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twenty twenty four. Hey.

0:39

Everyone, it's Cruces. I'm excited to tell

0:41

you about a special why is this

0:43

happening? Podcast series we're launching called with

0:45

Pod Twenty Twenty Four The Stakes. For.

0:48

The first time since Eighty Ninety Two, we

0:50

have an election in which both candidates have

0:52

presidential records. It's. A unique chance to

0:55

take a hard look at what both Joe Biden

0:57

and Donald Trump have actually done as President. I'm.

0:59

Talking to experts about both candidates

1:02

records on specific policy areas Stay

1:04

right here to hear the entire

1:06

first episode, right? Talk to American

1:08

Immigration Council Policy Director Aaron Reichlen

1:10

Melnyk. Search. For why is this

1:12

happening and follow a listen to the whole series.

1:15

New episodes drop on Tuesdays. When.

1:17

Buying took off as the legal immigration

1:19

system was like a cruise ship that

1:21

was on fire and listing. You hadn't

1:23

fully sunk yet, but things weren't looking

1:25

good. so right now the fire is

1:27

out. Vive mostly write it on a

1:29

lot of the list, but the engines

1:31

aren't really going yet. Pillow

1:37

Morgan was is happening with me. Your Host Chris

1:39

Hayes. Well,

1:47

the General Election is said. Barring some

1:49

unforeseen circumstances, it's gonna be Joe Biden

1:51

and Donald Trump. And for the first

1:53

time in one hundred and forty or

1:55

hundred and fifty years, the two men

1:57

running against each other each have been

1:59

President. and each have actual records. And

2:02

one of the things that drives me a little crazy about

2:05

the way the campaign is framed and

2:07

covered is the fact that it seems

2:09

to ignore that fact. And

2:12

one thing I've noticed about the

2:14

vortex Donald Trump's sort of attentional

2:17

vortex is that the

2:19

craziness around him can obscure some

2:21

of the more basic meat and potatoes questions

2:24

of like, where is Donald Trump on education

2:26

policy? Where's Joe Biden been on education policy?

2:28

What have they done with the

2:30

interior department under Joe Biden? And how

2:32

would that interior department look differently under

2:34

Donald Trump? All these just very basic

2:36

meat and potatoes questions about

2:39

the brass tacks of governing. So today

2:41

is the inaugural episode of what we're

2:43

calling why is this happening 2024, the stakes,

2:47

where we are going to in

2:49

a semi-regular franchise, we're gonna look

2:51

at areas of policy and

2:53

in a way that really we're trying to be

2:55

as sort of analytical and descriptive as possible, not

2:57

polemical, like where are the

3:00

different people, where are these two different

3:02

candidates on these policies? Where have they

3:04

been? What did they actually do

3:06

in office? Because you don't just have to check

3:08

their campaign websites, you don't just have to listen

3:10

to speeches, there's actual records. And

3:12

so we're gonna commit ourselves for the

3:15

duration of this campaign to really taking

3:17

the time to sit down with an

3:19

expert every week and just

3:21

walk through where the two different

3:23

candidates have been, what they have done,

3:25

what their records are on these crucial

3:28

areas of policy. Today,

3:30

we're gonna start with probably one of the most controversial

3:33

and one of the highest salience areas, which

3:36

is immigration. And of course, immigration has been front

3:38

of mind for a lot of voters, it has

3:40

been particularly the focus of a lot of Republican

3:43

rhetoric, but of course there was a big border

3:45

bill that just fell apart. And so

3:47

we're just gonna take a step back and say, what

3:49

did immigration policy look like under Donald Trump? What does

3:51

it look like under Joe Biden? What are the

3:54

differences? How can people make up a decision

3:56

about which of those two visions they think

3:58

they like? Joining me today

4:00

is Aaron Reikland-Melnick. He is the policy director

4:03

of the American Immigration Council. He is an

4:05

immigration wonk to end all immigration wonks, as

4:07

far as I can tell. In

4:09

an area of policy that I have

4:12

to say is extremely complex, extremely weedsy,

4:14

it strains my ability honestly to understand.

4:16

Often I find myself at the sort

4:18

of the border of my ability to

4:21

kind of synthesize. Aaron is

4:23

an incredibly important resource for me in that respect. So

4:25

Aaron, welcome to the program. Well, thanks for having me.

4:33

Obviously, you're coming from a think tank that

4:35

has its own sort of worldview and vision

4:37

of sort of normatively what the best immigration

4:39

policy is. But you're also

4:41

just extremely attentive to

4:44

like what is happening. Which

4:46

by the way is no small thing because

4:48

a lot of times people get that wrong,

4:50

right? I mean, I see you pointing out

4:52

a lot of basic mistakes in even how

4:54

people understand what's happening with immigration. Yeah,

4:57

I mean, immigration law is famously second in

4:59

complexity only to tax law. And

5:02

that's just immigration law. When you

5:04

actually look at the ways in

5:06

which that law interacts with reality

5:08

and how people function in the

5:10

world and interact with the system,

5:12

it just becomes a mess. And

5:14

so actually understanding what is going

5:16

on is not easy because there's

5:18

a lot of motivated reasoning. There's

5:21

a lot of government press releases that say one

5:23

thing, but when you actually look at reality, it's

5:25

a little different and it's a complex field to

5:27

say the least. So I want to start,

5:29

we're literally just going to divide this in half. So we're going

5:31

to start with immigration policy under Donald Trump, 2017 through 2021. And

5:36

I want to start because there's so much emphasis on the

5:38

border, I don't want to start with the border. So

5:41

I want to just start in broad strokes. The president

5:43

has a fair amount of latitude on

5:45

immigration policy, quite a bit in fact. It's

5:48

an area where they're sort of at some of their

5:50

highest level of autonomy, although the courts will

5:52

have things to say about that. Let's

5:55

just start talking about basically like

5:57

legal immigration, just the standard, how

5:59

many visas. we give out, who

6:01

we give them out to, that's

6:03

something that presidents have some control

6:05

over, some input on. Congress also

6:08

obviously gets a say in that.

