Florida Governor — and 2024 presidential candidate — Ron DeSantis (R) has rolled out his immigration campaign platform, in a web document captioned “Mission: Stop the Invasion. No Excuses”. Let’s say that he’s not pulling many punches, launching direct attacks at President Biden while taking subtle swipes at his primary opponent, former President Donald Trump. The challenge for DeSantis is not to just promise border security, but to make it stick — an elusive goal for the last administration. Of course, he must win first.
At the outset, and in the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I served as DeSantis’s staff director when he was chairman of the National Security Subcommittee of the House Oversight Committee, though we haven’t spoken to one another since I left the federal government almost seven years ago. Also, the Center for Immigration Studies does not participate in political campaigns.
Biden’s Old Immigration Web Page. DeSantis's platform a much different affair than then-candidate Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign immigration webpage (here’s a version of it from the internet archives circa February). Note that I had to pull it from the archives because in late April, the incumbent took it down. Click on that link now, and you see the president refer to himself as “Dark Brandon” while hawking t-shirts — tacks DeSantis opted not to take.
The 2020 Biden version was windy (more than 6,000 words long), tendentious (e.g., “It is a moral failing and a national shame when a father and his baby daughter drown seeking our shores”), and demagogic (“Trump has waged an unrelenting assault on our values and our history as a nation of immigrants”) — not an easy trifecta to hit.
I can imagine any number of reasons why the president’s campaign pulled the site, not least of which are that Biden’s immigration policies are now extremely unpopular and that he has failed to fulfill at least one key promise therein by appointing “Senate-confirmed professionals” to head ICE and CBP. (ICE hasn’t had a confirmed director since the Obama administration; a new acting director was announced this week.)
That said, immigration — curiously — was not a key issue in the 2020 campaign, and I seriously doubt that more than a few thousand would-be voters ever bothered to peruse Biden’s immigration campaign promises. Any of the rest who now have buyer’s remorse can only blame themselves.
“Biden’s Border Crisis”. By the Biden campaign web page standard, DeSantis’ is practically terse, running fewer than 3,000 words, and with the Florida governor painting with a broad brush.
He starts out by describing the situation at the U.S.-Mexico line as “Biden’s Border Crisis” and blaming the president for failing to “meet the most basic responsibility of ensuring the territorial integrity of our country” and for leaving “the southern border in shambles” thanks to his “gross dereliction of duty”.
While I agree with most of that description, I’m not sure that “dereliction” is the term I would have used, because it suggests that Biden tried and failed — or alternatively never tried at all — to bring the border under control.
Instead, a key administration document reveals our immigration system is in its current state because the president and his advisors have decided that the laws are “inequitable” and therefore need the heavy hand of the executive to be made more fair. Simply put, disasters like the one occurring at the Southwest border don’t just happen; rather, the administration has goaded it along.
DeSantis seemingly concedes this point, asserting that: “Thanks to Biden, border patrol lacks the needed resources, manpower and policy support to do the job the way rank-and-file agents desire.” (Emphasis added.) To that I would add, “and as the law mandates”.
Ending Catch and Release. DeSantis notes: “Millions of illegal aliens have entered the United States during Biden's administration, including criminal aliens and individuals suspected by the U.S. government of terrorism, which has overwhelmed communities across the nation”. Each of those points is beyond dispute.
Between February 2021 (Biden’s first month in office) and the end of May, Border Patrol agents have apprehended nearly five million illegal migrants at the Southwest border, a level never before seen in the nation’s history. By my most recent calculations, more than 2.18 million of those migrants have been released into the country — where they’ll remain indefinitely, if not forever.
And in FY 2023 alone, 125 illegal entrants on the terrorist watchlist have been stopped by agents at the Southwest border — more than eight times as many (15) as in FY 2021 — as have more than 7,500 other aliens with criminal convictions (plus 554 with criminal wants or warrants).
