Advisers for Joe Biden warned the former president in 2020 that his immigration plans could lead to “chaos” at the U.S. border, would overwhelm the system and might hand Donald Trump a second term – but he ignored them, according to a report in Sunday’s New York Times.
The warnings came in staff meetings as well as a newly discovered memo, sent when Biden was campaigning against President Donald Trump, the Times reported.
“A potential surge could create chaos and a humanitarian crisis, overwhelm processing capacities, and imperil the agenda of the new administration,” the advisers wrote, according to a copy of the August, 2020 memo viewed by the Times.
But Biden and his closest confidants ignored the warning. According to the Times:
Former Biden administration officials told The Times that Mr. Biden and his circle of close confidants — including Ron Klain, who was chief of staff during the president’s first two years, Mike Donilon, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon and Anita Dunn — made two crucial errors.
First, they underestimated the scale of migration that was coming. Second, they failed to appreciate the political reaction to that migration — believing that stronger enforcement would alienate Latino and progressive voters, and also that a border surge would not be an important issue to most voters. Those calculations would later prove to be mistaken, with many voters, including Latinos, citing immigration as a reason for supporting Mr. Trump in 2024.
Biden had pledged to treat illegal migrants with more tolerance than President Trump, who was building a border wall in his first term and was being accused of separating children from their parents.
Expecting a surge as a result, Biden’s team suggested ways to reject immigration claims more easily, including holding unauthorized migrants seeking amnesty in reception centers until their cases could be heard or transferring them to other countries.
Biden, however, also balked at that proposal, according the Times.
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After the former vice president took office, policy advisers again urged the administration to reign in border crossings and increase border enforcement, but the advice again was rejected.
Such suggestions would continue to be dismissed well into the 46th president’s term, according to the Times report, which took a deep dive into immigration policies and results in the Biden and Trump presidencies.
Yet, the warnings came true, as migrant encounters at the southern border quickly doubled and kept rising.
The number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States reached an all-time high of 14 million in 2023 after two consecutive years of record growth, according to Pew Research Center estimate. The increase of 3.5 million in two years is the biggest on record.
Migrants showed up from countries throughout the world, overwhelming border stations, nearby towns and eventually impacting major cities like New York, where hotels were contracted to house the influx.
Stunning images of the open border and reports of child and sex trafficking handed Donald Trump potent political fuel to power his campaign and return to the presidency in 2024.
Former president Biden apparently chose not to address the findings in the Sunday Times report. A spokeswoman for the former president declined to make him available for an interview, according to the Times.
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Instead, she provided a statement that blamed Republicans during the Biden term for blocking additional funding for more border agents, deploying more security technology and processing immigration cases more quickly.
It wasn’t that simple, one former advisor told the Times.
The Biden White House “had no strategy, because they had no goal,” said Scott Shuchart, who joined the administration in 2022 as a senior adviser at Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“All they had was wishing the problem would go away so that they could focus on the things they cared about,” he said.
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the best-selling author of Below the Line and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
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