How Biden ignored warnings and lost Americans’ faith in immigration

WASHINGTON — In the weeks after Joe Biden was elected president, advisers delivered a warning: His approach to immigration could prove disastrous.

Biden had pledged to treat immigrants lacking legal status more humanely than President Donald Trump, who generated widespread backlash by separating migrant children from their parents.

But Biden was now president-elect, and his positions threatened to drastically increase border crossings, experts advising his transition team warned in a video call briefing in the final weeks of 2020, according to people with direct knowledge of that briefing. That jump, they said, could provoke a political crisis.

“Chaos” was the word the advisers had used in a memo during the campaign.

They offered a range of options to avert that crisis, by better deterring migrants. Biden seemed to grasp the risk. But he and his top aides failed to act on those recommendations.

The warnings came true, and then some. After Biden became president, migrant encounters at the southern border quickly doubled, then kept rising. New arrivals overwhelmed border stations, then border towns, and eventually major cities such as New York and Denver.

Anger over illegal migration helped return Trump to the presidency, and he has enacted even more aggressive policies than those Biden first campaigned against. Trump has drawn outrage from Democrats by sending masked agents to target immigrants, often aided by National Guard soldiers.

Former Biden administration officials told the Times that Biden and his circle of close confidants — including Ron Klain, who was chief of staff during the president’s first two years; Mike Donilon; Jennifer O’Malley Dillon; and Anita Dunn — made two crucial errors.

First, they underestimated the scale of migration that was coming. Second, they failed to appreciate the political reaction to that migration — believing that stronger enforcement would alienate Latino and progressive Hispanic voters, and that a border surge would not be an important issue to most voters.

Those calculations would later prove to be mistaken, with many voters, including Latinos, citing immigration as a reason for supporting Trump in 2024.

“Everybody was reacting to the excesses of the Trump administration,” said Cecilia Muñoz, who helped shape immigration policy in the Obama administration and oversaw domestic and economic policy for the Biden transition team.

Yet as public concern over border security grew, partly in response to Biden’s own actions, his administration proved catastrophically slow to change course, former aides said. The president and his closest aides treated immigration as a distraction from other issues, such as the coronavirus pandemic and the economy.

Biden created new legal pathways for migration to ease pressure at the border, under which more than 1 million people were allowed into the United States, fueling public resistance. And he failed to persuade Congress to change immigration laws, dragging his feet on a crucial Senate border deal, according to the lead Republican negotiator, who said the effort might have otherwise succeeded.

The shooting in Washington last month that killed one National Guard soldier and left another critically injured has renewed scrutiny of Biden’s immigration programs. The suspect arrived through Operation Allies Welcome, which offered entry to Afghans fleeing the Taliban in 2021.

A spokesperson for Biden declined to make him available for an interview. She provided a statement that blamed Republicans for blocking additional funding for hiring more border agents, deploying more security technology and processing immigration cases more quickly. The statement also blamed Republicans for walking away from the proposed border bill “because Donald Trump told them to.”

“When it became clear Congress wouldn’t act, Biden took decisive action on his own,” the statement said.

Klain defended the administration’s actions on immigration as part of a broader set of priorities.

But former advisers said the problem ran deeper than Republican obstruction.

The Biden White House “had no strategy, because they had no goal,” said Scott Shuchart, who joined the administration in 2022 as a senior adviser at Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “All they had was wishing the problem would go away so that they could focus on the things they cared about.”

Biden’s policy advisers sounded the alarm before he even won the election.

In August 2020, several aides wrote a memo cautioning Biden’s inner circle that his promises — coupled with pent-up demand from the Trump years and economic hardship from COVID — could provoke a spike in border crossings.

“A potential surge could create chaos and a humanitarian crisis, overwhelm processing capacities, and imperil the agenda of the new administration,” the advisers wrote, according to a copy of the memo viewed by the Times.

Trump had tried deterring asylum-seekers. His administration separated children from their parents. He created the “Remain in Mexico” program, forcing asylum claimants to wait in Mexico until their cases were heard. During the pandemic, he invoked a public health rule, Title 42, to turn back migrants.

The memo from Biden’s advisers offered a range of options, including making it easier to quickly reject asylum claims; holding people in “reception centers” until their cases could be heard; transferring some migrants to other countries; and continuing to make some asylum-seekers wait in Mexico while ensuring they had access to shelter.

Once in office, Biden had to decide between the more permissive approach that Democrats demanded and the warnings from some policy advisers to tack to the center.

He wasted no time answering.

Soon after being sworn in, Biden issued a 100-day pause on deportations. He drastically narrowed the categories of immigrants lacking legal status targeted for arrest. He directed his government to stop building the border wall, a centerpiece of Trump’s agenda. He suspended Remain in Mexico. He sent draft legislation to Congress to create a citizenship pathway for people in the country illegally. He kept Title 42 in place but stopped using it to turn back children who crossed the border alone.

