On Sunday, Rich Lowry posted an article at The New York Post about the decisions made early in the Biden administration that created the border crisis we have now. You might be able to convince some people that the crisis was simply the unintended consequence of bad decisions (not done deliberately), but the fact remains that those bad decisions were made.
The article recalls the decisions made almost immediately after President Biden took office:
The Feb. 2 order emphasized an effort to “enhance lawful pathways for migration to this country” and revoked a slew of Trump rules, executive orders, proclamations and memoranda.
The sense of it was that there’s nothing we can or should do on our own to control illegal immigration; rather, we had to fix deep-seated social, economic and political problems in Central America instead.
It called for getting more refugees into the United States, using parole to let more migrants join family members here, enhancing access to visa programs and reviewing whether the United States is doing enough for migrants fleeing domestic or gang violence, among other things.
And it put on the chopping block numerous Trump policies that had helped establish order at the border, from Trump’s expansion of expedited removal, to his termination of a parole program for Central American minors, to his memorandum urging the relevant departments to work toward ending “catch and release.”
Most important, it targeted two of the pillars of Trump’s success at the border: the Migrant Protection Protocols, better known as Remain in Mexico, and the safe-third-country agreements with the Northern Triangle countries that allowed us to divert asylum seekers to Central American countries other than their own to make asylum claims.
