President Joe Biden came into office with a relatively low bar to clear. Anything, it seemed at the time, had to be better than former President Donald Trump’s blatantly racist and intentionally harsh tactics to limit all immigration across the southern border, legal or otherwise.
In the two years since, the White House is clearly getting desperate when it comes to immigration. The pressure that has been building at the border since 2017 threatens to erupt as the barriers erected at the start of the pandemic strain. Immigration overall has become a seemingly insolvable problem, not due to a lack of solutions but a deliberate poisoning of the well by Republicans. That has forced Democrats to look for answers that will provoke minimal backlash from the GOP. In practice, that has looked like the adoption of Republican policies of border control and detention that dehumanize migrants and abandon any moral high ground Democrats had held.
Immigration overall has become a seemingly insolvable problem, not due to a lack of solutions but a deliberate poisoning of the well by Republicans.
The New York Times reported Monday that the Biden administration is “considering reviving the practice of detaining migrant families who cross the border illegally.” The law currently allows for migrant children to be detained for no longer than 20 days, but the administration’s practice has been to release families temporarily while using “ankle bracelets, traceable cellphones or other methods to keep track of them,” the Times reported.
While no decision has been taken yet, and, according to NBC News’ reporting, “many inside the administration are against the move,” it’s still one of the options being bandied about ahead of the May 11 expiration of Title 42, a public health measure that Trump and Biden have leaned on to quickly expel migrants. That the idea is up for discussion at all showcases just how badly Biden wants to avoid scenes of chaos at the border that…
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