Joe Biden Flip-Flopped on Immigration and Embraced Trump's Tactics

In the January 2025 issue of Reason, we're giving performance reviews of Joe Biden's presidency. Click here to read the other entries.

When Joe Biden described his vision for the U.S. immigration system in 2020, the presidential candidate painted himself as the antidote to Donald Trump's cruel restrictionism. "Trump has waged an unrelenting assault on our values and our history as a nation of immigrants," Biden's campaign website charged. He promised to "take urgent action to undo Trump's damage."

In some ways he did that. On his first day in office, Biden rescinded Trump policies restricting the entry of people from several Muslim-majority and African countries and revoked the Trump administration's immigration enforcement priorities, which had dramatically expanded the pool of immigrants prioritized for deportation. Biden sent Congress a comprehensive immigration bill, which included a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and retention measures for foreign STEM graduates of U.S. universities, among other sensible measures.

Since those early days—and even in those early days—Biden's commitment to a kinder, gentler immigration system has wavered. Faced with a chaotic Mexican border, his administration has repeatedly reverted to the very tactics he lambasted Trump for using.

Biden maintained Trump's legacy by renewing the pandemic-era Title 42 order, which allowed U.S. border agents to expel migrants quickly without letting them seek asylum. In 2023, the administration waived federal laws to allow border wall construction in South Texas, despite campaign trail promises of "not another foot." Biden revived many aspects of a Trump-era "transit ban," which barred migrants from applying for asylum in the U.S. if they didn't do so in another country before reaching the border. And Biden, who once charged that Trump was "fighting tooth & nail to deny those fleeing dangerous situations their right to seek asylum," did just that in June when he significantly restricted access to the asylum process. He's on track to match his predecessor's removal numbers, according to the Migration Policy Institute (MPI).

Some of Biden's immigration moves have been humane and innovative. His administration allowed private sponsorship programs to welcome thousands of migrants fleeing dire circumstances in Afghanistan, Ukraine, Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. The Welcome Corps, which launched in January 2023, allows private sponsors to help refugees from all over the world. In FY 2024, the U.S. resettled 100,000 refugees, the highest number in 30 years. A new policy will protect half a million undocumented spouses of American citizens from deportation (though it has faced legal challenges).

To many of his critics, Biden's immigration record will be defined by the border chaos he oversaw. The border has overshadowed nearly everything else that Biden has done in what has been a very active immigration presidency—by the three-year mark, his administration had taken 535 executive immigration actions compared to 472 during all of Trump's first term, the MPI reports.

But Biden is complicit in making the border the centerpiece of his immigration policy. He has joined a mostly Republican, but increasingly bipartisan, group of politicians who see lower border crossings as the primary measure of success and higher border crossings as a sign of crisis. After years of Trump and members of Congress claiming that the president can simply "shut down the border," Biden essentially tried to do just that, legal and humanitarian constraints be damned.

Biden has spoken of immigrants in much friendlier terms than Trump has and has offered an optimistic vision of immigration that echoed America's longstanding principles on the issue. But he hasn't been the stalwart defender of immigration he purported to be on the campaign trail.

Immigration policy performance review: poor follow-through