A key promise of Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign is that, as president, she’ll “secure our border”. The only reason for such a vow is that the border is not secure presently, and hasn’t been for the past three-plus years, which raises the question: Whose immigration policy have we been living under since January 2021, and how can we be assured that it will change if the vice president ascends to the Oval Office? Nobody’s stepped up to take “credit” for what’s happening at the U.S.-Mexico line, which actually isn’t that big a surprise.
Biden Has “Shown Signs of Slipping for a Long Time”. I’m a rather prolific writer, and trust that I’ve used the term “Biden administration” in connection with the border somewhere near 5,000 times since the inauguration.
Having had some passing familiarity with then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) during my first stint on Capitol Hill, however, I’ve long believed that the various programs and proposals that triggered the largest illegal border onslaught in U.S. history didn’t start on one of his vaunted yellow legal pads.
Which is not to say that he didn’t stake out immigration positions in the past. He did, and in fact, as I’ve explained over the past four years, those earlier positions were wildly at odds with the various border approaches his administration has subsequently taken.
Consider the following, from a Biden campaign stop in Winterset, Iowa, in August 2007:
It makes sense that no great nation can be in a position where they can’t control their borders. It matters how you control your borders ... not just for immigration, but for drugs, terror, a whole range of other things. ... I have been arguing for more protection at the borders. ... You have to have a significant increase in security at the border, including limited elements where you actually have a fence. Not a fence that runs for 3,000 miles like some folks are talking about, but there are certain places — you can go over and under a fence, but you can’t take 100 kilos of cocaine over and under a fence. And, when you have limited places where fences are in populated areas, you force these drug dealers and others around, making it easier to apprehend. [Emphasis added.]
That’s Joe Biden, not the president who — on his first day in office — placed a pause on wall construction at the Southwest border, and whose refusal to improve infrastructure there earned plaudits from the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (popularly known as “AMLO”).
That old Joe Biden was best described, albeit well after the fact, in a May 2019 article in CNN that began: “Joe Biden once spoke about jailing employers who hire ‘illegals,’ said sanctuary cities shouldn’t be allowed to violate federal law, and argued a fence was needed stop ‘tons’ of drugs coming into the country from ‘corrupt Mexico’.”
Mexico’s likely no more or less corrupt than it was back in November 2006 when he referred to the nation as “an ‘erstwhile democracy’ with a ‘corrupt system’ responsible for illegal immigration and drug problems” here.
In fact, if Mary Anastasia O’Grady at the Wall Street Journal is correct (and she usually is when it comes to Latin America), Mexico under AMLO is backsliding from democracy on fiscal issues to what she refers to as “mobocracy”, with the “rule of law” there “on the ropes”.
Yet, it is AMLO and his government to whom the Biden administration has turned to slow the flow of illegal migrants at the U.S. Southwest border, as my colleague Todd Bensman has explained.
Initially, I thought Biden had possibly shifted his stances to conform with his party’s more novel and outré policies, but increasingly I believe that the president has had only a tenuous grasp on most everything his administration has been doing in his name for some time now.
Lest you think that’s harsh, consider the following from an otherwise glowing editorial in the Washington Post on the 46th president, published the day after he spoke at the Democratic National Convention:
In retrospect, Mr. Biden should not have sought reelection. The June 27 debate was worse than just a bad night, as the president maintained afterward. The 81-year-old had shown signs of slipping for a long time, but his inner circle worked to conceal his decline.
Honestly, the excuse that Biden has been “slipping for a long time” and therefore has been kept away from the levers of power would explain why his administration’s policies are so divorced from the immigration positions the long-time senior senator from Delaware not only embraced but promoted.
It would certainly explain press reports about the president exploding in anger at his staff over what was happening at the border, which I compiled in a July post. Note that despite all that Biden ire, nothing changed — not quite proof positive that he had little or no control over immigration policy, but familiar to anyone who’s read Shakespeare’s “King Lear”.
DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. If Joe Biden’s not responsible for the administration’s border and immigration policies, then who is?
In June 2021 comments in the border city of El Paso, Texas, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas claimed it was his responsibility as secretary “to address the security and management of our border”.
That’s plausible, and in fact, House Republicans impeached Mayorkas in February for his failure to secure the border (he was spared a trial in the Senate when Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) gutted the impeachment process there, likely irreparably), but I’m not so sure Mayorkas is calling the shots as he claimed.
I’ve watched the secretary testify before Congress on immigration and the border numerous times over the past three years, and come away with the thought that he’s more of a patsy for everything that’s gone wrong than a mastermind.
Public speaking is enervating enough (and congressional testimony more so), but if Mayorkas had carefully crafted and implemented the migrant release programs that have undermined border security since he took over the department in February 2021, he’d likely have had better responses to members’ complaints about what DHS was doing than simply repeatedly claiming the border is “secure”.
“A Team of Immigration Advocates”. If neither Biden nor Mayorkas are the authors of the administration’s immigration strategies, who was?
In an April 2022 article headlined “Disagreement and Delay: How Infighting Over the Border Divided the White House”, the New York Times portrayed “battles” between “senior aides” over how quickly the administration should “roll back” Trump-era border policies and what new policies should be implemented in their place.
Here’s the key paragraph:
Mr. Biden came into office with high hopes, saying he wanted a system that would allow the United States to determine, in a more compassionate way, which migrants should be allowed to stay in the country. He recruited a team of immigration advocates and others eager to put in place the humane system they had envisioned for years.
Those “immigration advocates” clashed with “some of the president’s most senior advisers” —including domestic policy adviser Susan Rice (an old Obama hand) and White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain — over such issues as whether to end Title 42 and what to do with Trump’s “Migrant Protection Protocols” (“MPP”, better known as “Remain in Mexico”), both of which were ended at inopportune moments from a security perspective.
While the Times notes that some of those advocates departed in disgust over what they viewed as backsliding, some remained, which is more than can be said for Klain (who left the White House in February 2023) and Rice (who departed two months later).
Klain was replaced by former businessman Jeff Zients, and not much is known about his immigration “vision”, assuming he has one at all. He did jump into then-stalled talks over the “Senate border bill” in mid-December, but it’s not clear whether his role involved anything beyond pressing for the Ukraine war funding that was then part of that legislation.
The only immigration advocates brought in during the early days of the administration named by the Times were the ones who left, including Esther Olavarria, Rice’s deputy; Tyler Moran, Biden’s senior adviser for migration; and David Shahoulian, a DHS official “who served as the go-between with the White House”. The ones who have remained weren’t identified.
“Personnel Is Policy”. Following the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco (a failed U.S.-supported effort by Cuban emigres to overthrow Fidel Castro), then-President John F. Kennedy accepted blame for the debacle, remarking: “Victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan”.
The administration’s border policies are — to put it mildly — politically unpopular, and thus it’s no shock that those advocates who molded them have opted to remain in the shadows.
Given the unpopularity of those policies, it’s unsurprising that Vice President Kamala Harris, according to left-leaning Capitol Hill tipsheet Politico, has been given “leeway from the left to talk tough on the border”, and in fact is now promising to be tougher than Trump was.
A commonly accepted D.C. maxim, however, underscores a critical truth: “Personnel is policy.” Harris — like Biden before her — might actually want a border crackdown (though that’s debatable), but if she’s relying on the same immigration advocates to implement her plans, nothing much is likely to change.
As the election heats up, the most important question is, “Whose immigration policy is it, anyway?” Tell me who won the administration’s internal immigration-policy debates, and whether they’ll remain in their seats of power, and I’ll tell you what the border would look like for the next four years under a Harris-Walz presidency.