On Wednesday, I noted reports that the Biden administration had significantly increased deportation flights of recent illegal immigrants to their home countries. This was a break from President Joe Biden’s early commitment to policies supporting open borders and a step toward a law enforcement approach.
Today, it is being reported that the Biden administration will also soon announce a deal with Mexico to revive President Donald Trump’s Migrant Protection Protocols, a program that returned illegal immigrants claiming asylum to Mexico while their asylum claims were heard in the U.S. court system.
Has Biden suddenly become a pro-immigration hawk?
Probably not.
Biden’s reimplementation of Trump’s MPP program came only after a federal court found the Biden administration failed to follow the proper procedures required to end the protocols. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has since reiterated his intention to end the program and has restarted the administrative process to end it properly.
In his October memo moving to end the program, Mayorkas wrote, “MPP not only undercuts the Administration’s ability to implement critically needed and foundational changes to the immigration system, but it also fails to provide the fair process and humanitarian protections that all persons deserve.”
Clearly, the man in charge of DHS wants open borders.
But as the detention flights mentioned above show, there is a pro-enforcement faction in the White House that recognizes Biden’s earlier open borders policies are a political liability and something must be done to bring down the record-high numbers of migrants crossing the southern border every month.
Those numbers are beginning to come down. And they will come down further if the pro-enforcement wing keeps sending illegal immigrants back to Mexico and their home countries.
The question is, once strict enforcement has returned order to the southern border and immigration fades as a political liability, will Mayorkas and his open borders allies then reverse Biden’s pro-enforcement policies?