6:10

How would you describe sort of

6:12

broadly the Trump administration immigration policy

6:14

on legal immigration? Yeah, the Trump

6:16

administration was a restrictionist administration. Their

6:19

goal was to slash immigration to

6:21

the United States. You

6:23

would see President Trump himself at the time, pushing

6:25

for, you know, why don't we have more Norwegians

6:27

here? Why are we taking Haitians? And

6:29

so they tried to reshape the legal immigration

6:31

system to act a little bit more

6:33

like the early 20th century

6:36

United States immigration system from the 1920s

6:39

through the 1960s, when we

6:41

had national origin quotas and

6:43

immigration system explicitly designed to

6:45

allow some desirable immigrants and

6:47

restrict the undesirable immigrants. At

6:50

the time in the 1920s, it was really

6:52

racial that the Trump administration, that was part

6:54

of it, but it was also aimed at

6:56

keeping out lower income immigrants and really saying,

6:58

we only want a few immigrants coming

7:00

here. And if they're going to come

7:02

here, they better be from Europe and

7:05

or educated. And obviously Congress changes that

7:07

and the president signs the law, Lyndon

7:09

Bayes Johnson in the 1960s with a

7:11

watershed immigration law that totally gets rid

7:13

of the kind of national origin and

7:15

highly racialized quotas and categories that had,

7:17

you know, dictated immigration policy for about

7:19

four years. But again, this

7:22

is just at a descriptive level, I think

7:24

Stephen Miller and many of the people that

7:26

are around President Trump really view that previous

7:28

period, the 20s to 60s, as

7:30

kind of a more ideal model. That's

7:32

actually what they want to get back

7:34

to less immigration, more control over where

7:36

people are coming from, as opposed to

7:38

like family reunification, and essentially

7:40

selecting for people from countries, wealthy countries, and

7:43

particularly countries that they say have a cultural

7:45

linguistic affinity, which is often people that are

7:48

in the racial sense of the word, quote unquote,

7:50

white. Yeah. And you'd find Jeff

7:52

Sessions, for example, who had a lot

7:54

of a role in the Trump administration

7:56

immigration policy, having openly endorsed the 1924

7:58

Act. which did

8:00

set up these racial national origin quotas.

8:02

And this is one of those laws

8:04

where the 1924 quota system, where

8:07

calling it racist is not an opinion,

8:09

it's fact, they were very open about

8:12

keeping what they call the racial stock

8:14

of the United States a certain way

8:16

through this law. Now, of course,

8:18

even if you go into the 1960s, the 1965

8:20

Act, one of the reasons

8:22

we have a family-based immigration system is because

8:24

that too was based in a racial

8:27

belief, as they said, they

8:29

got a number of conservatives at the

8:31

time to support the law because they

8:33

thought, well, okay, we'll keep America white

8:35

if we have a family-based immigration system

8:37

because most immigrants who'd been coming over

8:39

the last decades were white immigrants, Irish,

8:41

Italian, that was sort of the last

8:43

great wave of immigration in the early

8:45

20th century was from countries which today

8:47

we would call, peoples which today

8:49

we would call white. Back then, the racial

8:51

categories were a little bit more mixed, to

8:54

put it simply, but that

8:56

isn't how it worked out, of course, and

8:59

I think as the Trump administration found out,

9:01

if you have an immigration system that is

9:03

aiming at people from Europe, well, a lot

9:05

of Europeans are pretty happy to stay where

9:07

they are and people tend to come to

9:10

the United States when the United States is

9:12

a great deal better economically, safety-wise, and everything,

9:14

and less so if you're

9:16

coming from Finland or Norway, that there's

9:18

not a huge demand for millions of

9:20

people to immigrate from Central Europe to

9:22

the United States. So did

9:25

they succeed, the Trump administration did

9:27

they succeed in reducing the inflows of legal

9:29

immigrants, like the amount of visas that

9:31

they were able to get through

9:33

the various legal means? Yes, absolutely.

9:35

Visa issuance fell every single year

9:38

in the Trump administration. Now

9:40

it cratered in 2020 because of the COVID-19

9:42

pandemic, which shuttered consulates

9:44

around the world, but even setting that

9:46

aside, there was a steep drop in

9:48

immigration through the legal immigration system.

9:51

He also hollowed it out. There

9:53

was a hiring freeze at US Citizenship

9:55

and Immigration Services that meant when President

9:57

Biden took office, there's about a thousand

10:00

few. were adjudicators than they

10:02

needed to get things back on track.

10:04

And he also banned immigration, wide

10:07

swaths of legal immigration through a wide

10:09

variety of different means. There's, of course,

10:11

the infamous Muslim ban, transit ban, depending

10:13

on how you want to call it,

10:15

which applied to legal immigration from

10:17

a wide variety of Muslim majority

10:20

countries, plus Venezuela and North Korea.

