Americana

‘He’s using tools that Donald Trump used’: How Joe Biden became a border hawk

THE SCENE

At the time, in the summer of 2019, it was an easy question for Joe Biden. The future president was in Iowa, speaking to the Iowa Asian and Latino Coalition, a now-defunct PAC that vetted every major candidate for the Democratic nomination. Shaimaa Aly, an immigrant from Egypt, asked how Biden would end Donald Trump’s “horrible treatment for our asylum seekers” and refugees.

“He’s changed the law on asylum seekers,” Biden said. “He can’t do it.”

This week, Biden changed how asylum-seekers will interact with the law, with an executive order that allows non-citizens to be deported quickly unless they arrive at an official port of entry. Progressives called it a “return to Trump-era policies.” Trump called it “all for show.” The ACLU, which successfully halted Trump’s asylum limits with lawsuits, promised to sue and win again.

“He’s using tools that Donald Trump used and that we all spoke out against,” Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told Semafor. “I hope this will be declared unconstitutional, just as Trump’s was when he tried to do the same thing. But it’s troubling that our Democratic president and some Democrats are endorsing this strategy.”

DAVID’S VIEW

The long and agonizing climb-down from their 2020 ambitions may be the defining story of the Biden-era Democratic Party. On border policy, the Emma Lazarus mindset of the Trump years has vanished; a president who once summoned his inner Irish poet when talking about asylum seekers has now ordered that migrants “detrimental to the interests of the United States” can be kept out.

“To protect America as a land that welcomes immigrants,” Biden said on Tuesday, “we must first secure the border and secure it now.”

During his presidency, Trump’s actions to limit immigration and restrict asylum were broadly unpopular, and every faction of the opposition rejected them, from the socialists who wanted to dismantle Immigration and Customs Enforcement to the wealthy suburbanites who raised money for refugee groups.

That backlash was captured in virtually every official policy position Democrats released during the 2020 campaign cycle. Biden’s initial immigration plan asserted that “the US has a responsibility to help our neighbors and partners process and support refugees and asylum seekers.” The party’s unity commission recommendations, written by representatives of the Biden and Bernie Sanders campaigns, declared that “Democrats believe the United States should be a beacon of hope for those who are suffering violence and injustice, which is why we will protect and expand the existing asylum system.” The official Democratic platform echoed the same promise to rebuild “a beacon of hope” as it mentioned asylum for the first time. 

Trump’s framing of the issue is still horrifying to Democrats. They remain comfortable comparing his rhetoric to the words of fascists when he talks about migrants “poisoning the blood” of the country. Biden’s announcement of the new policy included a series of to-be-sures that were basically about Trump: “the Statue of Liberty is not some relic of American history,” and “I will never demonize immigrants,” and (once again) “I will never refer to immigrants as ‘poisoning the blood’ of a country.”

But three years of stories about migrants surrendering, asking for asylum, and roaming freely until far-off court dates have taken a rough political toll. In polling conducted for Gallup and the Pew Research Center, support for mass deportation has surged since 2020; support for deporting “all” noncitizen migrants jumped from 37% to 50%, driven by Republicans and conservative independents. Polling has also shown Trump winning more support among Latinos while promising mass deportations — sucking the wind out of any argument that tacking left on immigration might win more votes.

The Democrats who embraced Biden’s move this week were usually in tough races — Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego, Montana Sen. Jon Tester — and had endorsed bipartisan legislation that would have included the same changes. More wary Democrats could at least excuse that legislation as the price Republicans were demanding as a condition for approving more aid to Ukraine. Trump’s public opposition helped kill that bill, forcing Biden to act unilaterally, or not at all.

Biden has been cornered on this issue by his Republican opponents in more subtle ways, too. The promise to humanely welcome asylum seekers was always premised on a surge of resources necessary to process a historic number of arrivals at the Southern border — money and manpower the GOP has blocked.

Democrats have not entirely flipped on immigration; the party still favors work status and legalization for noncitizens. But they no find themselves with little leverage to demand those policies in a trade with Republicans while the border weighs on Biden’s polls.

