WASHINGTON — Even before President Biden took office, immigrant rights advocates and foreign policy experts warned he could face an early test of his vision for a radically different and more humane approach to immigration. Hurricanes and a pandemic had battered El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala in the late fall and early winter, leaving half a million people without homes and ready to make the dangerous trip to the US border.
Biden nodded to the challenges but counted on his significant experience with immigration. As vice president, he had taken the lead in the scramble to shelter migrant children arriving by the thousands without parents at the US-Mexico border in 2014. His White House made plans to address the gangs, government corruption, and poverty at the root of the rise in people fleeing Central America’s Northern Triangle nations.
But not even 100 days into his presidency, his administration appears to have lost the thread. Once again, thousands of unaccompanied minors have come to the border, entangling the new Biden administration in a familiar debate over the nation’s broken immigration system that has been cast in the old, familiar terms of “surge,” “crisis,” and “national security,” instead of framed around providing aid to asylum seekers, refugees, or migrant children.
So much for a new day on immigration.
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