10:22

And then you also had lesser known, he

10:25

had a number of other bans that were blocked

10:27

in court before they could go into effect. But

10:30

those were shaky legal decisions and the

10:32

appellate courts and the Supreme Court could

10:34

have well ruled otherwise because he used

10:36

the Muslim ban authority, INA 212F. At

10:39

one point, he blocked all legal immigration from

10:41

people who didn't have health insurance. So

10:44

that meant that if you were a lower

10:46

income individual and you didn't have, it was

10:48

a specific kind of health insurance too. So

10:50

there was essentially a wealth test imposed for

10:53

people coming to the United States during

10:55

the COVID-19 pandemic. He actually

10:57

blocked all legal immigration, allegedly

11:00

on economic recovery grounds. So there was a

11:02

period where even if the system had been

11:04

functioning, which it kind of wasn't because of

11:06

COVID consulate closures, where we would have seen

11:09

a huge drop in legal immigration. And that

11:11

did get blocked in court. And he also

11:13

blocked the diversity visa program. By

11:15

the end in the 2020s, he was

11:17

throwing out travel bans left and right,

11:19

aiming not at migrants, at the legal

11:22

immigration system. And there's

11:24

also refugees are another part of the

11:26

legal immigration system that's different than asylum

11:28

seekers because they are in their home

11:30

country where they apply and they go through

11:32

a very, very long and attenuated process of

11:34

interviews and vetting before they come over. That

11:36

number is the president has a lot of

11:38

control over that number. That was an explicit

11:40

campaign promise in 2016 to reduce the number

11:42

of refugees. And did he make good on

11:44

that promise? Yeah, when he took office, the

11:46

Obama administration's presidential determination from the previous year

11:49

had been 100,000 refugees. We will admit 100,000

11:51

refugees in a year. Crump

11:55

flashed that immediately every single year after

11:57

that, when it came time to set

11:59

the refugee. level. He slashed it again.

12:01

By 2020, he had dropped it down to 15,000

12:03

total. Now, this not

12:07

only reduced the number of refugees, it

12:09

also meant that when President Biden took

12:11

office, it took years to rebuild the

12:13

refugee program because refugee officers had quit

12:16

en masse, the refugee resettlement organizations had

12:18

had to lay off tons and tons

12:20

of staff. The funding was down. And

12:22

so we are just now in the

12:25

start of 2024, getting back to the

12:27

level. And I think we're finally about

12:29

to surpass the level it was when

12:31

Trump took office and get back to

12:34

the Obama level, like the 100,000 level.

12:36

We will hit that this year, but

12:38

it took three solid years of rebuilding

12:40

to get us back there. So

12:43

the broad strokes of the various means of legal

12:45

immigration, people that go through the system and they

12:47

file and they apply, whether it's, they have a

12:49

family member or they're sponsored by a

12:51

business, there are visas that are granted, student visas, like

12:54

all of these different ways that people can come to

12:56

the United States, right? They explicitly

12:58

wanted to reduce that. They

13:01

also wanted to sort of tip the balance

13:03

of which countries people were coming from and

13:05

reduce the amount of people. And they did

13:07

all those things basically. And they tried to

13:09

and probably could have done more had courts

13:11

not blocked some of what they did, but

13:13

in the aggregate, they did do that.

13:16

They said they would do that. And they did do

13:18

that on legal immigration. It's

13:20

a pretty clear story, right? Yeah. And

13:22

not just using these like ban authorities,

13:24

they also threw everything at the wall

13:26

to sort of lower the numbers and

13:29

using bureaucratic red tape tricks. One of

13:31

the worst of them was called the

13:33

no blank spaces policy that they

13:35

started applying it. So every form you

13:37

had to submit to the government for

13:39

an immigration benefit, there are extraneous extra

13:41

boxes. So for example, there's five boxes

13:43

to put your children, you know, you

13:45

put children, child one, child, two, child,

13:47

three, child four. So if you have

13:50

five children, you can fill out all

13:52

five boxes. If you have one child,

13:54

you fill out the one and then

13:56

you'll leave the rest empty. The Trump

13:58

administration started mandatorily denying all applications in

14:00

which people didn't write N

14:02

slash A in every single

14:04

irrelevant open box. A

14:06

hundred percent true. No. They denied

14:09

people. I don't believe that. They would turn

14:11

away applications because somebody didn't put the apartment

14:13

number because they lived in a house, because

14:15

they didn't write N slash A in apartment

14:17

number. And it was this

14:19

kind of Casca-esque bureaucracy that they really

14:21

weaponized. You know, and they said, look,

14:23

the form instructions say fill out every

14:26

applicable box and write N, A, and

14:28

ones that are not applicable. But

14:30

they didn't expect normal people to,

14:32

you know, again, every single little

14:35

irrelevant box if you missed one,

14:37

they'd reject the entire application and say, sorry, you

14:39

have to file this again. Go

14:41

back and file it again. So it was

14:44

creating these bureaucratic hurdles. Again, not denying for

14:46

substantive reasons, just denying for pure

14:48

petty, let's throw as many pitfalls in

14:50

the system to just get people. Yes.

14:53

And all of this in the same direction. We don't

14:55

want people coming. We want to keep them out. And

14:57

if to the extent that people come in, we want

15:00

to select those countries like, you know, again, the president

15:02

talked about, you know, Norway and countries like that. He

15:04

called Haiti a shithole country. Like it was very clear.

