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President Biden revealed a new approach to border security on Thursday, coupling a massive new path for some migrants from Haiti, Cuba and Nicaragua to reach the U.S. while promising Trump-style expulsions and blockades to stop those who refuse to use his new avenues of entry.
The carrot-and-stick approach comes after two years of unprecedented chaos at the southern border, and belatedly gives Mr. Biden some concrete answers to dealing with the crisis.
The new legal pathway would cover up to 30,000 people a month from four key countries. It allows a two-year permit to live and work in the U.S. while trying to find a more permanent status.
At the same time, Mexico has agreed to take back up to 30,000 people a month who try to jump the southern border without going through the new pathway. That return-to-Mexico policy is similar to the one used by the Trump administration to solve the 2019 border surge.
At the White House, Mr. Biden called for both sides to embrace his approach.
“This is a hard one to deal with, but we have to deal with it,” he said.
“These actions alone that I’m going to announce, they are not going to fix our immigration system but they can help us a good deal,” he said.
Administration officials called the new legal program “unprecedented.”
“We view this 30,000 a month as really, truly ground-breaking,” one official said.
The announcement comes ahead of Mr. Biden’s belated first trip to the border next week.
It also marks a stunning flex of executive power and one that could be challenged in the courts by both sides of the immigration debate. Immigrant rights activists say pushing people back to Mexico denies them their legal right to claim asylum, while legal experts on the right question Mr. Biden’s expansive use of “parole” to admit migrants outside of the system created by Congress.
“This is one of the most egregious, unlawful abuses of humanitarian parole authority in American history,” said R.J. Hauman, head of government relations at the Federation for American Immigration Reform. “‘Case by case’ has morphed into industrial-scale processing.”
Legal arguments aside, the administration says the plan will work.
They have been doing a trial run with Venezuela after a surge of migrants from that country threatened to overwhelm the border last fall. The administration in October announced its policy of paroling some Venezuelans who applied from abroad, while expelling others back to Mexico.
