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Being ‘anti-immigrant’ is not a winning strategy for Biden in 2024

Migrants attempting to cross in to the U.S. from Mexico are detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection at the border May 05, 2023 in San Luis, Arizona. (Nick Ut/Getty Images)
Migrants attempting to cross in to the U.S. from Mexico are detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection at the border May 05, 2023 in San Luis, Arizona. (Nick Ut/Getty Images)

When President Biden announced his intent to run for re-election, a collective groan could be heard from immigration advocates. President Biden’s record so far on immigration has been, in a word, disappointing.

It’s not that we never had hope for this administration’s immigration policy — it’s that we did.

As Biden’s reelection campaign begins in earnest, rather than hue toward the political center, the president should embrace a compassionate, common sense and lawful approach to immigration policy that deemphasizes enforcement and mass incarceration, and delivers on the unfulfilled promises from his previous campaign.

As a candidate in 2020, Biden’s immigration platform was progressive — a welcome response to years of President Trump’s relentless attacks on noncitizens, drastic enforcement measures and rollbacks of essential asylum protections. On the campaign trail nearly four years ago, Biden spoke with great promise and passion about “restor[ing] our moral standing in the world and our historic role as a safe haven for refugees and asylum seekers.”

Specifically, then-candidate Biden promised to hold ICE accountable for inhumane treatment in jails and detention centers, halt construction of the border wall, end border restrictions and the separation of immigrant families, and make the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program permanent. President Biden has — at best — under-delivered on these campaign promises.

More than 25,000  people are held every day in immigration jails and prisons across the United States, where they continue to face medical abusenegligent mental health caresolitary confinement and physical and sexual abuse.

Though oversight mechanisms have proven ineffective, Biden has not taken meaningful action to stop these harms. Moreover, additional barriers, including concrete walls topped with steel bollards, have been put in place at the U.S.-Mexico border during Biden’s tenure. Children are still being separated from their parents at the border and DACA recipients remain in more legal limbo than ever, still without a path to permanent status.

In this transitional political moment, the president has the chance to, once and for all, meaningfully distance himself from the hateful, unlawful policies of his predecessor by making bold moves on immigration.

Dasling Sanchez, 28, holds her sleeping sons as they rest next to a gas station in downtown Brownsville, Texas, on May 6, 2023. (Photo by Moisés Avila / AFP via Getty Images)
Dasling Sanchez, 28, holds her sleeping sons as they rest next to a gas station in downtown Brownsville, Texas, on May 6, 2023. (Photo by Moisés Avila / AFP via Getty Images)

First, he can take steps to greatly reduce, or even end, the mass incarceration of noncitizens — a blight on our standing in the world that has yielded pervasive, horrifying abuses, and that also cost taxpayers $2.9 billion in 2023. Immigration detention is dangerous, expensive and unnecessary. Immigration proceedings are a civil process, not a criminal sentence. And yet, nearly 25,000 people remain incarcerated in immigration jails and prisons under this administration.

Biden can also halt any further construction on a border wall. We know that the wall is not only a symbol of racism and xenophobia, but wholly ineffective; rather than preventing migration, the wall drives migrants to take more dangerous routes, risking their lives.

Finally, the president can urge Congress to pass the recently reintroduced New Way Forward Act, a bill that offers another vision of what our immigration system might look like.

The Act restores vital due process protections that will help keep families and communities together. The bill also ends the harmful practice of local police collaboration with federal immigration officials, ensuring that victims and witnesses — regardless of their immigration status — feel safe to report crime. Broadly speaking, the bill aims to remedy the criminalization and racial profiling that has been a hallmark of our immigration system, instead advancing values of compassion, fairness and due process for all.

Whoever the Republican candidate is in November, immigration — along with its bedfellows, racism and xenophobia — will also be on the ballot.

Make no mistake, anti-immigrant zealots will never support President Biden. He hasn’t won their votes by continuing construction on the border wallmaintaining illegal Title 42 restrictions at the border or massively expanding the surveillance of noncitizens. Politically, Biden stands to gain little, if anything, by continuing his move to the right on immigration; if he further panders to the anti-immigrant agenda in 2024, he risks losing both Democratic votes, and his integrity.

Instead, now is the time for the kind of bold, progressive leadership on immigration that President Biden once promised, but has yet to deliver.

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Related:

Headshot of Sarah Sherman-Stokes

Sarah Sherman-Stokes Cognoscenti contributor
Sarah Sherman-Stokes is associate director of the Immigrants’ Rights and Human Trafficking Program at Boston University School of Law.

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