Democrats face tough choices on immigration
Democrats who long blistered the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration policies are suddenly in a tough political bind.
The Biden administration is responding to a wave of children crossing the southern border into the U.S. with some of the very tactics that evoked moral outrage from Democrats when former President Donald Trump embraced them. That includes accommodating children in hastily improvised lockups, spurring Republicans to argue that Democrats are now the ones throwing “kids in cages.”
The moment leaves many Democrats with few good options. There’s little appetite to condemn President Joe Biden in the same terms as Trump. Biden, after all, is pushing for a massive immigration overhaul that includes prized goals such as a pathway to citizenship for millions and has spoken of the need to treat those entering the U.S. with compassion.
But in taking a softer stance, Democrats and immigration advocates also risk being branded by the GOP as hypocrites.
“I have chosen to not allow myself to get into my feelings about how there are still these detention centers being popped up by this administration because it makes me very, very angry,” said Amanda Elise Salas, a Democratic political operative in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley who worked for Biden’s presidential campaign.
Salas said that she understands “that change comes in increments” and that Democrats don’t have enough congressional seats to make Biden’s immigration agenda an immediate reality. But she added, “It doesn’t make any sense how
we aren’t looking at this in a radical way.”
Trump expanded and fortified border walls while championing “zero tolerance” policies that made it more difficult to seek U.S. asylum and briefly even separated immigrant parents and children.
Biden has used executive actions to begin rolling back much of that, but a sweeping plan he announced his first day in office to remake the immigration system has stalled in Congress. Instead, the Democratic-controlled House passed two smallerscale bills Thursday that offer a process to obtain U.S. citizenship for immigrants brought to the country illegally as children and extend legal status to farm workers and their families.
Winning issue?
Both initiatives won some GOP support, helping their chances in a Senate split 50-50. But Republicans have also signaled that they see continuing to hammer Biden on border issues as a winner heading into 2022’s midterm elections.
The number of immigrants being stopped at the U.S. southern border surged to nearly 100,000 in February alone. Enough of those were children without their parents that the Biden administration has reopened
a Trump administration facility in remote Carrizo Springs, Texas, to house them.
Officials are also planning to send more hundreds of miles north to converted space inside Dallas’ convention center.
Biden defenders note that what’s happening on the border now is not the same as during the Trump years. Their criticisms of the Trump administration focused on children separated from their parents and held in Border Patrol facilities featuring cells partitioned with chain-link fencing.
Some sent back
Further, the Biden administration continues to rapidly send back most single adults and families whom federal agents stop at the border under a public health order issued by Trump at the start of the coronavirus pandemic. It only is allowing teens and children on their own to stay — at least temporarily — which has helped cause their ranks to spike.
Still, such nuance is easily lost in the larger political fight. And Republicans, looking to hit back after Biden successfully delivered on his promised $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, have been quick to pounce.