Read Part 1 of this series: Biden Didn’t Cause the Border Crisis, Part 1: Summary.
Biden Did Not Cut Enforcement
The FOIA data give a precise picture of migration and Biden’s actions when he first arrived in office. The central argument of those who blame Biden for the surge in migration is that Biden cut enforcement, which then caused a later rise in arrests. Biden did cancel some of Trump’s policies, but he accomplished more removals using different authorities. As Biden said in December 2020—before he entered office—he did not want to rescind Trump’s Title 42 expulsion policy because “the last thing we need is … two million at the border.”
Biden did not end Title 42, which allowed for the expulsions of immigrants even if they were requesting asylum. Daily expulsions at the border grew from inauguration day onward, eventually doubling even before the end of April 2021. Biden did terminate the “Remain in Mexico” policy, which had returned some migrants to Mexico to await their asylum hearings in the US.
However, that is a change in enforcement procedure, not enforcement outcome. By April 2021, Biden was already returning over 140 times as many immigrants per day to Mexico under Title 42 as were being returned to Mexico under Remain in Mexico in early January 2021. Precisely zero Central Americans were returned under Remain in Mexico in January 2021, and their numbers grew the fastest in 2021.
Taking a broader perspective, the level of border enforcement achieved under Biden was unmatched by any month under Trump—including 2019, when Remain in Mexico was in effect. At no point was Remain in Mexico a majority of forced departures from the border. It was a relatively small program compared to Title 42. The whole purpose of the immigration enforcement apparatus is removals, and whatever else he did, Biden significantly increased the number of recent border crossers forced out.
Regardless, Biden later reinstated Remain in Mexico—at a level four times higher than the January 2021 level and negotiated the acceptance of more nationalities than Trump did—and illegal immigration did not fall during this period. Biden’s administration ultimately canceled Remain in Mexico again because, as the Washington Post reported, “Remain in Mexico was cumbersome and inefficient, requiring additional layers of paperwork and complex logistics.” Moreover, canceling Remain in Mexico cannot explain the rise in migration among groups that were never even subject to it: most prominently, Mexicans, unaccompanied children, Haitians, and all other non-Spanish-speaking nationalities.
Biden also ended another dormant Trump policy: the Asylum Cooperative Agreements with El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. This policy, which allowed for the removal of asylum seekers from one country to a “safe third country,” had not been used since March 2020. The Salvadoran and Honduran agreements never took effect, and during two months the Guatemalan policy was in effect, only 945 people were sent there: not even a morning’s worth of arrivals in 2021. Regardless, there was no reason to use the policy since Title 42 had suspended asylum, and it was not less expensive or logistically difficult to expel someone to Guatemala than to El Salvador or Honduras. It was even easier to send them to Mexico, which is what was done.
Biden’s other enforcement changes, such as reducing interior enforcement, were for the express purpose of increasing border enforcement. For instance, the so-called “deportation moratorium” memorandum was explicitly justified by the need to “surge resources to the border,” and it only limited deportations from the interior (and a court never allowed it to go into effect anyway). Limiting formal “deportations” wouldn’t have mattered for the border anyway since the Border Patrol could expel people under Title 42.
Border Releases Were a Consequence, Not the Cause, of the Crisis
Biden not only used Title 42, but he further justified and codified its use in regulations, and he defended those regulations in court, appealing repeated court decisions that its use was illegal. However, expulsions did not deter migration. Border Patrol arrests grew faster than the number of expulsions, so the percentage of crossers that Border Patrol expelled fell. This meant some crossers were released into the United States.
Biden’s critics claim that more people came and releases grew after because Biden cut enforcement. If true, the percentage removed should have initially declined because removals fell. But this never happened. Instead, we see that Biden increased removals but this did not deter crossings, which grew even faster than enforcement. In other words, higher migration caused releases, not fewer removals.
We can clearly see that higher illegal migration was not caused by releases or too few expulsions when tracking the migration of those Biden was able to expel: single adults (adults not traveling with children) from Mexico and northern Central America. They were virtually never released, yet their numbers continued to rise. As the figure shows, arrests in this demographic had already tripled from December 2019 to December 2020—before Biden came into office—ultimately increasing fivefold over that 2019 level. It is impossible to claim that failure to expel people caused increased migration when the Border Patrol saw fivefold increases in arrests among demographic groups who were universally expelled.
Biden clearly was not opposed to removing people. He was removing hundreds of thousands, so why did higher migration mean more releases? What were the logistical obstacles to Biden increasing removals as much as arrivals? There were essentially three factors:
Mexico’s willingness and capacity to accept returns.
The administration’s capacity to detain and remove people.
The willingness of other countries to accept removals.
