Democratic leaders are rallying to defend President Biden‘s handling of the migrant surge at the southern border, where the detention of thousands of children has threatened to spark a humanitarian crisis — and undermine Democratic promises to tackle the dilemma with more compassion than former President Trump.

The issue is a prickly one for Democrats, who spent the last four years bashing the Trump administration’s approach to border arrivals, which included a particularly controversial policy of separating children from their parents to deter Central American families from making the trek.

While Biden has shifted sharply away from such draconian practices, the sheer volume of new arrivals — many of them unaccompanied children — has put a profound strain on the capacity of border authorities to process the detainees and move them to safer, more sanitary facilities — a process complicated by social distancing protocols adopted during the coronavirus pandemic.

A recent CNN exposé described those detention centers, overseen by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), as “akin to jail cells and not intended for kids.”

Still, Democratic leaders are downplaying the nascent crisis and rallying around Biden, expressing confidence that their White House ally will prioritize the welfare of children as he tackles the growing emergency.

“It will be nothing like what we saw in the Trump administration of babies being snatched from the arms of their parents,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Thursday during a press briefing. “I trust the Biden administration’s policy to be based on humanitarian[ism] and love of children rather than political points or red meat for their Republican base.”

Under current law, migrant children detained at the border should remain in the custody of CBP for no longer than 72 hours before being transferred to facilities overseen by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, a branch of the Health and Human Services Department.

Rep. Pete Aguilar (Calif.), vice chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said party leaders are watching the administration closely to ensure those guidelines are followed.

“There is a process for this. The Biden administration will move toward that process, and we will hold them accountable, just like we did the prior administration, to ensure that they’re following the law,” Aguilar told reporters this week. “But this is a process that is rooted in compassion. And that’s the difference between the prior administration and this administration.”

The spike in border arrivals has highlighted the challenge facing border officials, even when they harbor the most humane of intentions.

In February alone, CBP officers encountered more than 100,000 migrants attempting to cross into the Southwestern states — a 28 percent increase over the previous month and almost three times the number in February 2020.

Of those, almost 9,500 were unaccompanied minors, up 61 percent from January. And agency documents unearthed by both CNN and The New York Times revealed that, on average, those children are being held in CBP custody longer than the 72-hour cap provided under the law.

Administration officials have sought to stem the growing tide by discouraging Central American migrants from making the long trip north.

“The border is not open,” Roberta Jacobson, Biden’s southern border coordinator, said tersely from the White House on Wednesday.

Yet Jacobson also acknowledged that the more lenient immigration policies of the administration — which include proposals to extend citizenship to millions of people living in the country illegally — likely encouraged the recent migrant spike.

“Surges tend to respond to hope, and there was a significant hope for a more humane policy after four years of, you know, pent-up demand,” she said.

The developments have not been overlooked by Republicans on Capitol Hill, who launched a media campaign intended to highlight the swelling border crisis — and the Democrats’ struggles to address it.

The GOP strategy is reminiscent of Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and hard-line, hawkish views on border issues that helped propel him to the White House in 2016. Congressional Republicans are now reviving aspects of Trump’s playbook in their bid to win back the House and Senate in the 2022 midterms.

“Biden has created a crisis on the border that he won’t admit; 100,000 illegal immigrants were encountered just last month. Put that in perspective. That is larger than the hometown of Scranton, Pa., of our President Biden, and now it’s only growing month after month,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who has requested a meeting with Biden about the border, said Friday on Fox News.

Biden “tears the wall down at the border, but he put one around the Capitol,” McCarthy added.

On Monday, McCarthy will lead a delegation of a dozen House Republicans on a tour of the border and a migrant processing center in El Paso, Texas. The group includes a handful of swing-district Republicans such as Reps. Yvette Herrell (N.M.), Maria E. Salazar (Fla.), Carlos Gimenez (Fla.), Mariannette Miller-Meeks (Iowa) and Tony Gonzales (Texas).

The planned visit follows a news conference outside the Capitol this week where roughly 40 House Republicans bashed what they call the “Biden border crisis.” At times, lawmakers seemed to be competing to see who could utter Biden’s name the most.

“You have thousands of people crossing illegally into the United States every single day. Border states are getting overrun. It’s a drain on their resources. There are superspreader caravans coming across,” Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) said. “And this was all done by President Biden, and President Biden can address and reverse this policy. … We’re calling on President Biden to reverse his policy that created this Biden border crisis.”

Added New York Rep. John Katko, the top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, “It’s disorder at the border by executive order, to channel Dr. Seuss.”

But Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.), who represents a majority-Hispanic district in Riverside County, argued that the GOP’s “reflexive, nativist, anti-immigrant sentiment” is harmful to the U.S. economy.

“If you were to suddenly get rid of 8 million people, our economy would contract significantly,” Takano told The Hill, while Republicans railed at Biden’s immigration policies just steps away at their press conference.

“Why a path to citizenship? Well, it means your Social Security is more sound. That means Medicare is on a solid footing. That’s an argument that every American, I think, can appreciate. … We have to recognize the contribution that [immigrants] make to the economic dynamism they provide to our society,” he added.

Biden is no stranger to the issue of border surges. As vice president under former President Obama, he focused on federal efforts to improve conditions in the so-called Northern Triangle countries of Central America — Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — where most of the migrants originate. The idea is that, by helping those nations reduce corruption and tackle poverty, fewer residents will want to leave — a strategy that will be included in a comprehensive immigration reform package currently being drafted by Rep. Linda Sánchez (D-Calif.) and other members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

“You don’t address this until you deal with the Northern Triangle issues,” Aguilar said.

While they work to finalize their comprehensive reform package, House Democrats are racing ahead with their immigration agenda, scheduling votes next week on a pair of bills providing a pathway to citizenship for migrant farmworkers, immigrants with temporary protected status and the “Dreamers” who were brought to the country illegally as children.

