Biden’s Policies Offer a Starting Point for Trump’s Border Crackdown

Mr. Trump has criticized the Biden administration for what he calls its lax handling of the border — but it has left him with tools he can use to shut down the border.

President-elect Donald Trump has spent the last year railing against the Biden administration’s immigration policies, saying they left the border wide open and risked American security.

But actions taken by President Biden in the past year, including a sweeping asylum ban and more streamlined deportation procedures, may make it easier for Mr. Trump to fulfill his promise to shut down the border and turn back migrants as quickly as possible.

To be sure, Mr. Biden’s vision for immigration is different from Mr. Trump’s. While the White House has enacted stricter regulations at the border, it has also emphasized legal pathways to enter the country and offered temporary legal status to migrants from certain troubled countries.

After promising a more humane immigration policy when he took office in 2021, Mr. Biden was confronted with a worldwide surge in migration that put pressure on the southern U.S. border. By his second year in office, annual border arrests topped 2 million.

As chaotic scenes emerged of migrants crowding at the border, Republicans like Mr. Trump argued that the Democrats were unable to govern and protect American cities, and they urged a crackdown on immigration. Republican governors such as Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida sent thousands of migrants by bus and plane to Democratic northern cities to highlight the border crisis.

Under relentless political pressure, Mr. Biden eventually took several steps that marked a radical shift in U.S. immigration policy.

In an executive order in June, Mr. Biden blocked migrants from seeking asylum at the border, the most restrictive border policy enacted by any modern Democratic president.

A key feature of the new policy is that migrants being screened at the border are no longer routinely asked whether they fear return. If they do not express fear on their own, they are quickly processed for deportation. Migrant activists say far too many people who would be eligible for asylum are being summarily rejected.

The U.S. also ramped up deportations to countries other than Mexico to record levels, built more space to hold migrants near the border and began removing people more quickly by deporting asylum seekers directly from Border Patrol custody.

Those actions dropped border numbers to lows not seen in several years.

“All of these tools will be in effect when Trump takes office,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.

Adam Isacson, who focuses on border security at the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights organization, said that nearly 45,000 of the 54,000 migrants who crossed in September had been deported or detained.

“That certainly lays the groundwork for Trump,” he said, noting that only 9,145 people had been released into the country in September, pending an immigration court hearing.

He added: “So it won’t be too much work for Trump to get it down close to zero. Especially if they find a way to detain people from distant and hard-to-deport countries.”

Mr. Trump has promised to close the border immediately upon taking office. He has committed to a return to a policy known as “Remain in Mexico,” which forces migrants to stay in Mexico until their U.S. cases are resolved. That would be one of his main solutions to shutting down the border, but that policy would likely take time and negotiations to put into place.

In the meantime, he can make use of the infrastructure that the Biden administration has developed.

The administration also announced in July a plan to help Panama deport migrants who cross its borders illegally as a way to cut down on migration targeting the U.S. border.

“This assistance seeks to reduce unprecedented irregular migration through the Darien region, through which over 520,000 migrants transited in 2023,” the State Department said in a statement at the time.

The Biden administration also plans to issue a regulation to make it easier for asylum officers to spot those ineligible for protection, like migrants with serious criminal records, and to quickly remove them from the country.

To increase opportunities for legal immigration, the administration is encouraging migrants to use a mobile app to apply for appointments with Border Patrol and to make a case for asylum. It also has created a program that allows people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to enter the U.S. and stay for two years if they have a financial sponsor.

Those programs have been key targets of Mr. Trump, who has promised to undo them immediately.

“All of the Biden administration restrictions give them a starting point far beyond what they had in 2016,” said Stephanie Leutert, the director of the Mexico Security Initiative at the University of Texas at Austin and a former State Department official in the Biden administration.

Ms. Leutert explained that, unlike in 2017, there are more single adults and families arriving from across the globe.

“So, in a sense, there may be more that the Trump administration will want to immediately undo (the legal pathways) and more that they may want to work with (the restrictions),” she wrote in a text message.

Trump Builds His Administration

As his team ramps up the transition process, President-elect Donald Trump says his administration will radically reshape the federal government.

• White House Press Secretary: Trump announced that he had chosen Karoline Leavitt, who worked in his administration and was his campaign’s press secretary, to be his White House press secretary.
• Justice Department: Trump intends to nominate three members of his criminal defense team to senior roles at the department, raising further concerns about politicization of the department.
• Health and Human Services: Trump said he would nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy opposes fluoride in water, promotes unproven Covid therapies and has threatened to prosecute medical journals.
• Immigration: Trump’s plans to expel noncitizens on a mass scale are likely to raise prices on goods and services and lower employment rates for U.S. workers, many economists say.
• Skirting the Senate: Trump’s demand that Senate Republicans surrender their role in vetting his nominees poses an early test of whether his second term will be more radical than his first.