Biden-Harris—Continuing Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Policies

Jun 21, 2021

During her recent high-profile trip to Central America and Mexico, Vice-President Kamala Harris warned migrants from that region: “Do not come. Do not come. If you come to the border, you will be turned back.” During his first press conference last March, President Joe Biden had said the same thing, when he told migrants, “don’t come over.... They should all be going back.”

When Harris and Biden had campaigned for office last year, they had denounced the Trump administration’s immigration policy, especially how it had expelled families and unaccompanied children and adolescents seeking asylum at the U.S. border.

When the pandemic hit in early 2020, the Trump administration had invoked an obscure 1944 statute, called Title 42, claiming that barring migrants from coming into the country was for public safety reasons. At the time, Kamala Harris and other Democratic Party lawmakers said that the Trump administration was violating U.S. and international law guaranteeing the right to seek asylum and prohibiting the government from returning persecuted people to harm. United Nations officials said the same thing. And three U.S. federal judges determined that the Trump administration’s policy was unlawful.

Certainly, the medical reasons given for this policy constituted a complete lie. In an open letter to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), leading public health and medical experts at public health schools, medical schools, hospitals, and other institutions urged the Biden administration to rescind this policy. They denounced how the Trump administration had used the pandemic as an excuse to carry out “xenophobic, cruel and unlawful policies ... under the pretext of public health to expel, block and return to danger asylum seekers and children seeking protection at the border,” and that it was possible to safeguard public health, while admitting refugees.

But once in office, the Biden administration adopted the Trump administration’s immigration policies wholesale, often using Trump’s same excuse: the pandemic.

In the first four months of the Biden administration, U.S. border officials carried out roughly 350,000 expulsions of migrants seeking asylum, including 50,000 families, according to an analysis by the Los Angeles Times. On top of that, the Border Patrol has been flying many of them hundreds of miles laterally from where they crossed the border, dropping them off in the dark with little warning in some of the most dangerous cities in northern Mexico.

In other words, U.S. officials are turning the migrants into sitting ducks for organized crime. Thousands of migrants returned to Mexico under Title 42 under the Biden administration have been murdered, raped, kidnapped, tortured and assaulted.

In April, after a major public outcry, the Biden administration did stop expelling children and adolescents. But the Biden administration did not stop expelling their parents. Thus, the Biden administration is continuing to separate children from their parents—just like the Trump administration.

And the Biden administration is also following in the footsteps of the Trump administration: continuing to build the wall. In April, there were reports that the administration is considering filling “gaps” in Trump’s construction.

“There is zero daylight between the Biden administration and the Trump administration’s position,” affirmed Lee Galernt, the top lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) that is suing the Biden administration to stop the mass expulsion of asylum seekers.

The Democrats and Republicans may sound different. But they are both enemies of the working class. They both try to divide workers in the interests of the capitalist class.