15:06

And again, this was expressed in policy. So now it's

15:09

so that's the sort of legal. That's the top line

15:11

of the legal immigration system. Let's talk about the border,

15:14

which is not should not be

15:16

conflated with all unauthorized immigration because a

15:18

lot of people, my understanding is it's still the case that

15:20

most people who are unauthorized migrants

15:22

are overstay visas. That was true as

15:24

of no longer ago. It's no longer

15:26

true. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

15:31

So let's talk about the border. I mean, the basic

15:33

one of the things that you've pointed out is they

15:35

clearly wanted to keep people out of the border. And

15:38

in some ways, people will probably remember

15:40

the child separation policy in which the

15:42

government was separating children from parents. It

15:44

was not keeping track of who belonged

15:46

to who. It was essentially, for lack

15:48

of a better word, kidnapping these children,

15:50

detaining them away from their parents, putting

15:53

them into group homes through contractors, really,

15:55

crazily stuff that caused a national uproar. They eventually

15:57

had to walk back this policy, which they did

15:59

not. they were doing, the reason

16:01

they did that was because they were so at

16:03

their wit's end about

16:06

stopping the flow of people showing up

16:08

at the border. What was

16:10

their approach at the border? And maybe you want to

16:12

sort of lay the groundwork of what starts before them

16:14

in 2014 under Barack Obama.

16:17

Yeah, you know, I mean, basically,

16:19

the goal of the Trump administration

16:21

was deterrence and specifically deterring families

16:23

from coming. So basically, starting

16:25

in around 2013 and 2014, we

16:28

started seeing more unaccompanied children

16:30

and families, primarily from Honduras,

16:32

Guatemala, and El Salvador coming

16:35

to the US-Mexico border and seeking

16:37

asylum. This was a

16:39

huge shift in migration patterns for

16:41

decades. The overwhelming majority of migrants

16:44

coming across the border were Mexicans,

16:46

primarily coming here for looking for

16:48

work. When the Great Recession hit

16:50

in 2007, and the construction

16:53

industry essentially collapsed for decades, that

16:55

demand for labor went down. You

16:57

had fewer people crossing because of

17:00

that. And that also coincided simultaneously

17:02

with a massive growth of border

17:04

security apparatus, enforcement personnel going on

17:07

in the Bush administration in the post 9-11

17:09

years. The Border Patrol doubled in size in

17:11

a 10-year period and quintupled in size in

17:13

a 15-year period. 4,000 agents in 1993, up

17:16

to 21,000 agents by 2011. So

17:22

you have simultaneously a collapse in demand for

17:24

the kind of labor that you have undocumented

17:26

immigrants coming and a huge increase in border

17:29

security. And so in the early, the first

17:31

term of Obama was actually the quietest the

17:33

border had been in 30 years. Then 2013,

17:35

2014, families started showing

17:40

up. And those posed brand new challenges.

17:42

Holding children in detention centers, small children

17:44

in detention centers for months or weeks

17:46

at a time, created an

17:49

outcry. The Obama administration created family

17:51

detention. Eventually a federal judge ruled

17:53

that a 1997 legal

17:56

settlement about the treatment of children in

17:58

immigration detention that

18:00

most families be released after 20 days. And

18:03

so you had in the Obama administration in 2014 and 2015, 2016,

18:07

you did have families coming and being released

18:10

into the United States to go into the

18:12

immigration court system and seek asylum. The

18:14

Trump administration wanted to stop that. Right, just

18:17

to be clear, released with a court date,

18:19

right? So they just go through this. You

18:21

presented the border or you're apprehended. You

18:24

say you're seeking asylum. You get put into

18:26

a process. This is a complicated process, but

18:28

there's things called a credible fear interview. And

18:30

then you get a court date for sort of

18:33

further sorting, essentially, right? Yeah, so I

18:35

think it's sometimes I really like to go to

18:37

first principles on these. It's really important to understand

18:39

as a legal matter, when somebody

18:41

crosses the border and taken into custody, if

18:43

the United States wants to remove that person,

18:45

because that person is quote unquote removable is

18:48

the term in the law. They have violated

18:50

immigration law. So there are two ways to

18:52

do that. You have to get a removal

18:54

order because it's a legal process. It's not

18:56

just a pure exercise of force.

