Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas insists that there is no crisis along the Southern border of the United States, only “challenges we are facing.” Since Biden’s inauguration and his subsequent migration policy adjustments, the Southern border has seen an increase in the number of migrants trying to enter the U.S. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CPB) there has been a 28% increase in the number of migrants at the Southern border from January to February.
Policies, responses and the nature of migration has varied widely throughout history. Dr. Anna Rannou, a professor of political science at Covenant, described the variation as “a partisan ping-pong match on immigration policy and process in recent years.” This has been true between the Trump and Biden administration as their policies and approaches toward immigration have differed dramatically.
The Trump administration undertook a series of interlocking, unilateral actions towards immigration policy, creating nearly 400 policy changes as of July 2020, which are documented in a report by the Migration Policy Institute. The administration's actions were characterized by punitive action at the Southern border, including building the wall, tightening policies to make it increasingly difficult for migrants to access asylum, and dismantling the refugee resettlement program.
Trump also enforced the “Remain in Mexico” policy which required migrants to wait in Mexico while their asylum claims, which are applications to receive protection from the U.S., were being processed. This was an attempt to address the issue of migrants who were remaining in the U.S. despite the denial of their asylum claims. The administration also made agreements with Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, making them “safe third countries” that migrants can apply for asylum in before coming to the U.S., along with pushing Central American countries to reduce immigration along their borders, going so far as to cut off aid and threaten tariffs on some.
Trump’s forceful rhetoric and strict policies led to record low border crossings in his first months, according to the Washington Post. However, the Migration Policy Institute reported that aside from the decrease in refugee resettlement, there was not a significant decrease in the amount of “permanent immigrants, temporary foreign workers, international students, and those receiving asylum in the United States—at least not yet.”
With the inauguration of the Biden administration, there has been a surge of migrants at the Southern border. The Boston Herald reported that President Biden’s obviously “openhanded approach” to migrants and his efforts to undo much of Trump’s policies is “creating a migrant surge that risks running out of control.”
In relation to the recent spike in border arrivals, Dr. Rannou observed that, “There does certainly seem to appear to be kind of a reactionary quality to the number of migrant arrivals at the Southern U.S. border since Biden took office.”
Biden has already begun dismantling much of the system that the Trump administration put in place, ending the “Remain in Mexico” policy and border wall construction as well as taking other actions to restore the asylum and refugee processes. “It takes time to rebuild the system from scratch,” said Mayorkas.
Not only have policies towards migration on the Southern border changed over the years, but the nature of migration has varied as well. Dr. Rannou discussed how prior to the 2008-2009 recession, the economy of the United States was a major pull factor for immigrants, many of whom were economic migrants. Since the recession however, she said, “We’ve seen a kind of wholesale reversal of this trend.”
While historically, migration into the U.S. has been thought of in the context of economic migration, Dr. Rannou said it has become an increasingly humanitarian crisis with migrants seeking asylum because of well-founded fears of persecution in their home countries. NPR reported that the uptick in migrants, especially since April 2020, was due to, “ongoing violence, natural disasters, food insecurity, and poverty in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.”
Among these migrants is a large proportion of unaccompanied minors, of which NPR reported a 60% increase in February from the numbers in January of this year. “It wouldn’t surprise me if in these circumstances, we’re looking at children who have either been orphaned by organized criminal gang violence and/or have been separated in the context of that,” Dr. Rannou noted.
“The big concern is that the gap is widening between the changing realities and the scale of what is now increasingly more humanitarian,” said Dr. Rannou in reference to the situation on the border. She noted that the complex situation is going to require, “major institutional and policy changes,” that will both guard the Southern border and simultaneously, “provide guaranteed protections to these most vulnerable people.”
The Biden administration is racing to navigate the ever-changing situation on the border, converting detention centers into rapid-processing hubs and beginning to process migrants on U.S. soil, addressing the backlog of applications produced through the “Remain in Mexico” policy. The pandemic has made this situation even more complex, and shelters are having to compromise on COVID-19 precautions in order to accommodate the rising numbers. Border agents are working to keep up with the increase but the Washington Post reported that they’ve been unable to contain everyone. Officials said they counted as many as 1,000 people on a single day who evaded apprehension at the border, via security cameras.
The current situation at the Southern border is a complicated problem with multiple factors to consider. No one is solely to blame for the situation currently unfolding. “It’s compounded years and years and years worth of mismanagement in the U.S. immigration system anyway, on top of nearly a full disassembly of the processes, especially in and around asylum procedures in the United States,” said Dr. Rannou, “I don’t think crisis is too far off a term to apply to this situation.”
Though the Biden administration has not officially termed it a crisis, the administration just recently deployed FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to the border, specifically to aid in the process of helping the hundreds of unaccompanied minors coming across the border, suggesting to the American public that this is in fact a crisis.