BIDEN WARNED AGAINST FAMILY DETENTIONS
Top Democrats on record opposing migrant policy shift
Top Democrats are warning President Joe Biden against restarting the controversial practice of detaining migrant families who cross the U.S. southern border without authorization.
“I urge you to learn from the mistakes of your predecessors and abandon any plans to implement this failed policy,” Sen. Dick Durbin, DIll., the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat; Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.; and 17 other senators wrote in a letter sent to the White House on Sunday and shared with the Los Angeles Times. Family detention, the senators argued, is “ineffective and impractical as an immigration management tool.”
As he prepares for an expected 2024 presidential campaign, Biden has tried to distance himself from the left, showing more willingness to crack down on illegal immigration and approving a GOP-backed bill to block an overhaul of the District of Columbia’s criminal code. The Senate Democrats’ letter amounts to an attempt to warn Biden against taking that effort too far.
The missive is also an indication of the potential of immigration issues to divide Democrats as Biden tries to reduce the large number of migrants seeking to enter the U.S. and claim asylum.
Most of the letter’s signatories — just over one-third of the Senate Democratic caucus — come from the party’s progressive wing, including California’s Alex Padilla and former presidential candidates Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. Some moderates, including Sens. Tim Kaine, D-Va., and Catherine Cortez-Masto, D-Nev., added their names, too.
Resuming family detentions would represent a significant shift from Biden’s previous positions. The president ended the practice and unwound a series of Trump-era immigration restrictions during the first few months of his administration, vowing a more humane approach.
In recent months, however, Biden administration officials studying how to manage the record number of migrants showing up at the southern border have discussed the possibility of once again locking up migrant children and their parents.
During fiscal year 2022, 2.76 million immigrants crossed the U.S. border illegally, shattering the previous annual record by more than 1 million, according to Customs and Border Protection data.