18:58

There is a process. It's set down the

19:00

law. And there's two ways

19:03

to do that. There's expedited removal, which

19:05

is a law created in 96. So

19:07

it's 30 plus years old. And we have

19:09

regular removal, which is immigration court. And

19:12

when you put someone through expedited removal

19:14

key to that, that's the credible fear

19:16

process that requires asylum officers. In order

19:18

to do a credible fear interview as

19:20

part of this expedited process, you need

19:22

to have an asylum officer who can

19:24

carry out the interview. And if you

19:26

don't have those asylum officers, because there

19:28

aren't enough, then the only other

19:31

option, because you've got one of two options,

19:33

is to put them straight to immigration court,

19:35

skipping over the credible fear process entirely,

19:37

and going straight to the immigration court

19:39

system, where they have a regular removal

19:41

hearing, and where they can apply for

19:43

asylum. And if they fail, they get

19:45

ordered deported and ordered removed. So you

19:47

have these two processes, and Congress thought

19:49

in 1996, so maybe a

19:52

few thousand people a year will apply for asylum

19:54

at the border. So we don't need to fund

19:56

the asylum officer. We don't have that

19:58

many of them. And so in 24... when

20:00

tens of thousands of families showed up in one

20:02

summer, was the first time we went,

20:05

the system went, had a huge stress test and it

20:07

failed it. And the system has

20:09

been failing the stress test for the

20:12

last decades ever since. Yes, and yet instead

20:14

of fixing that, we just keep

20:16

doubling down on this. But so basically, this

20:18

is the first time we saw this happening

20:20

under Obama. Thousands of families started showing up

20:23

every month. There weren't enough asylum officers to

20:25

carry out credible fear interviews. You couldn't do

20:27

them fast enough. And people

20:29

started getting released and they skipped over

20:31

that process, again, because you have one

20:33

of two options, either expedited removal or

20:35

regular removal. And so people started going

20:38

straight to that, to the immigration court

20:40

process where they go to

20:42

court. If they file an asylum application, a

20:44

judge will hear their case and decide eventually

20:46

whether to grant asylum or deny asylum. So

20:49

the idea of people going into the sort

20:51

of normal immigration court system and not getting

20:53

expedited removal because they're then released into the

20:56

country with a court date. And this is

20:58

this catch and release notion, which again, Donald

21:00

Trump campaigned against in 2016. He

21:02

pledged to stop this. Again,

21:04

that requires legal changes because as you

21:06

said, like it's a legal process and

21:09

if the capacity is not there. So

21:11

what did they do about this general

21:13

set of issues at the border, you

21:16

know, before COVID basically? Yeah,

21:18

and you can see how they evolved

21:20

throughout the course of the term. The

21:22

family separation started actually within months. There

21:24

was a initial pilot project. Within weeks

21:26

they were discussing family separation. So this

21:28

is actually something that the Obama administration

21:30

had discussed. And so there was already

21:32

some little policies on there. So when

21:35

they took office and this was sort

21:37

of options that had come out there,

21:39

they seized on it. They said, let's

21:41

give this a try. And so they did

21:43

look at some options for just deliberate

21:45

separation and where they just said, we're not even

21:48

gonna give you a reason for it. We're just

21:50

gonna tear families apart. And they said, I think

21:52

even that was maybe a little bit too far

21:54

from them. And so they said, what we're gonna

21:56

do instead is we're gonna prosecute the parents for...

22:00

illegal entry, so that will

22:02

punish the parents. So the idea is then the

22:04

parents won't come back and in the process, that

22:07

means the children will be separated, they'll

22:09

be sent off to Office of Refugee

22:11

Resettlement, they'll be treated as unaccompanied minors

22:14

and treated differently under a different law, and

22:16

the parents will be prosecuted and then they

22:19

basically, you know, it's like the South Bart

22:21

thing, you know, step one, prosecute parents, question

22:24

mark, question mark, question mark, reunite them and

22:26

deport them together. That's what sort of they

22:28

were saying to themselves, but the people inside

22:30

the agencies were going, what are you doing?

22:32

There is no, you have to figure out,

22:34

you have to have a reunification process, you

22:36

don't have one, you're just taking these parents

22:38

apart, taking the sending the children elsewhere, you

22:41

don't even have a tracking system. And in

22:43

fact, so by the time zero tolerance rolled

22:45

out in spring of 2018, there were

22:47

people inside the government who had been raising alarm

22:50

bells for months about what was

22:52

happening. And all they had genuinely

22:54

was an Excel spreadsheet at

22:57

the Office of Refugee Resettlement to try to track

22:59

these things. And then this quickly

23:01

became an absolute nightmare, 3,300 or so parents separated

23:03

from their children. And

23:07

I think there's some confusion here. What happened

23:09

is the parents were prosecuted and then oftentimes

23:12

the parents were deported. So the children would

23:14

still be in the US, and the parents

23:16

would be condoms where nobody would know and

23:18

they had no process at

23:20

all to reunite families. So over

23:24

5,000 families in total were separated during this

23:26

time. And it had very little impact on

23:28

border crossings too. This is the key to

23:31

me is that their theory of the case

23:34

was that people are presenting at the

23:36

southern border, not because of desperation and

23:38

push factors, but because of a perception

23:40

of how easy it is to get

23:42

in. And if we change that calculation,

23:44

if we say it's night

23:46

marriage to get in, it's so night marriage that

23:48

you will risk being separated from your

23:50

child, that will deter people from coming.

23:53

This was explicitly the theory

23:55

and deterrence didn't work. And

23:57

in fact, one of the things that

23:59

I've seen... you note is that people

24:01

showing up the southern border all the way

24:03

up until COVID was still very high. In

24:05

fact, Donald Trump gave a prime time address

24:07

at one point from the Oval Office about

24:09

the crisis of the southern border. They were,

24:11

they kept sort of throwing deterrence and

24:14

the notion of the wall at the problem

24:17

of people showing up because they didn't want

24:19

people showing up. They did not want people

24:21

applying for asylum. They wanted to stop the

24:23

flow at the southern border. And it really

24:25

wasn't until negotiations with Mexico and then

24:28

COVID that they were able to kind of turn

24:30

it off. Yeah. And so in 2018, they

24:32

did zero tolerance. That didn't work.

