Biden’s border record: Trump’s claims vs. reality

Unauthorized crossings at the US southern border soared higher and higher during the first three years of Joe Biden’s presidency.

Now, in the first half of 2024, they’ve fallen sharply, but they’re still significantly higher than in the decade before Biden took office.

That’s the basic numerical trend, according to numbers from US Customs and Border Protection (CBP). How much Biden’s policies have affected that trend is tougher to untangle, and that will likely be a major area of dispute at his debate with Donald Trump this Thursday.

The dramatic surge in unauthorized immigration in Biden’s first few years was spurred by major factors outside of the president’s control, such as the ebbing of the Covid-19 pandemic and upheaval in several Latin American countries.

It is also plausible that Biden’s more lenient immigration stance, relative to Trump, contributed to some degree. He has tried to strike a balance between humane policies toward migrants (like offering new legal pathways for entry or protections against deportation for some already here) and more hard-headed actions trying to cut down on unauthorized arrivals.

Yet for his first three years, the number of such arrivals remained quite high. His defenders often argued that the main drivers of immigration were not within the president’s control and that his responses were constrained by a broken legal and political process, insufficient resources, and Republicans’ refusal to act on legislation.

The twist in recent months is that the number of unauthorized arrivals finally has dropped. “Illegal crossings at the southern border continue to plummet,” Fox News reporter Bill Melugin wrote on X this week, adding that CBP was now seeing “the lowest border numbers of Biden's presidency.”

We don’t know how long those lower numbers will persist, of course, and there are still more unauthorized migrants arriving than was typical in the Obama or Trump years. But it’s a notable change, and it’s worth digging into why it appears to have happened.

There really was a major unauthorized migration surge under Biden. For most of the decade before he took office, US Customs and Border Protection had in the range of 300,000 to 500,000 “encounters” with migrants at the southern border each year. Under Biden, the average number has been about 2 million a year, with last year being the highest yet.

These are frequently cited as “record breaking” and “highest ever” migrant arrival numbers. But some analysts say it’s more complicated than that. Justin Fox argues at Bloomberg Opinion that the true numbers were likely higher from the 1980s through the mid-2000s because back then far more migrants escaped CBP’s notice.

But it does seem to be clearly true that far more people are coming in unauthorized under Biden than under Obama or Trump. So why?

Conservatives argue that there are specific features of US and Biden administration policy and messaging that drove the migration surge. Biden did, after all, run for office promising to reverse many of Trump’s cruel policies toward immigrants. More broadly, they believe many people are coming because they’ve heard that, with the way our system is set up, they have a pretty good shot at getting into the US and staying there for a good while. (The asylum claim system is incredibly backlogged and detention capacity is limited, so it’s common to release claimants into the US during the long wait until their claims are heard.)

In contrast, progressives prefer to emphasize the conditions that drive migrants to leave their home countries, like the catastrophic collapse of Venezuela’s economy and degradation of conditions in Nicaragua and Haiti. Crises like these, they argue, have simply gotten worse in recent years, both in the region and around the world, and people need help. (Also, notably, the Covid-19 pandemic ebbed when Biden took office, making migrants more free to travel.)

Both narratives likely have some truth to them. The president cannot simply wave a wand and make this issue disappear — otherwise Trump would have done it. (CBP still had more than 300,000 migrant encounters in each year of the Trump administration; in fiscal year 2019 that number rose to nearly a million.) The administration is indeed constrained by real-world practicalities and global forces outside its control.

Yet it’s also true that Biden’s policy, even if viewed charitably, has been a bit messy, in part because the Democratic Party is deeply torn about their fundamental values and goals on this issue.

Since taking office, Biden has tried to strike a balance between Democrats’ desire to help people seeking a better life in the US and their fear that too many unauthorized arrivals brings practical and political problems. But he has struck that balance in different ways at different times.

At first, his administration’s policy was aimed at “managing the flow” of migrants under the implicit assumption that policy could do little to actually reduce the overall demand to enter the US. Biden’s team did try to stress that the border was “not open” and clearly viewed chaotic border scenes as a political risk, but they also rolled back harsh Trump policies with great fanfare.

By 2022, with the number of arrivals rising sharply, Democratic politicians in blue states and cities seeing an influx of migrants increasingly complained that they were overwhelmed — with their shelter systems, schools, and budgets being seriously strained by the challenge of helping so many needy people. “It’s in our DNA to welcome immigrants,” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) said. “But there has to be some limits in place.”

In late 2022 and early 2023, then, Biden embraced a two-sided policy. Because so many recent arrivals had come from Venezuela, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Cuba, he used executive authority to let hundreds of thousands of people from those countries come legally if they followed an orderly process. He also changed policy to presume more asylum seekers ineligible if they didn’t follow an orderly process. The goal was to change chaotic and unauthorized migration into organized and legal immigration. Still, unauthorized border crossings remained at high levels.

In late 2023, Biden argued that the problem was really an outmoded asylum process and insufficient resources — and that the only solution was a big new immigration bill (which would be linked with a stalled Ukraine aid package). Bipartisan talks about this stretched on for months, and Biden was willing to give Republicans a whole lot of what they wanted. Ultimately, Trump got the GOP to nix the deal, and Senate Republicans say that Trump openly admitted he did so because continued border chaos would be good for his election chances.

With no bill in hand, unauthorized arrivals quite high, and the 2024 election getting closer, the Biden administration acted on its own.

First, officials got the Mexican government to agree to do more to stop migrants from getting to the US border in the first place. This, analysts believe, is likely the main reason why the number of arrivals dropped quite a bit in the first half of 2024.

Second was Biden’s executive actions this month to restrict asylum claims even further, shutting down the asylum process if too many people are coming. Many had previously argued that he doesn’t have the legal authority to do this, but he’s decided to try it anyway, leaving it up to the courts whether to block his policy.

So Biden may well claim some measure of victory in finally reducing the number of unauthorized arrivals, though it’s far from clear whether that will hold up over the long term. Still, if Biden’s recent actions did end up changing the situation, that may make some wonder why he didn’t take such actions much earlier in his term.

Additionally, progressive critics have noted that Biden’s moves to divert more migrants to Mexico and pause new asylum claims resemble policies pursued by Trump. “Though his Administration has avoided its predecessor’s belligerent rhetoric, its goal appears essentially the same: to push the border farther south and to hold Mexico responsible for managing the flow of migrants,” the New Yorker’s Stephania Taladrid writes.

That similarity shouldn’t be overstated. Biden’s policies also dramatically differ from Trump’s because he is still letting hundreds of thousands more people in legally, through his new legal pathways, and is protecting many already here from deportation (when Trump has promised an unprecedented crackdown). Biden is still trying to seek a middle ground. But overall, his border policy has been a case study in the difficulties of governance.