Some advisers warned that he was moving too quickly. Others worried that Latino voters would object if the new president softened support for migrants.

“The president and others made a decision that he wasn’t going to lose that community,” said Roberta Jacobson, the border czar for the first three months of the administration.

Biden’s policy changes, some of which were halted by the courts, were not the only causes of that early surge. The draw of the U.S. economy, which bounced back quickly from COVID, mattered, too. But the changes signaled to migrants that the border was opening again, former aides said.

The crisis foretold by Biden’s border advisers quickly emerged.

In January, the month Biden took office, the U.S. Border Patrol reported 75,316 encounters with migrants along the southwest border. By March, that number passed 169,000 — far higher than at any point during the Trump administration. Many arrivals were children, jammed into border stations ill-equipped to hold them.

Two months into his term, Biden tasked Vice President Kamala Harris with reducing illegal migration, especially from Central America, by working on the “root causes” of that migration.

Republicans labeled Harris the president’s border czar. But none of the former officials who spoke to the Times described her as a central decision-maker on border policy. A spokesperson for Harris did not respond to requests for comment.

Many former aides complained about the administration’s reluctance to push foreign governments harder to slow the movement of migrants or accept more deportation flights, as Trump has done in his second term.

Aides described Biden as having no strong positions on immigration beyond two key areas: He resisted anything that looked like Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy, and he did not want to send children back across the border.

As border crossings jumped, advisers across the administration kept offering ideas to deter migrants. But political concerns remained.

The result was paralysis. Andrea Flores was director for transborder security at the National Security Council early in the administration. Her first assignment, she said, was to help prepare a memo for Klain offering additional ideas for deterring migrants.

Officials could not agree on what options to present, she said, “so the memo died.”

Some Biden aides believed that the less the president said about immigration, the better. In June, the White House planned for Biden to give a speech on the border. Officials circulated the president’s remarks, Flores said, only to change their minds at the last minute.

Angela Kelley, who was then a senior immigration adviser at the Department of Homeland Security, described a collision between Biden’s campaign promises and “reality on the ground.”

“We didn’t really have a grip on it,” Kelley said.

One April day in 2022, a bus pulled up near the U.S. Capitol. It was carrying 12 Venezuelans, four Colombians, four Cubans and four Nicaraguans — and the start of a new phase in the immigration debate.

The bus had been chartered by the Texas Division of Emergency Management. “By busing migrants to Washington, D.C., the Biden administration will be able to more immediately meet the needs of the people they are allowing to cross our border,” Greg Abbott, the state’s Republican governor, said in a statement at the time.

The busing campaign had been under consideration since the previous summer, when local officials met with Abbott in the small border town of Del Rio, Texas, seeking help with the growing flow of migrants, according to two former senior Abbott officials who spoke on the condition that they not be identified.

Initially, the buses all went to Washington, “to take the border to the president,” the officials said. In August, Abbott began sending busloads of migrants to New York City. A few weeks later, buses began heading to Chicago, then Philadelphia.

By the end of 2022, Texas had sent more than 16,000 migrants to those cities, according to data obtained by the Times last year through a records request.

Many Biden officials came to view Abbott’s campaign as the point Democrats lost the debate.

“I don’t think we ever recovered,” said Deborah Fleischaker, then the assistant director for policy at ICE.

Abbott’s campaign echoed an idea that some Biden officials had been advocating for internally: using federal resources to help migrants reach their destinations, but in coordination with the cities receiving them.

Jason Houser, then the chief of staff at ICE, said he had pushed the idea partly to help make the movement of migrants more orderly. He said Biden’s senior advisers refused.

Some officials contended that the Department of Homeland Security lacked congressional authority to transport immigrants not in government custody. Others thought that providing free transportation would draw more migrants.

As Abbott’s campaign ramped up, White House officials debated taking executive action on the border, Klain said in an interview. But Kyrsten Sinema, then a Democratic senator from Arizona, had begun talking to Republican lawmakers about border legislation, he said. Biden wanted to give that effort a chance.

“We were trying to cut a deal,” Klain said.

But Democrats were running out of time.

By the halfway mark of Biden’s term, the failure of his approach was impossible to ignore.

The Border Patrol reported 2.2 million apprehensions along the Mexican border the previous year, up from 400,000 the year Biden was elected. In 2023, the number of migrants in the country lacking legal status who were not detained and were waiting for their cases to be resolved surpassed 6 million, almost doubling since 2020.

CHNV was an evolution of more targeted migrant programs introduced earlier in the Biden administration, starting with Operation Allies Welcome, which allowed the suspect in last month’s attack on the National Guard troops into the United States. In 2022, the administration started a similar entry program for Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s invasion of their country.

