Biden Administration’s Anti-Immigrant Policies

Nov 21, 2022

A U.S. federal judge last week ruled Trump administration’s March 2020 order used to expel more than 2.4 million migrants to Mexico was unlawful. The Trump administration used a pretext of preventing the spread of the virus and issued this order to further their anti-immigration stand. But, after taking over the administration, Biden continued to use the very same order to rapidly turn away asylum seekers without giving them a chance to apply for protection and knowing that the U.S. expelled these migrants to countries with a high probability of persecution, torture, violent assaults, or rape.

This ruling came just three days after the Biden administration forced its U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) commissioner, Chris Magnus, to resign after 11 months in this position because he did not precisely align with Biden’s harsh anti-immigrant policies.

CBP, with its more than 45,600 federal agents and officers and a 13.5 billion dollar annual budget, is the largest federal law enforcement agency of the United States Department of Homeland Security. CBP’s anti-immigration conduct was always in question. Between 2005 and 2012, more than 2,000 CBP employees were arrested for misconduct, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. No information was available after 2012, but nobody doubted that CBP’s violent corruptive misconduct against immigrants continued. Last September, CBP agents used unnecessary violence against Haitian migrants who had gathered beneath an international bridge outside Texas, as disclosed by CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility.

CBP commissioner Magnus said he wanted to change this environment. He clamped down on his officers’ offensive humor and sexist and violent comments in the media, including those who made fun of dead migrants. Magnus criticized Republican governors who forcefully dumped migrants picked up at the border into Democratic-controlled cities.

Magnus also wrote that the Trump administration’s March 2020 anti-immigration order “comes at a heavy cost to many asylum seekers.”

This criticism also went against the Biden administration, which wanted to look and act tough against immigrants. Last week, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Magnus’ boss, said the Biden administration had “expelled or removed more individuals from the United States than ever before” to boast about their violent border enforcement record. So, Biden sacked Magnus, who did not align with such anti-immigration policies.

No, the Biden administration’s anti-immigrant policies are not different than those of the Trump administration, if not worse. If there are more than enough immigrants to exploit as a cheap labor force, dumping them into other countries is U.S. capitalism’s deadly immigration policy.