Maybe it seems as though we have been here before. But this rerun of the 2020 election is happening in a vastly changed world, with urgent stakes for matters both domestic and international. We have learned more about President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump over the last four years, too.
Here is what both men have done and want to do on some of the most pressing issues, including immigration. Trump promised to build a border wall, but his administration didn’t get far. Under Biden, construction on the wall has continued.
Biden
Biden reversed many of the Trump administration’s immigration policies, but he has brought some back, like restrictions on asylum-seekers, as illegal border crossings have reached record levels.
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Trump
Trump enacted sweeping anti-immigration policies, including separating migrant children from their parents. If elected again, he wants to round up millions of undocumented immigrants and detain them in camps before deporting them en masse.
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Illegal immigration
Biden
On his first day in office, Biden reversed many of the Trump administration’s immigration policies. He suspended border-wall construction, temporarily halted most deportations and signed an executive order to “preserve and fortify” DACA, the Obama-era program that protects people brought to the United States illegally as children from being deported.
But he has since pursued stricter policies, partly because border crossings have surged to record levels, making immigration a major issue in the election, and partly because of court rulings.
He endorsed a bipartisan proposal that would have closed the border if crossings reached an average of more than 5,000 migrants a day over a week, and would also have hired thousands of new border security agents and asylum officers. The deal died in Congress after Trump came out against it.
Biden resumed construction of some sections of the border wall, saying that he didn’t believe it worked but that he had no choice because Congress had appropriated money for it.
This year, he resumed deportation flights that carry migrants hundreds of miles from the border.
He has continued to push to preserve the DACA program, which stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, though judges have ruled against it, including last September. In February, he deferred deportation of Palestinians who are in the United States illegally, using executive authority to shield people whose homelands are in crisis.
In June, he also announced sweeping new protections for undocumented immigrants who are married to American citizens.
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Trump
Trump is planning an extreme deportation operation that he has called the largest in U.S. history.
He plans to round up undocumented immigrants and detain them in camps while they await deportation, rely on a form of expulsion that doesn’t involve due process hearings, and deputize local police officers and National Guard troops from Republican-led states to carry out immigration raids.
Trump said to Time magazine in April that he would aim to deport as many as 15 million to 20 million people if reelected — numbers that are equivalent to the population of New York state at the high end.
In the same interview, he said he might deploy the military against migrants both along the border and in nonborder states, claiming that a law that forbids the use of the military for domestic law enforcement would not apply because people who are in the U.S. illegally “aren’t civilians.”
He also wants to revoke birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants, which overwhelming legal consensus holds to be guaranteed under the 14th Amendment.
All of this would be an escalation from his first term, during which he separated thousands of migrant children from their parents; suggested a border wall with spikes and a moat; and urged officials to shoot migrants in the legs.
Trump diverted money from the military budget to build a border wall without congressional approval. While a wall was his signature promise in 2016, his administration built under 500 miles of barriers along the nearly 2,000-mile southern border during his first term.
He has repeatedly dehumanized migrants, including saying on multiple occasions that they are “poisoning the blood” of the country — language that echoes Hitler — and calling some of them “animals” and “not people, in my opinion.”
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Asylum
Biden
In June, Biden issued an executive order to close the border to asylum-seekers when the seven-day average for illegal entries hits 2,500 a day. It was the most restrictive border policy enacted by any modern Democratic president, and similar to a 2018 Trump policy that was blocked by a federal judge; it will face a similar legal challenge.
Throughout his administration, Biden has kept several of Trump’s immigration policies in place, though he ended a rule that had forced asylum-seekers to remain in Mexico while awaiting hearings.
He initially retained Trump’s Title 42 policy, which enabled rapid expulsion of asylum-seekers on public health grounds — though he did allow more than 1 million into the country while the policy was in place. He later sought to end it but was blocked; then it ultimately expired in 2023.
After denouncing Trump’s asylum restrictions as a candidate, Biden reinstated a version of one requiring most people seeking asylum to apply in another country first and stating that people who enter illegally are presumed to be ineligible for asylum. (A judge then blocked it.)
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Trump
The Trump administration forced asylum-seekers to remain in Mexico while awaiting hearings, leading to the development of squalid refugee camps along the border. He has said he wants to reinstate that policy if elected again.
In 2018, he suspended asylum rights for people who entered the country illegally, a policy that was blocked by a federal judge.
His administration used the pandemic to lay the legal groundwork for denying asylum-seekers entry into the United States, something he had expressed interest in but been unable to do beforehand. The emergency public health measure he invoked, Title 42, allowed the government to quickly expel migrants who crossed the border.
He wants to reinstate Title 42 if elected again, this time based on claims that migrants carry diseases like tuberculosis rather than the coronavirus.
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Legal immigration
Biden
On his first day in office, Biden proposed legislation that would have created a path to citizenship for about 11 million undocumented immigrants and expanded visas for workers and families. Congress did not take it up.
The bipartisan border-security deal he endorsed this year — which Congress also did not pass — would have made more limited changes, including adding 250,000 family- and employment-based visas over five years and ensuring green-card eligibility for the children of immigrants on H-1B visas for highly skilled workers.
Through executive action, he has made migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela eligible for a temporary legal entry program for people whose home countries are in turmoil. He has also admitted hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians under a similar program.
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Trump
Trump tried, but Congress did not agree, to greatly reduce legal immigration by limiting U.S. citizens’ ability to bring in relatives and by increasing education and skill requirements.
In 2019, he began denying permanent residency to immigrants deemed likely to require public assistance, a rule that disproportionately affected people from Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia. He also significantly limited H-1B visas for skilled workers, but while privately courting business leaders in June, he talked up the importance of high-skilled immigration.
If elected again, he has called for revoking the status of people who have been allowed into the country for humanitarian reasons, as well as revoking the student visas of people whom he called “radical anti-American and antisemitic foreigners.”
He said at rallies in October that he would put in place “strong ideological screening” for visa applicants, barring anyone who was “communist, Marxist or fascist,” who sympathized with “radical Islamic terrorists and extremists,” who wanted “to abolish the state of Israel” or who did not “like our religion.”
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Travel bans
Biden
Biden revoked Trump’s travel bans, which had barred travelers from several majority-Muslim countries, on his first day in office.
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Trump
One of Trump’s first actions upon taking office was to ban travelers from several majority-Muslim countries. He has said he would reinstate and expand that ban if elected again.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
