Migrants in limbo after policy to help busy border

More than 2 million illegal crossings recorded at U.S. southwest border between Dec. 2020 and Dec. 2021

WASHINGTON — A Haitian couple and their young son were among thousands of immigrants whom U.S. officials decided to allow entry through the southwest border last summer — part of a record-setting surge in unauthorized crossings over the past year.

Beginning last spring, immigration officials were so overwhelmed that they admitted tens of thousands of migrants while issuing them a new document that did not include the typical hearing dates or identification numbers recognized in the immigration court system. The change sped up the process of releasing them into the country, but also made it much harder for the new arrivals to start applying for asylum — and for the government to track them.

Months later, the government has not been able to complete the processing started at the border, showing how ill-prepared the system was for the surge and creating a practical and political quagmire for the Biden administration.

President Joe Biden pledged as a candidate to fix the country’s broken immigration system, a campaign mantra that resonated with many voters after the harsh policies of former President Donald Trump. But over Biden’s first year in office, his administration’s response to the surge in migration has consisted largely of crisis-driven reactions — including the faster entry process.

Migrants were caught crossing the southwest border illegally more than 2 million times between December 2020 and December 2021, the largest number since at least 1960. They came not just from Central America and the Caribbean but from around the world, many fleeing persecution and economic hardship with the expectation that Biden would be more welcoming than Trump. Although migrants were expelled in a little more than half the cases, more than 400,000 of them were released into the country for a variety of reasons during Biden’s first year in office.

Of those, more than 94,000 were released through the sped-up process — a streamlined version of a longtime practice that critics call “catch and release,” in which those who are apprehended at the border are released from custody pending their immigration court proceedings. These migrants were instructed to register with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement within 60 days to complete the process the border officials started. But in some parts of the country, local ICE offices were overwhelmed and unable to give them appointments. So the Haitian family and other new arrivals have spent months trying in vain to check in with ICE and initiate their court cases.

“It was a quick fix — ‘Deal with them later,’ ” said Evangeline Chan, an immigration lawyer in New York. “But they have not been able to.”

Human rights advocates say the change has made it harder for those seeking asylum to get by while they wait to be officially recognized in the immigration system. Republicans, in the meantime, have pounced on the Biden administration for releasing immigrants without legal status into the country with even less ability to keep track of them.

“Those who cross our border illegally should be detained and deported, not released into the interior of our country on an unenforceable promise to reappear,” 80 Republican House members wrote in a letter to Immigration and Customs Enforcement earlier this month. “It is nothing short of reckless.”