Biden Fixed the Immigration System that Trump Is Once Again Smashing

The new president is going to combine chaos with cruelty

(Anna Moneymaker, Shutterstock)

Dear Readers:

President Donald Trump entered the Oval Office this week champing at the bit to implement sweeping changes to U.S. immigration policy. Mere hours after he was inaugurated, he signed executive orders to “enforce the law” and secure the border, claiming that his predecessor had failed to do so. But David J. Bier of the libertarian Cato Institute argues in the essay below, adapted from testimony he powerfully delivered to Congress this week (read his full testimony here; watch his remarks here), that the exact opposite is the truth: Biden fixed the immigration system after Trump took a hammer to it and Trump’s draconian and illegal policies will smash it again.

This was a sad week for the country and what it stands for. When Trump's militant enforcement methods result in border chaos and unsafe streets, understand why.

Berny Belvedere
Senior Editor

When Joe Biden took office, he inherited an immigration system obliterated by four years of intentional sabotage. From Jan. 2017 to Jan. 2021, during President Donald Trump’s first term, the U.S. immigration system underwent an assault unlike any other in modern history. During that time, nearly 500 policies—both large and small—were implemented to disrupt and destroy the system.

The Trump administration illegally spent money appropriated for immigrant detainees on dog food and night vision goggles for Border Patrol. It illegally diverted funding from the military to build a border wall. More than 30 times, courts found that the Trump administration’s policies were implemented illegally.

The result was more—not less—border chaos and less—not more—safety for Americans. Trump’s misguided enforcement priorities allowed criminals to enter while ejecting peaceful immigrants. At the same time, Trump severely curtailed legal immigration.

President Biden made a concerted effort to rebuild the immigration system despite a hostile political climate and a less-than-supportive Congress. But, sadly, President Trump is set to destroy it again.

The assault on the rule of law during Trump’s first term was so relentless that many of his changes could not be stopped. By his last full month in office, Trump abused his authority and cut legal immigration from abroad by nearly 80% and refugees by 92%. He removed requirements that focused interior enforcement on public safety threats. He reassigned Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents from terrorism and smuggling cases to track low-level visa overstay offenders. He forced U.S. attorneys to prioritize misdemeanor family separation prosecutions of parents over sex offenders. Thanks to such misguided enforcement priorities, Trump ended up releasing twice as many convicted criminals as President Biden.

By the time Trump left office, he had cut:

• total grants of legal permanent residence or green cards by 54% from their 2016 average

• immigrant visas that have a path to a green card by 78%

• nonimmigrant visas for temporary workers, students, and tourists by 82%

• refugees entering legally from abroad by 92%

• asylum seekers lawfully entering at ports of entry by 93%

In short, he completely and totally gutted legal immigration. But when people don’t have legal means of entering the country, they resort to illegal means, resulting in border chaos.

And, indeed, by Dec. 2020, Trump’s last full month in office, Border Patrol arrests were at the highest level for any December since 1999. Evasions of Border Patrol were a whopping 75%, higher than when Trump had entered office. Encounters with convicted criminals had tripled.

In other words, Trump left for President Biden an immigration system that was in complete shambles. The infrastructure was gutted. Immigration courts were closed; consulates for processing visas around the world were limited only to “emergency” cases; and ports of entry were blocked to “nonessential” travel.

President Biden had to begin from scratch. Yet Congress failed in its duty to appropriate the necessary resources to rebuild the gutted immigration system. Biden made a great deal of headway despite the enormity of the task and the paucity of resources.

To be sure, he acted too slowly and too timidly in the face of this challenge—but the fact is that it was always going to take time to undo the mess Trump left with no help from Congress and active obstruction by the states. Plus, the U.S. had the hottest labor market in the world, attracting migration to its southern border. Border Patrol arrests, which had already reached the highest level in 21 years before Biden took office, rose even faster as the U.S. economic recovery outpaced the rest of the world’s.

So what did Biden do to restore the U.S. immigration system?

He reprioritized public safety threats in the interior and cut releases of convicted criminals from detention in half. He reunited hundreds of children separated from their parents during President Trump’s cruel Zero Tolerance border policy and ended discriminatory travel bans that separated families based on their birthplace. He refocused on border security, doubling detention, removing three times as many border crossers as President Trump.

But his crackdown wasn’t what saved the system. It was fixing legal immigration that most contributed to ending the crisis. Biden restored visa and refugee processing to above 2016 levels. He also deregulated the parole process to allow asylum seekers to enter in a lawful and orderly way.

This was working. Yes, overall crossings initially increased during the economic recovery, but by Biden’s final months, Border Patrol encounters were down 33%, and criminal crossings were down 57% compared to Trump’s final months. Evasions of Border Patrol were down 42%, falling immediately after President Biden reversed Trump’s expulsion to Mexico policy. The share of U.S. Customs and Border Protection encounters with people who crossed illegally fell from 98% to 49%—meaning that at the end of Biden’s term, and for the first time ever, most immigrants coming to the U.S. border were applying to enter legally through a regulated and screened lawful pathway.

But President Trump is already undoing all the progress. The slew of executive orders he issued on his first day violate the U.S. Constitution, target peaceful people while leaving violent felons alone, and by limiting legal immigration, will inevitably encourage illegal immigration.

He has suspended resettlement entirely for refugees from abroad, including for Afghans who backed the U.S. military and Iranian Christians en route to the United States. The president has ordered violations of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, denying the legitimacy of millions of Americans their citizenship and threatening to deport babies born in America. He has declared a national emergency at the border, even though illegal immigration is falling and significantly lower now than it was when he was last in office.

He has baselessly declared an “invasion,” which under the Constitution would authorize states to make war and open the potential for habeas corpus to be suspended. He is threatening to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to deploy the military to arrest, detain, and remove people without proving to courts that they are removable noncitizens. He has moved to illegally block law enforcement grants intended for local policing and public safety for cities that fail to cooperate with his agenda. All in all, President Trump’s orders explicitly declare that he is above U.S. law, and he asserts that he can ignore any immigration law that members of Congress write.

The president once mused that he wanted to be dictator for a day. But despite its awesome powers, the presidency is no place for a dictator and the United States no place for an authoritarian. Congress should defend its powers and the U.S. Constitution and our rights before they’re gone.

Immigrants come to America because it is the land of the free. Let’s keep it that way.

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One last thing from the editors…

Earlier this month, The New York Times reported that Trump was searching for a “health threat” to justify his looming immigration crackdown. Title 42 of the Public Service Act of 1944 allows health authorities to block the entry of migrants to the U.S. when it’s necessary to avert a serious danger posed by the presence of communicable diseases in foreign countries. Landry Ayres, The UnPopulist’s senior producer, prepared a short video on Trump’s months-long quest to identify a health threat he can use as a pretext to justify the implementation of his anti-immigrant agenda. Watch it here.

This essay has been adapted from congressional testimony David J. Bier provided the House Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement on Jan. 22, 2025.

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