Those are just the ones who were caught — no one knows how many terrorists and criminals have been among the 530,000 “got-aways” — aliens who were detected entering illegally without being caught — this fiscal year. That’s on top of 599,000 other got-aways in FY 2022, and 389,000 in FY 2021.
As for “overwhelmed communities across the nation”, cities as large and rich as New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., are struggling to deal with the migrants who have appeared on their doorsteps.
DeSantis blames this surge on the administration’s “soft policies and softer public statements”, which he contends “have made clear to potential migrants that the door to the United States is open, so long as you are willing to make a harrowing and dangerous journey in the hands of Mexican drug cartels.”
On most of these points, he is in concurrence with U.S. district court Judge T. Kent Wetherell II, who in his March 8 opinion in Florida v. U.S. found that the administration has:
effectively turned the Southwest Border into a meaningless line in the sand and little more than a speedbump for aliens flooding into the country by prioritizing “alternatives to detention” over actual detention and by releasing more than a million aliens into the country.
In response, the governor vows to “end catch-and-release and ensure that migrants are held in detention while they are awaiting the resolution of their claims, and not just released into the interior of the country”, and to “reimpose Remain in Mexico” — the term used to describe the Trump administration’s Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP).
That would bring border policy in line with the terms of section 235(b) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), which mandates that all inadmissible “applicants for admission” — including illegal entrants — be detained from the point at which they are encountered by CBP until they are either granted asylum or removed.
Both the Obama and Trump administrations attempted to comply with that detention mandate, and up until FY 2019, the majority of aliens encountered by CBP at the Southwest border remained detained throughout their removal proceedings. Trump’s ability to detain such aliens that fiscal year, however, was hindered by two closely related factors.
The first was a 2016 Ninth Circuit order in Flores v. Lynch, which required DHS to release alien minors who had entered the United States illegally with adults in “family units” (FMUs) within 20 days. To avoid “family separation”, the department has generally released the adults in that time frame, as well.
Not surprisingly, that order encouraged would-be migrants (and more importantly, their smugglers) to bring kids along during the “harrowing and dangerous journey” to the United States that DeSantis describes. By FY 2019, more than 55 percent of all aliens apprehended at the Southwest border (473,000-plus migrants) were traveling in FMUs.
Because DHS could not detain family migrants for more than 20 days, it failed to invest in detention space for them, and by FY 2019 there were just 2,500 total FMU detention beds. In response, the Trump administration, utilizing authority in section 235(b)(2)(C) of the INA, implemented MPP.
Under the program, “other than Mexican” migrants apprehended entering illegally were sent back across the border (where the Mexican government had agreed to provide for them), while their removal cases were proceeding.
As DHS determined in its October 2019 assessment of the program, MPP was “an indispensable tool in addressing the ongoing crisis at the southern border and restoring integrity to the immigration system”, particularly as related to alien families. Asylum cases were expedited under the program, and MPP removed incentives for aliens to make weak or bogus claims when apprehended.
Biden railed against Remain in Mexico on the campaign trail, however, and as president has fought efforts by state plaintiffs to preserve the program for more than two years (thus far successfully).
DeSantis’ promise to end catch and release will require either a massive reprogramming of DHS funding from other department accounts or a significant supplemental appropriation from Congress. Similarly, reinvigorating MPP will require some level of assent from the Mexican government to accept returnees.
Reprogramming of funds is the most likely option, as it remains to be seen whether DeSantis would have an easier time getting border money from Congress than Trump did. The latter’s demand for $5 billion in “wall funding” in December 2018 triggered the longest government shutdown in history, which was only resolved when both parties agreed to accept $1.375 billion for that purpose instead. I’ll get back to that.
One factor that may put DeSantis in a better position than his primary opponent from an appropriations standpoint is that he has Hill experience, serving three terms as a congressman.