“We are where we are,” California Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia told Semafor. “The president’s doing the best he can with having no Republican support. We also have to have immigration reform, but it’s not gonna get brought up. So I think we have to be honest about the reality.”

Progressives who worked on the 2020 platform, while not abandoning Biden, are expressing frustration that the new policy is so far from what he promised.

“There is a right-wing, white Christian nationalist, xenophobic movement in America and its nominee for president is Donald Trump,” said Analilia Mejia, Co-Executive Director of Center for Popular Democracy, an appointee to the unity commission. “President Biden is better served by differentiating himself from that hate.”

THE VIEW FROM IMMIGRATION HAWKS

Republicans have given Biden no credit for his switch, and the White House didn’t expect any. “The Biden announcement might be the first small stirring of acknowledgement on the left of center that asylum is, potentially, a problem,” said Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the restrictionist Center for Immigration Studies. “Liberals have been mugged by the reality of open borders.”

Trump bad-mouthed the Biden shift from the get-go, initially ignoring the details and saying it was all about the president’s vulnerability in their upcoming debate. He’s since focused on one provision of the order — exempting “unaccompanied minors” from the count of daily border crossings. At a Thursday rally in Phoenix, he labeled Biden’s action “pro-child trafficking” and led the crowd in a chant of “bullshit.”

NOTABLE

• Previously in Semafor, Joseph Zeballos-Roig and Kadia Goba talked to more progressives who were furious about the Biden order. “We shouldn’t fall into the trap that Republicans have set for us,” said Texas Rep. Greg Casar, a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
• In The New York Times, former Obama and Biden immigration adviser Andrea R. Flores urges the president to change the debate and “lead his party back to a time when fighting for the undocumented was a major policy priority alongside border security.”
• In the Liberal Patriot, Ruy Teixeira chastises Biden critics on the left who want to stop the executive order: “What part of, “We need to get a lot tougher on border security,” don’t these Democrats understand?”
• For MSNBC, Dara Lind speculates that the order may backfire once fully implemented. “It’s quite possible that border numbers will drop over the summer. It’s harder to imagine that they won’t rise at any point between now and, say, November.”

Joseph Zeballos-Roig contributed reporting.

New Jersey. Democrats nominated Rep. Andy Kim for the seat now held by Sen. Bob Menendez; Republicans nominated Cape May real estate developer Curtis Bashaw. In doing so, they rejected Trump-endorsed candidate Christine Serrano Glassner.

The results, Kim said on Wednesday, gave voters a choice between “the chaos and corruption of Bob Menendez and Donald Trump.” Menendez, who filed petitions to run as an independent right before the primary, loomed over the race when Senate Majority Chuck Schumer refused to tell CNN who he supported: “We are going to make sure a Republican is not elected.” The Democratic Senatorial Senate Campaign Committee didn’t react to Kim’s win on Tuesday, either, even as it congratulated Sen. Jon Tester for his re-nomination in Montana.

A DSCC aide said the committee simply wasn’t commenting on races in safe states, and it considered New Jersey to be one, saying the committee was “in regular working communications” with the Kim campaign. Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, who broke with his colleagues to endorse Kim, told Semafor that “the Menendez seat needs an enema and Kim would be “the ultimate reboot” for New Jersey. “Democracy and Democrats both won and I was proud to be with him from the beginning. I look forward to serving together in 2025.”

Rep. Rob Menendez, who stayed neutral in the Senate primary as his father stayed in the race, held on against two primary challengers with 52% — down from the 84% he won two years ago, before his father’s second indictment.

Florida. Gov. Ron DeSantis prevailed in his legal battle with a progressive state attorney he removed last year, after the state supreme court’s conservative majority upheld his decision. Orange-Osceola State Attorney Monique Worrell had argued that the governor’s order, removing her over not seeking tougher sentences for criminals, was politically motivated and didn’t reflect falling crime in the Orlando area or misplaced blame by a county sheriff who hadn’t prosecuted drug traffickers; six of the seven justices agreed that “prosecutorial discretion is no complete defense to an allegation of incompetence or dereliction of duty.” Worrell is running to retake the office in November.