Republicans accused the administration of letting in immigrants lacking legal status. And no one at the Department of Homeland Security was responsible for ensuring that people who entered through CHNV left the country when they were supposed to, according to a report this year by the agency’s inspector general.

Still, CHNV succeeded in reducing the number of people from those four countries approaching the border. But overall crossings remained high.

In May 2023, the administration replaced Title 42 with new restrictions. Asylum-seekers were supposed to book an appointment through a mobile app, CBP One, which offered a limited number of openings.

The administration also raised the threshold for asylum for people who did not use the app. But the new restrictions failed to stem the tide. Border encounters fell briefly, then rebounded.

Texas eventually sent more than 19,000 migrants to Denver. The city of about 720,000 wound up taking in 43,000 of them.

The influx became a crisis for Johnston, who was elected mayor three weeks after the first bus arrived. As the numbers grew, he repeatedly asked the Biden administration for money and policy changes to address what he called a “humanitarian crisis.”

The costs spread. The main safety-net hospital spent millions of dollars treating additional patients with no insurance. The school system made room for more than 5,000 additional students. Denver spent almost $100 million trying to manage the crisis.

The city was not alone. By September, Texas had sent tens of thousands of migrants to Chicago, Washington, Philadelphia and New York.

“This issue will destroy New York City,” Mayor Eric Adams told a town hall that month. “The city we knew, we’re about to lose.”

Murphy, D-Conn., had led his party’s negotiations over a bill to fix the border crisis by giving the government authority to restrict asylum claims. The bill had taken Murphy and his Republican counterpart, Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, months to agree upon.

Within hours, as Murphy watched Republicans attack the bill on social media, he knew it would fail. Early the next day, Trump delivered the death blow. “This Bill is a great gift to the Democrats,” he wrote on social media. “It takes the HORRIBLE JOB the Democrats have done on Immigration and the Border, absolves them, and puts it all squarely on the shoulders of Republicans. Don’t be STUPID!!!”

“We had our votes on Sunday afternoon,” Murphy said. “We didn’t have them on Monday morning.”

The bill could have provided what Biden needed as he ran for reelection: a drop in border crossings, blessed by both parties in Congress, with enough time before Election Day for voters to change their minds about Democrats supporting open borders.

Democrats blamed Trump for sinking the deal. But Lankford pointed to another culprit: the Biden administration’s own foot-dragging.

Looking back, Lankford said he believed the delay was critical. If Biden had signed on sooner, he said, the talks could have produced an agreement before the end of 2023. At that point, Trump, who still faced opposition for the Republican presidential nomination, might not have had the clout to torpedo the deal.

Then Trump defeated Ron DeSantis in Iowa, and Nikki Haley in New Hampshire. By the time the border deal concluded in February 2024, “it was very clear that Mr. Trump was going to win” the nomination, Lankford said. And Trump was eager to score political points off Biden’s immigration record.

The deal’s failure left Biden in a bind. Border encounters were still higher than at any point in the Trump administration. The estimated number of immigrants lacking legal status in the United States — 11 million when Biden took office — was approaching 14 million. And the election was nine months away.

Less than three weeks after the Senate deal collapsed, a 22-year-old nursing student, Laken Riley, was killed on the University of Georgia campus. When a Venezuelan man who had entered the country illegally was charged with the murder, her death became shorthand for Democrats’ failures. Trump met with Riley’s family and said that she would still be alive “if Joe Biden had not willfully and maliciously eviscerated the borders.”

By June, 55% of Americans said total immigration levels should fall, the highest share measured by Gallup since just after the 9/11 attacks.

Why Biden waited so long to effectively seal the border has become one of the defining questions of his presidency.

Some aides feared that closing the border would be overturned by the courts. Others said that principles mattered. “It was truly believed — deeply, by many, including the president — that that was not in keeping with our values,” said Jacobson, the former border czar.

Three weeks after closing the border, the president faced off against Trump in a debate at CNN’s Atlanta studios. Asked why voters should trust him to solve the crisis, Biden flubbed it.

“What I’ve done — since I’ve changed the law, what’s happened?” said Biden, who had not changed the law. “I’ve changed it in a way that now you’re in a situation where there are 40% fewer people coming across the border illegally.”

Biden added, “I’m going to continue to move until we get the total ban on the … the total initiative relative to what we’re going to do with more Border Patrol and more asylum officers.”

Within a month, Biden left the race.

On Trump’s first day back in the White House, he effectively blocked asylum claims entirely. He also shut down Biden’s border entry app, ordered the military to the border and directed ICE to drastically expand its scope of arrests and deportations.

“The American people deserve a federal government that puts their interests first,” read Trump’s executive order.

The Biden experiment was over. A very different kind of experiment was just beginning.