In calls with House lawmakers this week, Biden government officials have repeatedly emphasized that they have inherited a disaster from the Trump administration and said the solutions would not be easy or quick. In a separate call with Democratic media advisers in Hill, White House officials reiterated that the “real crisis is in Central America,” according to several people on the call. Biden and his team are emphasizing the “root causes” of the migration outbreaks and their renewed diplomatic efforts with Central American countries, which lapsed during the Trump administration.
The White House has liaised with outside groups and teams for high-level Democrats outside the Hill to coordinate messages, too, with the aim of ensuring that all stakeholders are paddling in the same direction.
This coordination, along with the recognition of the breadth of the situation, has been welcomed by many Democrats. After joining the House Democrats in a virtual private meeting with Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Deputy Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) Scribbled “hallelujah” on a sheet of paper. paper next to your other notes.
“Because they were saying, ‘Look, this is not the problem with HHS or DHS, but that every federal agency would now be involved’ in this project,” said Cleaver. “It was important to hear that the government does not believe that it has already arrived in Nirvana. We have a long and persistent problem on our southern border. “
The government’s revised approach is tacit recognition that its initial stance – in which they downplayed the problem and vehemently refused to call it a crisis – was not working, at least politically. But when it comes to really fixing the conditions that force migrants to flee their countries of origin, the White House has a lot of work ahead of it.
For the president, it is not as simple as resuming where he left off during the Obama administration, when he disputed diplomatic efforts with countries in the North Triangle such as Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. It also involves reviewing a drastically altered immigration system by Trump and adding capacity to deal with a wave of migrants across the border – many of whom are being expelled immediately.
The number of unaccompanied children arriving at the border reached a monthly record in March, surpassing the last record in May 2019. In total, about 170,000 people were apprehended by the border patrol last month. About 100,000 of these migrants were single adults, who were routinely removed from the United States by the Biden government under a Trump-era public health authority.
Despite the problems, there is virtually no prospect of immigration reform in a Congress with such narrow margins. Biden’s broad immigration plan is stuck in the House, where there are no votes yet for approval by his own party, according to several Democratic sources. Senate Republicans – who were at the table to discuss reform in 2013 – are instead making trips to the border to make the issue a weapon before next November’s elections.
Some border democrats say they appreciate Biden’s efforts to address the root causes of the increase in migrants. But they argue that the government needs a plan to deal with the immediate influx of migrants now, too.
“We already know what the root causes are. We can send researchers there, but we already know the answers, ”said Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), one of the few Democrats who has publicly expressed his concerns about how Biden is dealing with the issue. “The question is, how do you approach this problem? Private investment will be essential. Foreign aid and private investment take time. It won’t be done today, tomorrow. “
The immigration tax system remains one of Biden’s biggest challenges in the first months of his presidency. The president has relatively high marks on issues such as the pandemic and the economy. But only 34% of Americans said they approve of the way the president is dealing with immigration, according to an NPR / Marist poll conducted late last month.
Some immigrant rights advocates say it is partly because Biden and his government took longer to come together in a clear strategy in the first weeks of his term, with much of the focus on the coronavirus pandemic and the help package to help to solve it.
“The White House needed to be, or should have been, more proactive, framing and telling the story three weeks before it really started doing it,” said Lorella Praeli, executive director of Community Change Action, a progressive grassroots group. . “If you don’t define the narrative, you will give your opponents the power to do so.”
Democratic and activist frustration with Biden’s continued use of Trump-era authority – known as Title 42 – is also simmering to expel most people found at the border. Publicly and privately, the White House told reporters and Hill’s team that they have no deadline to stop using authority.
In recent weeks, the government has tried to show signs of agility by sending delegations to the border. They have been increasingly coordinating with Democrats in the border districts, too, after some of those members initially said they were left out.
Last week, Biden appointed Vice President Kamala Harris as the new coordinator for the Northern Triangle and Mexico and, on Thursday, reversed a Trump-era policy that allowed immigration services to reject asylum applications if any space was left blank. Conservatives say the reversal of Trump’s policies and Biden’s language are creating the situation at the border, but immigration experts say that few migrants make the dangerous journey based solely on who is in the White House.
The government also ended Trump’s “stay in Mexico” policy, which forced migrants to await their claims on the Mexican side of the border in tent camps, and reinstated the Central American juvenile program, allowing children to submit requests for asylum in their countries of origin. Still, DHS Secretary Mayorkas said the United States is on track to meet more people at the border than in the “past 20 years”.
While Biden faces an increase in the number of migrants fleeing the violence, poverty and devastation of hurricanes, he and his officials emphasize to the Democrats and the public the cyclical nature of the migration outbreaks, which also occurred during the Obama and Trump years.
As vice president, some of Biden’s most important visits to Central America at the time coincided with peaks of unaccompanied young migrants crossing the border from the United States to Mexico, and he took on the role of administration spokesman.
In the spring of 2014, when migrants’ tickets were in the headlines, Biden stopped in Guatemala. He told reporters that the situation at the border was “unsustainable and unsustainable”. But even so, Biden spoke about the problem as a matter of humanity, sharing that he “cannot imagine the desperation” that leads a family to send their son into the arms of criminal traffickers on the dangerous journey.
Years earlier, when Biden first traveled to Central America as vice president, he sought to change the way the United States approached the relationship, advisers and officials recalled. Obama and Biden have prioritized deepening partnerships with governments, along with getting more money for depressed areas in the region.
The process of releasing resources took time. But in mid-2015, Congress devoted more than $ 1 billion to the North Triangle over a two-year period. Obama and Biden began a more concentrated effort to encourage people fleeing violence, especially children, to seek asylum abroad, instead of trying to cross Mexico to the United States.
There has been some progress. Studies have found that there have been sharp drops in the number of migrants’ seizures at the United States border from 50 counties in El Salvador between 2014 and 2018, said Mark Schneider, senior consultant at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and former head of Latin America America and the Caribbean at USAID. In the same municipalities, homicides decreased by 40% in about a three-year period.
But despite the relative successes in El Salvador, said Schneider, the number of migrants from Guatemala and Honduras to the United States has increased.
“Did that solve the problem? No, obviously not, ”said Francisco González, a scholar from Mexico and a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. “Did they allocate enough resources? No, it wasn’t even close enough. And did Vice President Biden learn about the southern border of the United States and Central America? The answer is, yes, it did. “
“He came with this portfolio. He did what he could. But it is a speck in the ocean. “
Fast forward to Biden’s turn in the Oval Office and he is again pressing Congress to send aid to Central America and Mexico. Its administration is also rushing to expand its capacity to humanly house an increasing number of migrant children in emergency entry points – such as stadiums, churches and summer camps – instead of keeping them in overcrowded border patrol facilities.
Facing calls to allow media access to the facility, management allowed only a small number of reporters to enter one of the border patrol this week. Overburdened government agencies are also releasing some migrants at the border without any paperwork.
“We can’t just deal with the symptoms,” said Cleaver, the House Democrat. “This is all we have been dealing with for the past two, maybe three decades, are the symptoms. This is not going to work anymore. “