Courage to Change, “Jamaal Bowman Fights for Us.” New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Bowman when he was challenging a colleague, joined him at his 2024 campaign launch, and is funding this ad through her PAC — a digital and TV spot that highlights his support for higher taxes on billionaires and “lower prices.” Bowman’s overall strategy: Portray him as a loyal liberal Democrat, not an insurgent inside his party.

Sherri Biggs for Congress, “Conservative Republican.” Back in April, Trump endorsed pastor and campaign surrogate Mark Burns in the race for a safe South Carolina House seat. Biggs has the support of Gov. Henry McMaster, who argues here that voters can also support Trump by supporting her; he endorsed Trump in 2016, and he supports Biggs because she’s a “strong, conservative, pro-Trump” leader.

Sonnenberg for Congress, “Better.” Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert switched congressional districts this cycle to avoid a potential loss in the seat she lives in. She’s dominated the new race anyway, raising nearly 10 times as much as the closest Republican rival. “We can do better than Lauren Boebert,” says ex-legislator Jerry Sonnenberg in his campaign’s only spot: He lives in the district and “won’t embarrass you with scandals.”

Republican voters have repeatedly adjusted their biases to fit Trump’s circumstances — first on the question of indictments, now on convictions. In April, just 17% of Republicans said that a convicted felon should be allowed to serve as president. That number has surged to 58%. Democrats haven’t budged on the question, and independents barely have. But the GOP movement has changed this from a landslide result to a contested one.

The unified Republican argument on the Trump conviction is that Democrats are pursuing “lawfare” to disqualify the GOP nominee. In Georgia, where the Trump legal team has successfully delayed a trial over 2020 election interference with motions about Fulton County DA Fani Willis’s personal conflicts, most voters believe that the verdict in New York was right — but they don’t want to punish Trump for it. By 3-point margin, Georgia voters say Trump is the better choice for “preserving democracy,” suggesting that the GOP message has penetrated; 67% of all white voters say that Trump is best on that question.

White House. President Biden traveled to France for the 80th anniversary of the D-Day operation, sitting for an interview with ABC News, in which he ruled out a pardon for his son. Trump did a run of interviews as he headed west for campaign stops, including one with Fox News host Sean Hannity, and one with Dr. Phil McGraw.

Both pressed Trump to say that he wouldn’t seek vengeance on Democrats for the charges filed against him since leaving office. Both times, Trump left the door open. “Revenge does take time. I will say that,” he told McGraw. “And sometimes revenge can be justified, Phil. I have to be honest. Sometimes it can.”

After his Thursday rally in Arizona, Trump told an ABC News affiliate that he could not rule out prosecutions of opponents who had wronged him and, he felt, done things that opened themselves up to lawsuits: “I’ll talk to you in about three years from now.” He told Newsmax that “it’s a terrible, terrible path that they’re leading us to, and it’s very possible that it’s going to have to happen to them.”

Biden’s answers in France clarified how the two candidates approach the clemency/prosecution question. It also provided a strong example of a Biden optics problem that the White House hasn’t been able to fix with speeches or events. The RNC’s rapid research team clipped a 13-second video of Biden, onstage, slowly sitting down, then pausing as First Lady Jill Biden talked to him. It cut before Biden took his seat — an edit that led to a frenzied online discourse about whether Biden had broken protocol, or tried to sit where there was no chair.

“He goes over to France, and something happens that was not good,” Trump said in a Friday TikTok with Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk.

Joe Biden won the 2020 Democratic primary over a field of more progressive candidates, with dreams of dismantling the Trump legacy. Julián Castro, who’d served as the Obama-Biden administration’s final HUD secretary, ran on decriminalizing border-crossing and protecting asylum seekers. Now a commentator for NBC News, Castro was an early, vocal critic of Biden’s asylum order, and he talked with Americana about why. This is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Americana: What was your first gut reaction when you heard about this policy shift?

Julián Castro: It wasn’t unexpected. The administration has been signaling this for a while and, of course, had proposed legislation, which failed a few months ago. Overall, I believe that it’s the wrong direction. I believe it’s going to be hard to claw back the damage that this is going to do to the asylum system in the long run and the injury that it does to our values. I believe that 10, 20, 30 years from now, the country is going to look back on this as a mistake.

