The border Biden leaves behind: Stable thanks to Mexico and doors closed to asylum seekers

There was a migrant crisis in the United States. Was, because today the southern border, where just a year ago thousands of migrants crossed daily, is a mostly calm and stable place. Anyone would be forgiven for thinking that the crisis has continued, since candidate and now president-elect Donald Trump based his entire campaign on the fact that the border was collapsed. While the Republican is not known for his faithfulness to the facts, for the first three years of Biden’s presidency, that description was basically correct.

But after Trump quashed a bipartisan bill that would have drastically tightened the border in the first few months of this year, President Joe Biden signed a sweeping executive order in June that put a sharp halt to migrant inflows. While this measure has effectively shut the door almost entirely to asylum seekers — although asylum can still be sought from applicants’ countries of origin or some third countries thanks to a series of offices that Biden established during his term, which along with other measures has made that process much more efficient — it has been the combination of this, with Mexico’s intensification of its activity to detain migrants on its territory, that has meant the biggest change to the border that Biden is leaving behind.

This is what Doris Meissner, director of the U.S. immigration policy program at the Migration Policy Institute and head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), predecessor of the current Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE), points out between 1993 and 2000. “[The change] has been achieved as a result of two things. One is something the United States did and the other is something that Mexico did. The highest numbers were about a year ago, and that led to very high level talks between senior officials of both countries. Mexico had already been doing a great deal to work with the United States on reducing flows coming through to the border. But that accelerated and heightened beginning in January of 2024,” Meissner said by phone.

On the other hand, the rule in place since the summer that suspends the acceptance of new asylum applications until the average flow of migrants over two weeks falls below a certain threshold — that threshold has been lowered as crossings have decreased — has eliminated the incentive to cross the border, turn oneself in to the Border Patrol, and request asylum.

This was the strategy that migrants followed before the new measures. Applying for asylum at the hands of the Border Patrol began a long process that meant that people were released while their cases were resolved. With a backlog of almost three million cases — about 10 times more than a decade ago — for some 700 immigration judges in the country, the date for a court date could be several years in the future. In addition, while they wait, migrants have the right to remain in the country, and although they cannot work legally, many still do so illegally. Likewise, migrants who know in advance that their asylum application would be rejected for whatever reason can miss their court date and become undocumented.

With this door closed — and now if they pass through and turn themselves in they are deported directly — migrants have had no choice but to wait in a virtual line on the CBP One application. Through this app, people can request immigration appointments at official ports of entry where they can request asylum. Appointments can be given weeks or even months in advance and migrants, alone or with their families, must wait in Mexico. Despite this, and complaints about numerous flaws and dangers in the application, U.S. authorities have viewed it as a success that has generated order on the southern border.

The numbers bear this out. According to customs information published exclusively by NewsNation last Friday, in November, for the first time in history, there were more encounters with migrants at official ports of entry than on the rest of the southern border. Encounters with migrants in general have also decreased month over month since June, with each new number of migrant crossings being the lowest since Biden took office. According to CBP figures, in October of this year, the most recent numbers openly published, there were 106,344 encounters along the entire southern border, a drastic reduction compared to the 301,981 in December 2023, the highest number in history. The expected increase in migrants seeking to reach the United States before Donald Trump takes office has not materialized precisely because Mexican authorities are dissolving the migrant caravans that have been forming in recent weeks, and because once they reach the border, there is no way to cross without being deported on the spot.

Despite the success of Biden’s measures and Mexico’s implementation of a much more aggressive strategy to stop migrants on their way to the U.S. border, it seems that this victory has come too late for the Democratic president to claim. Precisely, the legislation negotiated in Congress by both parties, which was even more comprehensive than the executive order that finally reduced the migrant flow, was overturned by order of Trump so that he could campaign with the message of a collapsed border. And, by all accounts, it worked. So the question remains as to why Biden took so long to take decisive action in the face of the situation.

“The Biden administration has been searching throughout its tenure for ways to establish effective border control, but also have humane policies that make it possible for people to gain protection in the United States if they are eligible for asylum. We’ve seen continual efforts from the beginning of the Biden administration to look for that balance, but it has really faced very difficult cross currents because of the way in which the flows have changed and also a tremendous amount of political pressure from its own constituencies. And so that’s been a real struggle for the administration. They were trying very hard to gain greater resources from Congress to make it possible to process more people and make it possible to decide asylum claims more quickly, but Congress ultimately did not agree to either the appropriations or to legislative measures. And so the administration waited and hoped for Congress to act, and that waiting ultimately, in retrospect, took too long,” Meissner said.

Asylum door closed, but refugee system well-oiled

The search for more humanitarian policies has been particularly evident in what has happened with the refugee resettlement system; although in the midst of an electoral campaign in which the border was at the center, this issue, somewhat convoluted with specific terms, has gone somewhat under the radar. While there is much talk about asylum seekers, the word refugee is less common. This is because technically they are exactly the same thing — people who flee their countries due to a lack of guarantees about their safety for various reasons — but there is a big difference: asylum seekers ask to be welcomed once they are already in the new country, while refugees process their request from their country of origin. During Biden’s presidency, the door to asylum has closed, but the refugee resettlement system, on the other hand, has been oiled.

The 100,034 refugees resettled in the United States in fiscal year 2024 represent the highest number of resettlements in 30 years and a notable rebound from the roughly 11,400 admissions three years earlier, the lowest on record. The turnaround reaffirms the United States’ role as the world’s leading resettlement destination, far outpacing other major resettlement countries in Europe and Canada. In addition, the nearly 25,400 refugees from the Western Hemisphere were the most on record, quadrupling the previous year’s 6,300.

This remarkable change was brought about by a series of new policies implemented that have streamlined a very rigorous process that used to take several years from start to finish. For one, security interviews have now been conducted remotely and the system has been digitized. Combined with the expansion of the refugee officer corps, this system modernization dramatically increased the number of interviews conducted, from approximately 1,200 in FY 2020 to more than 141,900 in FY 2024. In addition, the simultaneous processing of different stages, rather than being tiered, has also helped to streamline the process dramatically. Together, these changes allowed the resettlement program to expand its decision-making. In FY 2024, officials decided more than 149,600 cases, up from a low of 7,000 in FY 2020.

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