That said, again, the success of a renewed MPP push depends on some diplomatic maneuvering, and Trump had significant success in bending the Mexican government to his will when it came to the border. Whether DeSantis can follow his model of threatening tariffs to force concessions is an open question, but he plainly knows what he is in for.
As an important aside, DeSantis also vows to “close the Flores loophole that incentivizes child trafficking”, a worthwhile goal Trump attempted to achieve only to be stymied by the courts.
Literal “War on Narco-Trafficking”. DeSantis reserves his most bellicose (in the truest sense of the word) prose for the criminal organizations on the other side of the line.
The governor vows to “wage war on narco-trafficking in Mexico and throughout Latin America” and the cartels that he blames for U.S. fentanyl overdose deaths, indicts for murdering Americans, and rightly notes are engaging in “military battles with the Mexican Army” and assassinating “Mexican politicians and law enforcement officials”.
And he doesn’t just stop at promising to implement soft measures like designating cartels “Transnational Criminal Organizations” and sanctioning the “cartels, their leaders, and other entities that provide support for drug trafficking” (although he does that, too).
Rather, DeSantis pledges to “authorize appropriate rules of engagement at the border so that those trying to smuggle drugs into the United States are met with the use of force” and to “engage in additional direct action as needed to counter cartel activities”, including by sending the Coast Guard and the Navy to stop precursor drug chemicals from steaming into Mexican ports.
It’s a popular stance, especially among Republican voters, according to a recent NBC News poll that asked respondents whether a candidate’s support for “deploying the U.S. military to the Mexican border to stop illegal drugs from entering the country” would make them more or less likely to vote for that candidate.
Some 55 percent of those polled, including 86 percent of GOP primary voters, stated that such a position would make them more likely to vote for such a candidate. Just 29 percent of all respondents, and 6 percent of Republicans, asserted it would make them less likely to pull that candidate’s lever. Of the 11 policy positions polled by the outlet, it was far and away the most popular.
Note that DeSantis blames the president for such steps being necessary, arguing that Biden “has ceded operational control of the border to the Mexican drug cartels”. That’s a point that I have been making for more than two years.
“The Most Inhumane Policy Choice Possible on the Border”. DeSantis is careful not to vilify the migrants themselves, or even really blame them for the choices they made to come here illegally. Instead, he contends:
Joe Biden’s administration has made the most inhumane policy choice possible on the border. Dangling jobs to migrants as a reward here in the United States, so long as they are willing to bring an unrelated minor child along with them, should be something out of a dystopian novel. But it’s happening right here, right now, and it’s time for us to stop it.
Compare that to Trump’s June 2015 presidential announcement, when he argued that:
When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
While it’s unclear whether that statement cost or gained Trump votes in 2016, those words dogged him throughout his administration. Either the governor is throwing fine shade at the former president, or he has learned from Trump’s travails.
While DeSantis avoids denigrating illegal migrants, he doesn’t shy away from discussing the deleterious impact they’ve had on public safety and the economy, either.
For example, he describes border towns as being “under assault”, with “sidewalks filled with illegals from around the world, emergency rooms overflowing, ranches and homes overrun, and public safety shredded because Joe Biden has refused to meet his most basic responsibility of upholding American sovereignty”.
Similarly, he complains that “Illegal immigration has ... hollowed out the wages of the American working class” and is “fundamentally unfair to immigrants who make their way to the United States legally”, some of whom must “wait a decade in line for their turn to immigrate”.
This system, he contends, “spits in the faces of those who respect our laws by allowing illegal aliens to break those laws with functional impunity”.
“No Excuses”. Although DeSantis never names Trump specifically, he plainly attempts to distinguish his border plans from the former president’s accomplishments in a section captioned “No Excuses”, which begins:
As president I will put an end to this moral and humanitarian catastrophe by shutting down illegal entries and building the wall, once and for all. There are more than 600 miles of the US-Mexico border without an effective barrier to illegal crossings: I will use every ounce of my executive power and political capital to get the wall built.
