Last week, The New York Times reported that the Biden administration may reinstate the practice of detaining migrant families that cross the border illegally. The irony isn’t lost on those who recall that candidate Joe Biden blasted the same policy as inhumane and racist. “It is a moral failing and a national shame when … children are locked away in overcrowded detention centers,” his campaign Web site proclaims to this day. “Trump has waged an unrelenting assault on our values and our history as a nation of immigrants. It’s wrong, and it stops when Joe Biden is elected president.”
“Has his administration succumbed to the ‘fear and racism’ it once denounced?”
And it did stop, for a while, when Biden made it to the Oval Office. In December 2021, the administration put an end to the detention of migrant families and released more than 100 families into the United States. Two years and 2 million illegal immigrants later, Biden is considering reversing course. Has his administration succumbed to the “fear and racism” it once denounced?
More likely, Team Biden is reading the polls and realizing that the border crisis is going to be a massive vulnerability come 2024—and not just with Republicans and independents. When asked if there is an “invasion” at the southern border in August, a majority of Americans said yes—including 42 percent of Democrats. A new Gallup poll found that Americans’ satisfaction with the immigration situation is lower than at any point in the last decade, which, as you may recall, includes all four years Trump was president. That same poll found that one-fifth of Democrats want less immigration, up from 2 percent in 2021. And most voters blame Biden for the crisis at the border, Rasmussen found.