24:35

And ironically, I mean, it's very hard to say, to

24:38

point to one thing and say this

24:40

is the cause, but family unit arrivals

24:42

spiked pretty much immediately after Trump publicly

24:45

renounced family separation. And

24:47

that is in part, you know, people have

24:49

theorized, I think there's some probably some evidence

24:51

to this, but it's hard to say for

24:53

sure, because everybody has different reasons for coming

24:56

to the border. But the international outrage over

24:58

family separation and the ways in which the message

25:00

was sent is we're going to stop doing this

25:03

may have encouraged more people to come to the

25:05

border. Because here you have the president saying like,

25:08

actually, no, I'm not going to take children from

25:10

families. Like actually, even I agree that this is

25:12

bad and family units arrivals started spiking immediately after,

25:14

you know, within a month or two after that.

25:17

And we had throughout 2018, he shut

25:19

down the government in 2018 in December,

25:23

a national emergency, migrant

25:25

arrivals kept increasing every single month after that

25:27

they put remain in Mexico in place in

25:30

late January 2019, they ramped

25:32

it up February, March, April, May 2019.

25:35

And the numbers kept going up kept

25:37

going up kept going up until Mexico

25:40

intervened and Trump threatened 25%

25:42

tariffs on Mexico, all Mexican

25:44

goods coming into the country

25:46

and Mexico caved and

25:48

said, All right, we will crack down

25:50

as hard as we can. They deployed

25:52

their new national guard to the northern

25:54

border. You have images of Mexican National

25:56

Guard troops running after Central American families

25:58

grabbing them and running them, hustling them

26:01

back onto the Mexican side, or making sure

26:03

that they weren't able to cross onto the

26:05

US side. And that caused

26:07

an immediate drop in migrant arrivals.

26:10

The Trump administration points this and says, actually

26:12

it was rain in Mexico that did this.

26:14

This is a program that worked. And this

26:16

is the argument that they make. They say,

26:18

look, he reached that deal to expand or

26:20

made in Mexico, migrant arrivals dropped immediately, program

26:22

success. The complicated version of

26:24

that is that this was again, multiple other

26:26

things going on. And if you actually look

26:29

at like the dates in which

26:31

this expansion actually happened, arrivals

26:33

started dropping weeks before the expansion

26:35

actually began and coincided pretty much

26:37

exactly with Mexico's crackdown. And

26:40

in fact, we've actually seen this happen

26:42

several times. In 2014, Obama got Mexico

26:45

to crackdown and that caused a significant

26:47

drop in families crossing the border. So

26:49

we've been in this cycle multiple times

26:51

when numbers spike, Mexico cracks down, the

26:54

US imposes some policy, and

26:56

then they start going up again. And

26:58

the key difference is, after this

27:00

happened in the late 2019, the

27:02

Trump administration started throwing other crazy policies

27:04

at the wall. They created

27:06

a roulette system where they would

27:08

send Guatemalans to Honduras, Hondurans to

27:10

El Salvador and Salvadorans to Guatemala.

27:13

Not just that, they were also gonna send... Yeah, so these are...

27:15

You might have heard of these. So

27:17

these were the so-called asylum cooperative

27:20

agreements. These are so-called safe

27:22

third country agreements. The Trump administration signed through

27:24

them. With Guatemala, Honduras, and

27:26

El Salvador. You often see people saying,

27:28

ending these agreements under Biden caused a

27:30

big thing. No, these agreements never really

27:33

went into effect. The Guatemalan one

27:35

did. They sent 945 Hondurans and Salvadorans

27:37

to Guatemala, total, before COVID hit

27:39

and the agreements were suspended. So the

27:42

idea that getting rid of those agreements made a big

27:44

difference, again, less than a thousand people ever put through

27:46

them. But setting that aside, the idea was basically, no

27:49

matter how you come here, we will turn you

27:51

away. So, crucially, you didn't have to

27:53

have ever been in one of these countries. If you were

27:55

Honduran and you crossed the border, they could

27:58

send you to Guatemala or El Salvador. if

28:00

you were Salvadoran and you crossed the border, the

28:02

idea was they'd send you to Honduras or Guatemala.

28:04

And if you were Guatemalan, they'd send you to

28:06

El Salvador and Honduras. And then

28:08

they went further than that. The agreement

28:10

they signed with Honduras let them send

28:12

Mexicans to Honduras. So you could

28:14

be born in Tijuana steps from the US border and they

28:17

would put you on a plane and if you tried to

28:19

seek asylum, they'd put you on a plane and send you

28:21

3,000 miles south of Honduras.

28:24

And they also sent Ecuadorans and Brazilians

28:26

the idea they would send them to

28:28

Honduras. Wait, I don't understand. What is

28:30

the logic here? Well, the logic is

28:32

find every way possible to deny people

28:34

access to the United States. And that

28:36

was their overarching goal here. And look,

28:39

treating their utilitarian argument was

28:42

this. This is taking them

28:44

as seriously as possible, trying to treat their

28:46

arguments as fairly as we can. They said,

28:48

it is awful

28:50

what happens to migrants. They are

28:52

abused by the cartels, often sexually

28:55

extorted, kidnapped, tortured. Awful things happen

28:57

on the way here. So what

28:59

we need to do is basically

29:02

make it impossible for anyone to ever get

29:04

into the United States. Shut

29:06

down this entire route and shut down both

29:08

the border and the entire route so that

29:10

this mass migration route is not happening because

29:12

it is a site of horrors. Which by

29:14

the way, it really is a brutal trip

29:16

and people do get exploited. They do get

29:19

sexually abused. They do get occasionally kidnapped. They

29:21

do get extorted, the amount of money that

29:23

people have to... I mean, they are walking

29:25

victim. They're sort of easy pickings for a

29:27

million different nefarious and predatory people

29:30

and institutions. And the Trump administration basically thought,

29:32

or this was sort of their basic... Their

29:34

way of saying this is we'll just cause

29:36

as much harm to people so that if

29:38

we just keep ratcheting up the punishment and

29:41

the cruelty, eventually it will get so high

29:43

that people stop trying to come and all.