We know how to get infrastructure built quickly and cut through red tape.
As the polling analysis website FiveThirtyEight explained in September 2017, “Trump's Hardline Immigration Stance Got Him to the White House”, mainly by separating him from the pack of other 2016 Republican candidates, and “the wall” was Trump’s signature immigration proposal in that campaign.
Conversely, opposition to border infrastructure became a unifying issue for his Democratic opponents and critics, even those (like then-Vice President Biden) who had championed it in the past.
Trump’s most ardent nemesis, then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), went so far in April 2017 as to describe “the wall” as “immoral, expensive, [and] unwise”. Given that, it’s no wonder that once she became speaker, Pelosi was willing to shut down the government for more than a month rather than give Trump the fencing funding he was asking for.
By the end of his term, Trump had completed 455 miles of fencing, but only 82 miles of it was new primary (49 miles) and secondary (33 miles) fencing. The rest, 373 miles of (mostly primary) fencing, replaced barriers that had been there previously.
Whether you call it a swipe or not, DeSantis’ promise to use his power and clout to finish the wall is plainly an attempt to distinguish himself from the 45th president. And, whether Democrats have changed their minds on this issue or not, as I explained in October, border infrastructure is an issue that holds a lot of appeal for both Republican and independent voters.
“Birthright Citizenship”. DeSantis also promises to “take action to end the idea that the children of illegal aliens are entitled to birthright citizenship if they are born in the United States”, explaining: “Dangling the prize of citizenship to the future offspring of illegal immigrants is a major driver of illegal migration.”
President Trump had floated the idea of ending birthright citizenship by executive order back in 2018, but to the best of my knowledge it went nowhere. It did prompt me, however, to write a report providing an overview of the issue that November.
As I explained at the time:
The issue of birthright citizenship, as it pertains to children born in the United States to aliens unlawfully present, remains an open question. Although this fact would appear to be resolved in the public imagination, it has not actually been ruled upon dispositively by the Supreme Court.
It still hasn’t been, but I followed that piece up the next month explaining, much as DeSantis has, that the promise that children born in this country will be automatically granted citizenship is a magnet for some level of illegal immigration to the United States.
An early June poll conducted by The Economist and YouGov found that most Americans oppose ending birthright citizenship (although I note that the poll question began, “The U.S. Constitution says that all persons born in the U.S. are citizens, regardless of whether their parents were here legally”, which is an open question), by a margin of 60 percent in favor of it continuing to 25 percent who want to end it.
That said, the margin of support among Republican voters on the issue is much narrower, with 42 percent stating that they want birthright citizenship to continue compared to 40 percent who want to end it. In my experience, DeSantis is not a politico who trolls for votes, so don’t expect this issue to go away if he receives the GOP nod.
The Challenge — Deliver Security and Make It Stick. DeSantis is correct in asserting that the Southwest border is “in shambles”, and he’s also spot-on in blaming the incumbent and his feckless policies for the disaster that is unfolding there. As I have stated numerous times in the past 28 months, this provides an opening for the GOP, but it is one that the party has been slow and hesitant to exploit.
Trump proved in 2016 that a Republican candidate who promises a secure border and an immigration system in the national interest is likely to strike a chord with the electorate in both the primary and general elections. His immigration policies didn’t lose the 2020 election, but his failure to highlight those policies as vigorously as he had in his first, successful campaign likely played a role.
For all his border successes — and they were many and real — Trump failed to ensure that the security he had built there would last. As the foregoing reveals, Biden not only quickly swept all of Trump’s triumphs away, but he created chaos at the border the likes of which this nation has never seen before.
DeSantis has plainly learned from both Trump’s successes and his failures when it comes to immigration and the border. The challenge for him will be to not only promise security at the U.S.-Mexico line, but to deliver it and make it stick — and he first must get elected. It’s a tall order, but not insurmountable for a governor who won his first election by .7 points before coasting to reelection in a 19-point “landslide”.