Events in recent weeks have led many observers to question the degree to which President Biden controls the various departments and agencies he (officially, at least) leads. If those concerns are correct, it would explain why the “Biden administration” has implemented so many questionable immigration policies “Joe Biden” has opposed in the past — as well as a few that clash with his own current policies.
“Joe Biden” vs. the “Biden Administration”. When I talk about “Joe Biden”, I’m referring to the erstwhile senior senator from Delaware, former vice president, and serially unsuccessful presidential candidate.
Then-Sen. Biden was a person with whom I had a passing familiarity during my first stint on Capitol Hill, when I was working for the House Judiciary Committee and he was past chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and chairman (and then ranking member) of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Even by congressional standards, it was always tough to get a bead on his true principles. Not that there was anything wrong with that, particularly given that he was often considered by colleagues and staffers to be a “dealmaker”, and it’s tough to cut deals when you are unduly hidebound.
That said, “Joe Biden” did stake out some clear positions on immigration.
Border Fence Construction. In a November 2006 profile, NBC News described him as “favor[ing] tightening the U.S.-Mexico border with fences”. That was not an idle statement, as Biden at the time had just voted for, in his words “700 miles of fence” in the Secure Fence Act of 2006 (SFA).
But almost immediately after he was sworn in as president, one of the “Biden administration’s” first acts was to place a “pause” on border barrier construction. While Biden’s DHS has intermittently plugged gaps along the Southwest border, his efforts have been so faint as to merit praise from the Mexican president for his inaction on border-wall construction.
Worksite Enforcement. In that 2006 NBC News profile, Biden also contended that U.S. employers who hire illegal immigrants needed to be “punished”.
Despite that, his DHS secretary, the now-impeached Alejandro Mayorkas, issued a 2021 policy statement directing ICE to “cease mass worksite operations”, which my colleague Jon Feere explained has “gutted the ICE worksite enforcement effort”.
As a former prosecutor I can assure you that you can’t “punish” anyone for crimes you don’t investigate.
“No Great Nation Can Be in a Position Where They Can’t Control Their Borders”. Then, there were Sen. Biden’s August 2007 statements at a presidential campaign stop in Iowa, where he laid out a series of “truisms” about immigration and the border.
The first was: “It makes sense that no great nation can be in a position where they can’t control their borders”.
Objectively, however, the border under President Biden is more out of control than it has ever been, and as a federal judge concluded in a March 2023 order, “the crisis at the border is ... largely of their own making”, referring to DHS officials appointed by the president, due to their “lenient detention policies”.
Perhaps a more wizened Joe Biden has concluded the United States is no longer a great nation, and thus no longer needs control of its borders. Few voters seem to share either of those assessments, however.
Jobs For American Workers First. “Joe Biden” circa 2007 next stated: “The second truism is that this nation is such that people in the country should have the first opportunity to be able to have jobs that pay well and have jobs that are decent and that after that, the second crack goes to what we may need from other parts of the world or any other input.”
Contrast that “truism” with the official policies of the “Biden administration”.
As of the end of March, according to my calculations, Biden’s DHS had paroled in more than two million foreign nationals, none of whom had proper documents or any right to be here, but all of whom — thanks to the administration’s largesse — are now in a position to apply for work authorization and have the first crack at “decent” and “well-paying” jobs.
In fact, during those 2007 remarks in Iowa, “Joe Biden” claimed it was “our conservative business friends” who want to bring in workers on “work permits that will take away jobs of Americans right now”, decrying “the allowance of a significant increase — several hundred thousand people a year — to take regular jobs, particularly in the construction industry”.
I have no doubt Biden’s “conservative business friends” are still slavering for as much cheap migrant labor as they can get, but it’s somewhat ironic that it’s the “Biden administration” that’s shoveling it into their gaping maws.
Unaccompanied Alien Children. Perhaps the most shocking disconnect between “Joe Biden” and the “Biden administration”, however, has to do with the unaccompanied alien children (UACs) taken into custody by his Border Patrol and then released by his Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to “sponsors” in the United States.
Here’s how then-Vice President Biden described the perils facing those children during official remarks in Guatemala in June 2014:
The United States, to state the obvious, is greatly concerned by the startling number of unaccompanied minors that — children and teenagers who are making a very perilous journey through Central America to reach the United States. These are some of the most vulnerable migrants that ever attempt — and many from around the world attempt — to come to the United States. They’re among the most vulnerable. And the majority of these individuals rely — we estimate between 75 and 80 percent — rely on very dangerous, not-nice, human-smuggling networks that transport them through Central America and Mexico to the United States.