29:45

And there's really just no evidence that that

29:47

actually works. They do point to the

29:50

fact that by early 2020, January, February 2020, family unit crossings

29:52

were down. Absolutely no

29:58

doubt about it. And we were... in the

30:00

sort of the lull period, then

30:03

COVID hits Title 42, a

30:05

pandemic health policy that the CDC technically

30:07

put in place, allegedly to

30:09

stop migrants from spreading COVID, even though COVID

30:12

was already spreading in the United States. You

30:14

weren't going to stop more people bringing it

30:16

in. That went into effect

30:18

and totally reshaped the border. It was

30:20

essentially an end to asylum as they

30:22

envisioned it. And the idea was

30:25

any person crossing the border could be expelled

30:27

without letting them access asylum because it was

30:29

public health law. It wasn't immigration

30:31

law. So that meant that they

30:34

could circumvent every little protection, due

30:36

process, anything in immigration laws

30:38

that were built in and to say, well,

30:40

we can get to ignore those because this

30:42

is public health emergency. We'll just turn everybody

30:44

away. And what that actually did,

30:46

they reached an agreement with Mexico to turn

30:48

back Hondurans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Mexicans to Mexico,

30:50

just those foreign countries. And they said, Mexico

30:52

said, we'll take those people so you can

30:54

send back as many of those people as

30:56

you want. And so what happened is people

30:59

started crossing, getting sent back to Mexico

31:01

and then saying, well, okay, all that happened

31:04

because this was not immigration law. It wasn't

31:06

a deportation. It had no consequences. It was

31:08

literally just a bus back to Mexico.

31:10

And they said, okay, smugglers

31:12

started saying, oh, great, repeat packaging.

31:14

We'll sell you a

31:17

repeat crossing package. Three tries or

31:19

your money back, that kind of

31:21

thing. And people started crossing over

31:23

and over and over again. And so by the

31:25

end of 2020, again, nobody was really

31:28

paying attention at the time because everything else

31:30

happening with the election. But by the end

31:32

of 2020, border crossings were already at 15

31:34

year highs. Wait, wait, wait, the end of

31:37

2020. So even

31:39

in COVID, pre-vaccine after they've thrown everything

31:41

at the wall, this is important, everything

31:44

in the wall, deterrence, they've done everything

31:46

they can to get border

31:48

crossings of asylum seekers to zero if they

31:50

can do it. That would be their ideal

31:52

number. They have put title 42 through

31:54

the CDC, which is a public health law, which allows

31:56

them to circumvent the normal due process to just ship

31:59

people. people out without having to go through what

32:01

you were talking about before. Even

32:03

under all of that, in the last full

32:05

month of Donald Trump's term, border

32:08

crossings in December 2020 were at a 15-year high.

32:11

Actually 20-year high. That is crazy!

32:13

Yeah. And again, no one was paying

32:15

attention at the time because, you know, we were a

32:18

few weeks away from January 6th. And

32:21

I mean, realistically, the thing is every single

32:23

month from April 2020 through May 2021, border

32:27

apprehensions went up. Border crossings went

32:29

up. Every single month. Initially, it was mostly

32:31

a return to the 1980s, 1990s of people coming here for work.

32:36

I mean, it was primarily single adults at first,

32:38

but the number of family units crossing was

32:40

creeping up too. The number of unaccompanied children

32:43

was creeping up too. And

32:45

so you were already seeing a

32:47

reversal of the Trump administration's success.

32:51

And not only that, because people were just crossing

32:53

over and over. The message was getting out. Right

32:55

now, you can cross as many times as you

32:57

want. If they catch you every time, they're not

33:00

going to prosecute you. They're not going to formally

33:02

deport you. They'll just send you back to Mexico.

33:04

Right. Because of the way Title

33:06

42 worked. Yeah. And in

33:08

fact, it's estimated during the Title 42

33:10

era, about one in three border apprehensions

33:12

was a person on their second, third,

33:14

fourth, or fifth of failed attempts to

33:17

cross. So this repeat crossings, which

33:19

used to be how the border worked back in

33:21

the 90s, when people would

33:23

just keep crossing until they eventually made it through. We

33:26

just sort of like policy wise, Title

33:28

42 was a return to the sort

33:30

of laissez-faire, just send them back

33:32

to Mexico policies of the 1980s and 1990s. And

33:36

it was a complete failure. And then

33:38

the other crucial thing to understand is three

33:41

days after Biden took office, the governor

33:43

of Tama Lipas, which is the Mexican

33:45

state bordering South Texas, boring the Rio

33:47

Grande Valley, said a

33:49

new Mexican law had just gone into

33:52

effect about the detention of migrant children.

33:54

And he said, you know what, you

33:56

can no longer expel children or families

33:58

with children under the age of seven. So

34:01

if you are a family with a small child

34:03

and DHS wants to expel you from South Texas

34:05

back to here, we're not going to let you

34:07

do it. So within days,

34:10

the Biden administration lost the ability to expel all

34:12

families because that had been true, you know, under

34:14

the last bits of the Trump administration. Families

34:16

were still being expelled. But within

34:19

days, that power broke down. And

34:21

then almost immediately we saw thousands

34:23

of people who've been waiting in central, you

34:25

know, in central Mexico and northern Mexico to

34:28

see what would happen suddenly start crossing again

34:30

because there had been a whole bunch of

34:32

pent up demand with COVID and everything. And

34:34

that is really when we started

34:36

seeing large numbers of families start crossing again.