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Biden has to unwind 1,000 Trump immigration laws

President Biden is finding it increasingly difficult to unwind his predecessor’s immigration regulations as the administration grapples with a surge of migrants at the southern border.

Trump officials put in place some 1,000 different immigration measures, according to figures compiled by the Immigration Policy Tracking Project, creating a complex and lengthy process for an administration that is seeking to turn the page on the Trump era.

The administration is trying to unravel those rules in the face of immediate challenges. Officials on Saturday night said the Federal Emergency Management Agency will launch a 90-day effort to care for the influx of unaccompanied migrant children at the U.S.-Mexico border.

The move comes amid the administration’s plea for patience on the immigration front.

“We can’t just undo four years of the previous administration’s actions overnight. Those actions didn’t just neglect our immigration system; they intentionally made it worse. When you add a pandemic to that, it’s clear it will take significant time to overcome,” Roberta Jacobson, President Biden’s southern border czar, said at a White House press briefing this past week.

In four years, the Trump administration effectively barred asylum-seekers from entering the U.S., limited green card access for those who might need public assistance, ended protections for immigrants who came to the U.S. amid unrest in their home countries, and created new administrative hurdles for those seeking to migrate or become citizens.

Lucas Guttentag, a professor at Stanford University who runs the Immigration Policy Tracking Project, said one of the overarching goals of the Trump administration was “to grind things to a halt by adopting new restrictions, new requirements, promulgate new regulations and pursue endless policies and directives.”

That was often achieved, he said, through internal methods such as memoranda, guidance documents and legal opinions or through the lengthier rulemaking process.

“Undoing all of that requires, as to each policy, an assessment of what the replacement ought to be, what the legal requirements are for changing it, and what the operational and logistical challenges are for implementing a new policy,” said Guttentag, who served as a senior counselor at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under the Obama administration.

He said the task facing the Biden administration amounts to “bureaucratic archeology” in order to untangle each policy and the multiple ways it may have been implemented.

Jorge Loweree, policy director at the American Immigration Council, said Trump officials also used a layered approach by combining orders and regulations to take a duplicative approach on some policies.

“It was sort of an all-of-the-above approach using all the levers of power available to the executive branch to short-circuit the system entirely,” he said.

“Each one of those systems will require a deliberative process by the new administration to shield them from litigation challenges,” he added.

The Biden administration has already taken a number of steps to roll back Trump’s legacy on immigration, rolling out a new system for processing asylum claims for those waiting in Mexico and scrapping the public charge rule that would limit green cards for those who might need assistance.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, and the administration has already hit roadblocks on other immigration efforts.

A federal judge in Texas halted Biden’s first major immigration order that sought to freeze deportations during his first 100 days in office.

“The administration tried to do something categorical. It tried to have a 100-day moratorium on deportations to give itself breathing space on some things,” said Margo Schlanger, a law professor at the University of Michigan and DHS’s officer for civil rights and civil liberties under the Obama administration.

Meanwhile, the number of apprehensions at the southern border increased 28 percent in February to more than 100,000 people, according to the U.S. Border Patrol.

Most of those apprehended are being quickly expelled from the U.S. under a Trump-era policy allowing swift deportation to guard against the coronavirus, a policy many immigration advocacy groups want to see eliminated.

Biden’s struggles on immigration extend to Congress as well.

The president has yet to nominate the heads of DHS agencies, and the administration’s plan to provide a path to citizenship to some 11 million people already living in the U.S. has been set aside by House Democrats as they focus instead on two bills that would offer citizenship to a smaller group.

Existing legal challenges to Trump immigration policies give the Biden administration another avenue to roll back regulations, though many are likely to be stuck in litigation for some time.

That means many of the Trump-era regulations will need to be reversed in the same way they were rolled out. While previous internal memos can easily be rescinded, regulations will likely need to be replaced with new ones, often requiring a rulemaking process that can last months if not years.

Even though internal directives can be more easily replaced, the increased pressure at the border adds practical obstacles in addition to the legal ones.

“Making changes has effects on the ground, and you have to work out how you’re going to manage those effects,” Schlanger said.

“If you do away with family detention, you don’t do away with families coming to the border and seeking admission, so have to have systems in place that can step in and process those families. If you do away with the ‘Remain in Mexico’ program, then you’ve got this pent-up reservoir with people who are seeking admission to the U.S. It’s not just normal migration patterns or asylum-seekers; it’s all months and months and months of people all ready to come in just as soon as you tell them they can,” she added.

Some advocates want Biden to speed things along by undoing not just Trump-era policies but others that date back even before former President Obama.

Chris Newman, legal director at the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, said the Biden administration could have moved “yesterday” to scrap years-old agreements that allow local law enforcement to carry out some immigration enforcement.

But he also wants the administration to move more quickly on reversing positions in lawsuits.

The Biden administration already convinced the Supreme Court to toss challenges to the public charge rule and another on former President Trump’s policy forcing migrants to wait out their asylum cases in Mexico.

But there is a pending challenge to the Trump administration’s attempt to revoke temporary protected status (TPS) for individuals from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua and Sudan.

“They could concede that the Trump administration’s actions toward TPS were unconstitutional. They could reverse position in lawsuits and settle and concede,” Newman said.

But those urging patience, such as Loweree of American Immigration Council, say the administration needs to move carefully to ensure its policies hold up in court.

“Working to shield any changes from legal action to the greatest extent on the front end is critical to ensuring changes the administration works to implement actually endure over time,” he said.

FREENEWS

Democrats Defend Biden’s Handling of Mexican Border Surge

Biden has to unwind 1,000 Trump immigration laws