In early 2021, when some migrants were being released, Mexico’s willingness and capacity to accept expulsions was the main factor. As President Biden stated in March 2021, “They should all be going back, all be going back.” Why weren’t they? Biden explained: “Mexico is refusing to take [some families] back.”
If the Biden administration had changed policy, it would have affected the entire border. Instead, families were released in a single sector: the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. Here’s why: in November 2020, Mexico passed a new law effective January 11, 2021, that required Mexican state governments to provide housing and care for child migrants they encounter. Mexican immigration service officials decided how to implement the law on January 22, 2021, and within two days, all the shelters in the Mexican state across from the Rio Grande Valley sector (Tamaulipas) were filled up.
Biden did not sit on his hands about this situation. By February 9, he had opened a new tent detention facility to hold families longer. In April, he opened three more. He increased Border Patrol detention by 12-fold from January to July 2021. ICE began to fly families on “lateral removal flights” to California and Arizona to expel them to Mexican states with the capacity to receive them. These actions started to increase the expulsion rate for families by mid-February. By early March, Biden negotiated a deal with Mexico to accept more families in exchange for vaccine access. However, new arrivals quickly eclipsed Mexico’s higher threshold and the Border Patrol’s increased detention capacity.
Beyond more detention, Biden:
sent 1,500 National Guard troops to the border;
hired processing coordinators to free up Border Patrol agents to carry out expulsions;
sent asylum officers to conduct fear screenings with individuals in border detention; and
created a special family docket for expedited immigration court hearings.
Biden had a much more significant complication for his goal of closed borders than Central American families—namely, immigrants from outside of Mexico and northern Central America (Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador). The deal that Trump struck with Mexico on Title 42 did not allow for the expulsion of immigrants other than these four nationalities to Mexico. The only way that they could be expelled is by air to their home countries.
More problematically still, several countries, including Venezuela and Cuba, were refusing to accept deportation flights from the United States, making it impossible to remove them. Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz explained this situation to Congress, but they blamed the Biden administration’s “policy of release” anyway.
Biden tried to detain as many crossers as he could in long-term Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities away from the border pending removal. At no point was Biden detaining fewer people than when Trump left office. Biden reversed the COVID-19 person limits on ICE detention that Trump imposed, allowing ICE to further increase detention in 2022, and he ultimately increased ICE detention to a level nearly three times what he inherited from Trump. However, the detention capacity of just 25,000 to 40,000 was never close to sufficient to detain the four million border crossers who entered illegally and were not removed under the Biden administration.
Biden did cancel long-term family ICE detention, but 1) he increased detention of families at the border, and 2) had he reinstated family detention, he would have had to release twice as many single adults as the number of families he detained because family detention is twice as expensive. This would have effectively reduced detention. In any case, since there were only about 3,000 beds available, most families were released even under Trump in 2019.
Why is it necessary to detain people before removal? Why couldn’t Border Patrol just put these people on planes and fly them immediately to their home countries? For one thing, Border Patrol has no removal planes, so they must transfer people to ICE for air removals, and it is not as if there are planes just sitting around waiting for people to enter them. Moreover, ICE has planes to conduct about 130 flights per month, with an average of about 120 deportees on board each flight, implying a limit of 190,000 air removals per year. Border Patrol arrested 1.5 million non-Mexicans in 2022 and 2023—with another 1 million in 2024. Even taking out the northern Central Americans who could be at least sometimes expelled to Mexico, the totals were one million in 2022 and 2023—with 700,000 in 2024.
Biden increased US removal flights by 55 percent during his term. He extended unprecedented contracts with airplane charter companies when the prior contract lapsed. However, it was impossible for ICE to remove as many people as were arriving with its current resources by air.
Biden also did everything he could to stop immigrants from ever crossing the border. Among his more than 120 actions:
He convinced Mexico to ban visa-free legal entries into Mexico for Ecuadorians, Brazilians, and Venezuelans.
He convinced Belize and Costa Rica to ban Venezuelans as well, cutting off alternative flights.
He convinced Colombia to accept deportation flights of Venezuelans (Jan. 2022).
He negotiated the reopening of Cuba (Nov. 2022) and China (July 2024) to US deportation flights.
He even briefly obtained consent from the Maduro regime for deportations directly to Venezuela (Oct. 2023), though Maduro then canceled the deal after the US protested his fraudulent reelection.
He convinced Ecuador to cancel visa-free entries for Chinese.
He convinced Panama and Colombia to crack down on crossings between their countries (Apr. 2023).
He convinced Haiti to ban (previously legal) charter flights off its island to Central America (Oct. 2023).
He banned charter flight operators carrying out legal flights out of Cuba and Haiti from entering the United States (Nov. 2023).
He funded the largest-ever immigration enforcement operation in Mexico—almost four times higher than the highest month under Trump.
Read Part 3: Would Trump have stopped the Biden border crisis?