A recent article in the Hill newspaper titled “Biden Walking Back Immigration Promises for a Reason” outlined some of the differences between President-Elect Biden’s campaign promises and what’s actually going to become policy. Newell spoke to Andrew Arthur from the Center for Immigration Studies to understand what’s changed.
“There’s an old saying - you campaign in poetry and govern in prose,” Newell began. “I’m mystified by the number of changes to what Biden said he was going to do in his first 100 days.”
“It was inevitable,” Arthur said. “Biden really does understand the issues, but when you’re running for President, most of the people you speak to do not. A lot of the promises he made on the trail were just reactions to Donald Trump. In reality, immigration enforcement under Trump wasn’t that different than it was under Obama. One of the biggest issues Biden will face is the border, where Trump has instituted a number of policies that restrict the number of people entering illegally… about 60% of those were people with kids and Border Patrol doesn’t have the capacity to deal with those people. CBP facilities were built at a time when 90% of everyone they dealt with were from Mexico, and 90% were single adults. Those facilities are not built to handle children, to separate minor girls from adult males. The infrastructure really hasn’t changed in 30 years, and Biden understands if there’s a big rush at the border, there’s going to be a humanitarian disaster… he’s about to become the 46th President and he recognizes the facts on the ground and is changing his tune.”
“I’m sure this will happen again,” Newell continued. “This report from DHS highlights some of what you just talked about - we continue to have a huge backlog. As of November 2020, 1.28 million cases are still on the docket, yet to be decided. Just the other day VP-Elect Harris said they’re going to add more judges and immigration advocates went crazy, saying we don’t want that, we want the underlying laws to change so that we win more cases.”
“I was a former immigration judge myself,” Arthur said. “We only have 520 judges, you can do the math. Those cases take about 4 hours to complete. You just don’t have enough immigration judges out there. There are a lot of good cases, people that need the protection of the United States, as we’ve done since the end of WWII. But there are people who want to exploit the asylum system in order to get in and remain indefinitely. Separating the good cases from the bad is absolutely essential.”
“If you have a case and you’re waiting for a hearing, the average wait time is 849 days - 2 years and 3 months,” Newell said. “If we have this operational backlog of this group trying to get through, and then add more pressure of people trying to get in - how can we ever catch up? I know the inclination is to add more judges, but you’d need to quadruple the number of judges unless there’s a relaxation of the rules. How do you get caught up to where this makes any sense?”
“If the whole idea is that you’re entering the US to live and work here, but you’re detained and you aren’t going to be successful in your case, you’re not going to come,” Arthur replied. “98% of all the people detained ended up getting repatriated. Once we release people, that's where you get into those big numbers… forty years ago the Supreme Court said every continuance in immigration cases benefits the alien. The longer your case stretches out, the longer you get to stay. You need to remove the incentives for people to game the system and slow walk the cases, but you need more people to do that… the only thing that is required is the will to get that done. But we also need to limit the number of people coming over the border so we don’t add to that backlog. Biden knows he has to do that.”
Hear the entire interview in the audio player below.