42 without any public health emergency to justify it, and deny entry to “Marxists” and “communists.” He’ll of course be building more wall, he says.
While Trump promises to go back to the old favorites, presumably Biden, if elected, would continue to be guided by some combination of his heart and his political calculations—right now, he’s on a political journey from the median voter of 2020 to the median voter of 2024. His problem is that he’s behind the curve and hasn’t yet convinced the voters.
The public wants a system that is both humane and orderly, which neither Biden nor Trump has been able to deliver. If Biden is reelected by the same coalition of anti-Trump voters that elected him in the first place, he’d once again attempt bipartisanship and technocracy. If, partly because of frustration with Biden’s border management, Trump is returned to the White House, surely bringing Stephen Miller back with him, we’ll be welcoming back the real, substantive, sometimes careless immigration restrictionism of Trump’s first term. The choice is a stark one, and it is yours.
