#Biden’s asylum policies for migrants at the border are insane

Migrants are pouring across our southern border. They are largely poor and desperate, and we often have no idea how many of them carry COVID. But they are not all treated the same. 

Asylum-seekers from the Caribbean, such as Haitians and Cubans, are packed onto planes and sent back where they came from. Thousands of Haitians who arrived here following the July 22 assassination of the nation’s president have already been deported without a hearing. Border Patrol agents have been photographed corralling them down on horseback. 

By contrast, vast numbers of unaccompanied children and arrivals from Central America are allowed to stay while they make their cases — even though most cannot meet the legal standard for asylum. The Border Patrol’s hands are tied. What gives? 

The discrepancy is partly the doing of the legal system, but it also reflects policy choices. To qualify for asylum, immigration law typically requires proving that the immigrant faces a threat of persecution back home that goes beyond just living under a bad government. 

Under Donald Trump’s successful “Remain in Mexico” policy, applicants for asylum entering through Mexico — many of them Central Americans — were required to wait in Mexico while their cases were heard, so they couldn’t just disappear into the country. Biden undid that policy, until a judge in Texas ruled that Biden broke the law. The president is still in court trying to get that reversed, and in the meantime, he is ignoring the court’s order — preliminarily upheld by the Supreme Court — on the grounds that he has talked Mexico into refusing to comply with it, so now his hands are tied. 

Biden has also ordered the Border Patrol to stop sending back unaccompanied children. Predictably, this led to a huge surge in the arrival of such children, sent here by unscrupulous human traffickers. 

Meanwhile, Trump last year invoked a 1944 law empowering the Surgeon General to bar the entry of migrants who could import a “communicable disease,” accelerating immediate deportations to fight the pandemic. In 2020, Kamala Harris criticized that step. The ACLU recently won a court order to stop it by the end of this month. 

But in the meantime, Biden has kept deporting Haitians without a hearing. Are unvaccinated Haitians a greater public health threat than unvaccinated Hondurans? Nobody is bothering to say. It took until this week for Biden to lift a ban on travelers from Great Britain, one of the world’s most-vaccinated countries. 

Adding to the incoherence, Biden in May cited unstable conditions in Haiti to order an 18-month temporary protected status for Haitians in the United States before July 29, so they are protected from deportation — but anybody arriving after that is not. 

Our immigration policy is often too harsh and too lax at once, treating lawbreakers better than people who play by the rules and passing unforgiving laws that are inconsistently enforced. Even by those standards, Joe Biden is making it up as he goes along. Our southern border is wildly insecure, but that is not much consolation to desperate Haitians being herded onto airplanes back home.