Americana: What are the potential policy consequences of what Biden did, given that a similar action by Trump was already struck down in court?

Julián Castro: First, it’s likely to be struck down again. Second, and perhaps worse, it affirms the Trump playbook. It feeds right into the narrative that there’s an invasion. It feeds into the narrative that the best approach is simply enforcement and rewriting, completely, our asylum laws, doing a 180-degree turn on what we’ve stood for as a country when it comes to asylum.

We didn’t get here overnight. Trump accelerated this descent and Biden didn’t push back enough. He didn’t offer his own positive vision on immigration. Offering a positive vision on immigration is not sufficient to avoid a moment like this, but it is necessary. Now we’re at a point where a lot of Democrats are tripping all over themselves to agree with a policy that under Trump, people would have been in the streets about.

Americana: Looking back at how Biden talked about this in 2020, and the Democratic platform, I see language like: “I believe we are a nation that welcomes those fleeing persecution.” So is this policy a betrayal of what Democrats promised in 2020?

Julián Castro: Of course. I mean, this is a promise broken. This flies in the face of what Joe Biden articulated as a candidate, the vision that he laid out when he was running. To be fair, somebody might say: Well, look, the circumstances changed. More people are abusing the system. I think [California] Sen. Padilla has it right — you have to push for the ability to better handle that as a country, instead of compromising your values. This executive order is going to require, at some level, the participation of Republicans in Congress. Well, if you’re dealing with something that’s going to require additional funding, then you might as well deal with it in a positive way, like trying to beef up the ability to handle greater asylum requests.

The president got bullied into a corner on this issue. Did he have to do this to win in November? I don’t think he did. I believe, if anything, he could have pointed to the Republican failure to help Democrats pass that bipartisan legislation. The material was already there to work with.

Americana: Was there a better option available to Biden? If the goal was faster processing of asylum claims, was there something else he could have tried?

Julián Castro: My understanding is that they’re reducing the number of guaranteed hours that a person has to obtain a lawyer. These are changes that basically guarantee that people who would otherwise have a legitimate asylum case lose in the asylum process. I also find that 2,500-person trigger to be completely arbitrary. To me, this looks like a mostly political move, one that contradicts what was promised when he ran last time.

Americana: For the last few months we’ve seen Democrats willing to give up any path to legalization in these negotiations. That’s a change from what we saw five years ago. So what’s happened to the Democrats’ negotiating position?

Julián Castro: This is a classic case of negotiating against yourself. The Republicans spiked that legislation, and then the administration came back and said, we’ll just do a lot of what you wanted.

Americana: In 2019 and 2020, Democrats were reacting to how inhumane the Trump policies were — in their view, in the popular view. How does the party return to that mindset? Does it take another Trump presidency, and a backlash to the deportations that he’s promising to do?

Julián Castro: Unfortunately, that very dark scenario is what it seems like it would take to swing the pendulum back. And that’s not a good way to govern. That’s not a way to hold on to values, and it’s not a way to treat people. My hope is that Trump doesn’t get a second term, and that is that in the years to come, we find a better landing spot than this. Democrats have to make the case for the value of immigrants, and not be afraid to stand up for asylum seekers.

American: So, why is Trump able to run on that and not lose more of the Latino vote? That’s been another story after 2020 — Republicans are far more confident about restricting immigration. They can look at what Greg Abbott’s done, while still running stronger than Trump did in 2016 in the Rio Grande Valley.

Julián Castro: There are more than just Latinos watching this issue. There are more Americans with a good heart that care about how we treat asylum seekers than just brown people.

But here, again, I think it’s instructive that there’s been no positive case made, and no push for more protections for DREAMers and for their parents, for people who have been here in the country for a number of years, who are rooted here. This entire conversation is about people who are very recent arrivals. If this conversation were being had about the DREAM Act, or about DAPA, it might be different. But they’re fighting about people who are just getting here, literally at the border. And that involves a different category of people that have much less political sway. Unfortunately, that makes a difference on this issue.

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