These smugglers — and everyone should know it, and not turn a blind eye to it — these smugglers routinely engage in physical and sexual abuse, and extortion of these innocent, young women and men by and large. [Emphasis added.]
You’d assume the man who spoke those words would — as soon as he took office — quickly take action to plug the glaring loopholes in federal law encouraging those children (or more precisely their parents and guardians), to hire the criminals and rapists bringing them illicitly to the United States.
But you’d be wrong.
In fact, the only concrete action the “Biden administration” has taken to address UACs — aside, perhaps, from prosecuting a few unlucky smugglers it’s managed to catch — is to speed the process by which HHS releases those “innocent young women and men” into the United States, encouraging more parents and guardians to pay more criminals and rapists to take more “children and teenagers” on that “very perilous journey” to the Southwest border.
The HHS Office of Inspector General (OIG) — the department’s watchdog — now cranks out reports identifying vulnerabilities in the sponsor vetting and UAC release processes under Biden, with titles like “Gaps in Sponsor Screening and Followup Raise Safety Concerns for Unaccompanied Children” (February 2024), “The Office of Refugee Resettlement Needs To Improve Its Oversight Related to the Placement and Transfer of Unaccompanied Children” (May 2023), and “The Office of Refugee Resettlement Needs To Improve Its Practices for Background Checks During Influxes” (also May 2023).
“President Biden ... Exploded in Rage”. There’s ample evidence to suggest “President Joe Biden” isn’t pleased with many immigration policies that are being carried out in his administration’s name.
For example, a February article in Axios claimed “President Biden sat at the head of his conference table” on Air Force One “and exploded with fury” while en route to a Southwest border trip in January 2023 after the president demanded what were described as “obscure immigration data points” that his staff didn’t have.
He could have called me. Few immigration data points are “obscure”, because there’s no way to quantify policies without data, and moreover, immigration data points are my stock in trade.
In any event, two other quotes in that article point to Biden’s dissatisfaction with his administration’s policies:
People in the meeting later told others in frustration that his winding process and irritability were making it more difficult to reach decisions about the border.
...
The rolling chaos along the border has grown to the point that Biden now is embracing immigration policies he ran against in 2020 — such as restricting asylum laws and suggesting he'll "shut down" the border — as the crisis threatens his re-election.
We’ve subsequently seen the policies — the misnamed “asylum ban” and the “parole in place” amnesty — the administration ended up “embracing”, but is the former simply a watered-down version of what the commander in chief had envisioned, or was it exactly what he wanted, or was he told that it would do what he desired it to do? There’s no way to know — even if he could tell us.
That Axios article isn’t the first describing Biden’s “rage” over immigration and the border. An April 2022 New York Times article described internecine immigration policy battles that were waged among his White House advisors, beginning with the administration’s handling of a wave of UACs at the border:
He had been in office only two months and there was already a crisis at the southwest border. Thousands of migrant children were jammed into unsanitary Border Patrol stations. Republicans were accusing Mr. Biden of flinging open the borders. And his aides were blaming one another.
Facing his bickering staff in the Oval Office that day in late March 2021, Mr. Biden grew so angry at their attempts to duck responsibility that he erupted.
Who do I need to fire, he demanded, to fix this?
His anger apparently never triggered a change in UAC policy, and it doesn’t appear anyone was fired, either (the Times notes a number found job opportunities elsewhere, however).
That article highlights the role Biden’s then-chief of staff, Ron Klain, played in mediating those fights while at the same time pushing back on those seeking to further limit enforcement.
According to the Times, Klain gathered “senior aides” (including former Obama U.N. ambassador turned Biden domestic policy advisor, Susan Rice) in the summer of 2021 to tell them:
they needed to make sure the administration was not pandering to people who wanted an immediate end to Trump-era border restrictions, according to two people familiar with his comments.
If they did not find a way to deter soaring illegal crossings at the southwest border, he said, accusations about border chaos would grow worse, anger moderate voters and potentially sink the party during the 2022 midterms.
Mr. Klain was channeling his boss, who had complained to top aides about the intensifying attacks from Republicans characterizing him as an open-borders president, according to a person familiar with Mr. Biden’s comments.
But the source of the president’s frustration was as much from inside his administration as it was from outside. As border crossings increased, disagreements erupted over how quickly to dismantle Mr. Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and what to replace them with. [Emphasis added.]
As a practical matter, it really doesn’t matter whether Biden’s interest in halting illegal entries was born of political considerations or heartfelt concern, so long as it became actual policy.
The problem, of course, is that nothing came of Klain’s or Biden’s complaints. Nearly all of Trump’s successful border policies were quickly scrapped by the “Biden administration”, and as a consequence Border Patrol agents set a yearly record for migrant apprehensions at the Southwest border in FY 2022.
