Biden administration officials have repeatedly stressed this week that they inherited a disaster from the Trump administration, saying the solutions would not be painless or quick. According to a separate call with Democratic collaborators on the hill, White House officials reiterated that the “real crisis is in Central America,” according to several people. Biden and his team highlight the ‘root causes’ of migration training and their renewed diplomatic efforts with Central American countries, which have fallen under the Trump administration.
The White House also called outside groups and staff for high-profile Democrats off the hill to coordinate messages, with the goal of getting all stakeholders moving in the same direction.
The coordination, as well as the recognition of the scale of the situation, was welcomed by many Democrats. After joining House Democrats in a private virtual meeting with Xavier Becerra, secretary of health and human services, and Alejandro Mayorkas, secretary of homeland security, rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) Scribbled ‘Hallelujah’ on a sheet of paper along with his other notes.
“Because they said, ‘Look, this is not the problem of HHS or DHS, but that every federal agency will be involved now’ in this project,” Cleaver said. ‘It was important to hear that the government does not believe it has reached Nirvana. We have a long and persistent problem on our southern border. ‘
The government’s revised approach is a tacit acknowledgment that their initial stance – in which they underestimated the problem and steadfastly refused to call it a crisis – does not at least work politically. But when it comes to correcting the conditions that force migrants to flee their homelands, the White House must work for it.
For the president, it is not as simple as stopping from where he left off during the Obama administration, when he worked on diplomatic efforts with the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. It also involves reviewing an immigration system that has been dramatically changed by Trump and adding the ability to handle a boom of migrants at the border – many of whom are suspended immediately.
The number of unaccompanied children arriving at the border reached a monthly high in March, surpassing the last record high in May of 2019. In total, about 170,000 people were arrested by border patrol last month. About 100,000 of the migrants were single adults who were regularly removed from the U.S. by the Biden government under a public health authority in the Trump era.
Despite the problems, there is virtually no prospect of immigration reform in a Congress with such a small margin. According to extensive Democratic sources, Biden’s comprehensive immigration plan is trapped in the House, where there are still no votes for his own party. Senate Republicans – who were on the table to discuss reform in 2013 – would rather travel to the border to arm the issue before mid-November next year.
Some border Democrats say they appreciate Biden’s efforts to address the causes of the long-term migrant boom. But they argue that the government needs a plan to address the immediate influx of migrants as well.
“We already know the causes. We can send researchers there, but we already know the answers, ”said Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), one of the few Democrats who has publicly expressed concern about Biden’s handling of the issue. ‘The question is how do you address this issue? Private investment is going to be the key. Foreign aid and private investment take time. It is not going to be done today, tomorrow. ”
The taxed immigration system remains one of Biden’s biggest challenges in the first months of his presidency. The president enjoys relatively high marks on issues such as the pandemic and the economy. But only 34 percent of Americans said they approved of the president’s handling of immigration, according to an NPR / Marist poll conducted late last month.
Some immigration rights advocates say this is in part because Biden and his administration slowly merged in the early weeks of his term behind a clear strategy, with most of the focus on the coronavirus pandemic and the aid package to solve it.
“The White House needed, or should have been, more proactive in presenting and telling the story for three weeks before they really started doing it,” said Lorella Praeli, executive director of Community Change Action, a progressive grassroots group. “If you do not define the narrative, you give your opponents the power to do so.”
There is also a provocative democratic and activist frustration over Biden’s continued use of the Trump-era government – known as Title 42 – to drive the majority of people to the border. Publicly and privately, the White House told reporters and Hill staff that they had no timeline to stop using the authority.
Over the past few weeks, the government has been trying to act quickly by sending delegations to the border. They also increasingly coordinated with Democrats in border districts after some of the members initially said they had been left out.
Last week, Biden installed Vice President Kamala Harris as the new coordinator of the Northern Triangle and Mexico, and on Thursday reversed a Trump-era policy that allowed immigration services to reject asylum applications if any. no space is left. Conservatives claim the reversal of Trump’s policies and Biden’s language create the situation on the border, but immigration experts say few migrants undertake the dangerous journey solely on who is in the White House.
The government also put an end to Trump’s stay in Mexico policy, forcing migrants to await their demands on the Mexican side of the border in tent camps, and reintroduced the Central American Minority Program so that children could apply for asylum from their home countries. Mayorkas, DHS secretary, nevertheless said that the US is on track to meet more people at the border than in the past 20 years.
As Biden confronts an increase in migrants fleeing violence, poverty and devastation due to hurricanes, he and his officials stressed the democratic and the public about the cyclical nature of migration increases, which also occurred during the Obama and Trump years .
As vice president, some of Biden’s most sensational visits to Central America at the time coincided with spikes in young unaccompanied migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, and he took on the role of ghost person for the government.
In the spring of 2014, when migrating crossings made headlines, Biden stopped in Guatemala. He told reporters that the situation at the border was “unsustainable and unsustainable”. But even then, Biden spoke of the problem as a matter of humanity, saying he “can not imagine the desperation” that leads a family to send their child into the arms of criminal traffickers on the perilous journey .
When Biden traveled to Central America for the first time years as vice president, he was trying to change the way the U.S. approached the relationship, assistants and officials recalled. Obama and Biden have given priority to deepening partnerships with governments and getting more money in depressed parts of the region.
The process of releasing funding took time. But by mid-2015, Congress had spent more than $ 1 billion on the Northern Triangle over a two-year period. Obama and Biden have made a more concentrated effort to encourage people fleeing violence, especially children, to seek asylum abroad rather than trying to cross from Mexico to the US.
There has been some progress. Studies have found that between 2014 and 2018 there was a sharp decline in the number of U.S. population border crossings of immigrants from 50 of El Salvador’s municipalities, said Mark Schneider, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and former head of Latin , said. America and the Caribbean at USAID. Across the same municipalities, murders have dropped by 40 percent over about three years.
But despite the relative successes in El Salvador, Schneider said, the number of migrants from Guatemala and Honduras came to the US.
‘Did it solve the problem? No, of course it did not, ”said Francisco González, a Mexico scholar and professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. ‘Did they allocate enough resources? No, it was not nearly enough. And did then-Vice President Biden finally know more about the American southern border and Central America? The answer is, yes, he did. ‘
‘He came in with this portfolio. He did what he could. But it’s a spot in an ocean. ‘
Fast forward to Biden’s turn in the Oval Office and he pushes Congress again to send aid to Central America and Mexico. Its administration also seeks to expand the capacity to accommodate a growing number of child migrants in emergencies – such as stadiums, church facilities and summer camps – rather than keeping them in densely packed border patrol facilities.
The administration allowed only a small number of reporters to access one of the media to allow access to the facilities border patrol facilities this week. Overwhelming government agencies also release migrants at the border without paperwork.
“We can not just deal with the symptoms,” said House Democrat Cleaver. ‘That’s all we’re been doing for the last two, maybe three decades, are the symptoms. It will not work anymore. ”