The “Iron Fist” at the White House vs. “Committee Rule”. Klain resigned as chief of staff in January 2023, so any moderating influence he may have had on what the Times describes as “the former immigration advocates in the West Wing” is gone. Which raises the question: Who’s currently ignoring the president’s “rage” and implementing the “Biden administration’s” feckless immigration policies?
Months ago, I talked to a reporter who intimated that there is no “Biden administration” per se —just a disconnected group of self-interested department and agency heads implementing their own policies, unmoored from any direction by the White House, let alone from “Joe Biden”.
That sounded ridiculous, until January when it was revealed that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had been hospitalized for several days — during which he wasn’t actually running the department — without anybody in the White House having any idea.
Having served in the executive branch, the thought that a cabinet secretary — and not like the head of HUD but the leader of a department with two million servicemembers under arms, stationed all around the world — could simply go MIA without anybody noticing was unfathomable.
Usually, the SecDef has daily contact with the White House chief of staff, whose main role is overseeing the day-to-day operations of the executive branch. But when I realized that I had no idea who replaced Klain, I really got concerned.
So I googled and it turns out the WH CoS is “a wealthy former management consultant” (and former Obama official) “with little political experience” named “Jeff Zients”.
A glowing profile in Axios notes that Zients “is a firm believer in delegating authority”, and as a result, the “White House” is now “governed more by committee and process than Klain's iron fist”. Given the chief of staff is the president’s “iron fist” in dealing with his underlings, that only convinced me more.
“Uniting for Ukraine” and TPS vs. DoD’s “Unflinching” Fight Against Russian Aggression. I looked for immigration programs that didn’t align or worse, worked at cross purposes, with other policies in different departments and agencies and quickly found one: “Uniting for Ukraine” (U4U).
U4U is a “Biden administration” program that, as USCIS explains, “provides a pathway for Ukrainian citizens and their immediate family members who are outside the United States to come to the United States and stay temporarily in a 2-year period of parole”.
All Ukrainian nationals are eligible for U4U parole, including military-aged men, which is a problem given that in its war against Russia, Ukraine is facing a troop shortage that the country’s president just last month warned is “sapping morale”.
In response, Ukraine lowered the draft age from 27 to 25 in April, and implemented a mobilization law requiring all men aged 18 to 60 to register with the military (and carry their registration documents) to facilitate recruitment.
Still, the Washington Post reported in June that the staffing shortfall has gotten so bad that the country “has embraced one of Russia’s most cynical tactics: releasing convicted — even violent — felons who agree to fight in high-risk assault brigades”.
DHS has been paroling Ukrainians into the United States under U4U even while SecDef Austin has fought (successfully) for tens of billions of dollars in military aid for the country. As the secretary explained in announcing a $6 billion aid package in April, “’This coalition stands together and we will not falter, we will not flinch, and we will not fail’ to stave off Russian aggression”.
Stirring words, but one could reasonably ask why Congress is paying tens of billions of dollars to satisfy DoD’s Ukrainian military aid requests while DHS’s U4U program is providing haven to the would-be soldiers needed to use the weapons systems that money is funding.
This would be like the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration pushing its “Lend-Lease” military-aid package for Britian during World War II while simultaneously creating a “Uniting for the UK” plan to parole military-aged Britons into the United States so they could wait out the war safely here.
In June, the U.S. embassy in Kyiv announced the country “eliminated a ‘residence abroad’ exception”, which had previously allowed certain Ukrainian males in that 18-to-60 age range to leave the country, but the New York Times has reported that Ukrainian draft dodgers are crossing illegally into Romania and other neighboring countries to avoid conscription.
The paper quoted Lt. Vladyslav Tonkoshtan, a Ukrainian border guard who stated: “We cannot judge these people. ... But if all men leave, who will defend Ukraine?”
Who, indeed. DHS hasn’t said much about the 187,000 Ukrainians who had arrived here under U4U as of the end of March (a figure that doesn’t include 350,000 others who have arrived since the Russian invasion of that country according to CBS News), so there’s no way to know how many U4U beneficiaries are military-aged men, and how many of them left Ukraine illegally.
Given that DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has designated Ukraine for Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which allows all nationals of the country who were here as of August 16, 2023, to apply to remain here through at least next April, none of those half-million-plus Ukrainians will be leaving unless they commit some (really serious) crimes or decide to go on their own.
What We Know — and What We Won’t Know for a While. So, is there a “Biden administration” per se? There’ll be no way to know until White House insiders write their “tell-all” books. But what I do know is that the current executive branch has implemented numerous immigration and border policies that “Joe Biden” would have opposed in the past — and that directly conflict with other, significant administration priorities.