34:40

More of our conversation after this. Today

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and every day Planned Parenthood is

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Planned parenthood.org/future. That's Planned parenthood.org/future.

35:56

So let's now go over to the Biden administration. of

36:00

both the sort of legal, the vision

36:02

of restrictionism of legal

36:04

immigration, a vision of a sort of

36:07

zero people at the border crossing for

36:09

asylum, and various attempts to get that

36:11

number to there. Basically, by any means

36:13

necessary, right, to get there, much

36:15

of which did not work, which I think is

36:18

a key thing to understand here. Or if it

36:20

worked, it worked temporarily. Right, it worked temporarily. So

36:22

now you go over to the Biden administration. Let's

36:24

just stay with the border, and then we'll go

36:26

to legal immigration. So the Biden administration does

36:28

have a bunch of promises about things they're going to

36:31

do differently at the border. And

36:33

they do revoke some of the

36:35

executive orders of the Trump administration. The

36:37

argument that Republicans and Trump make now

36:40

is the revocation of those is what

36:42

has led to record numbers

36:44

of border crossings. So let's just start with

36:46

what does the Biden administration do differently? What

36:49

are the places where it's doing things differently

36:51

than what Trump was doing at the border?

36:53

Yeah, I mean, the thing is, as a

36:55

policy matter, it's not that much because Title

36:57

42 stayed in effect, and it

36:59

stayed in effect all the way through to May of 2023. And Title 42

37:01

was the

37:04

big policy in effect when Biden took office.

37:07

Those asylum cooperative agreements I mentioned where

37:09

they were sending Hondurans and Salvadorans to

37:12

Guatemala, that agreement had been completely suspended

37:14

since COVID hits. Guatemala said, absolutely not,

37:16

you are not sending back Hondurans and

37:18

Salvadorans here during a pandemic. So

37:21

zero people have been put through those

37:23

agreements when Biden took office and hadn't

37:25

been since March of 2020. Remain in

37:27

Mexico, very similar. There hadn't

37:29

been a single court hearing. So for

37:32

those who don't remember how it worked

37:34

under Trump, the idea was people were

37:36

sent back to Mexico to go through a

37:38

court process in the United States. They have

37:40

to come back to the border, cross the

37:42

border, go to a court hearing. And then

37:44

if the court hearing ended, or didn't reach

37:46

the end, they get sent back to Mexico.

37:49

And so those court hearings were also completely

37:51

suspended and had been suspended since March of

37:53

2020 for COVID reasons. And

37:56

They had been putting about a few hundred

37:58

people, maybe a thousand people in. Into

38:00

the program, That's it sorted, literally descending the

38:02

back and saying say sorry We have no

38:04

clue when we're going to start of these

38:06

court hearings, but why you just wait? mixed

38:09

over mean in the meantime. So when buying

38:11

took office because of the pandemic, both of

38:13

those policies were were basically moribund or haven't

38:15

been set aside or were like that were

38:17

you know about less than two percent of

38:19

people were put into remain in Mexico during

38:22

this period. So I took office and said

38:24

suffer going to let these policies are not

38:26

really being used right now, but we're going

38:28

to keep in place Title Forty. Do and

38:30

they sent the message early on during the

38:32

transition. They said look, we're going to be

38:34

better on this but we need time. The

38:37

system is not working. Don't com and be

38:39

sent that message. Don't come over and over

38:41

and over and over again And of course

38:43

nobody listened because no one ever listens to

38:45

the United States and these issues. And to

38:47

be clear, the Obama administration had tried that

38:49

messaging. they a big messaging campaign and Central

38:51

America saying don't com The Trump Administration had

38:54

a messaging campaign in Central America same Don't

38:56

Com and on the by demonstration this is

38:58

very little evidence that the people wasn't. And

39:00

of course like if you look at in

39:02

the United States who listens to government the

39:04

essays you know some wrinkle do have are

39:07

but most people to tune about. So the

39:09

main thing to hear to think about is

39:11

the third party repatriation agreements and really Mexico

39:13

which were to the big policies the Trump

39:15

ministrations used to try to reduce border crossings.

39:18

York intention is the one that effect of

39:20

and by the time that the transition happened

39:22

they were essentially more been because Title Forty

39:24

Two which was the Public Helsing sort of

39:27

blocked it all out. That was really that's

39:29

kind of sovereign. At the bar her

39:31

was title Forty Two. That was really

39:33

what was guiding border policy And so

39:35

the revocation by the by mysteries of

39:37

those two policies didn't really make a

39:39

big difference because Forty Two stays in

39:41

place now eventually. And is

39:44

a very complicated litigation history here

39:46

for such as simplify. It. And.

39:48

I'll simplified this way. you can't

39:50

keep title forty two which is a

39:53

public health emergency provision in place forever

39:55

he got more and more ridiculous particular

39:57

years as a certain moment where Republicans

40:00

are, you know, at every opportunity saying

40:02

the pandemic is over and all of

40:05

these emergency authorities have to be revoked

40:07

and it was a huge, you

40:09

know, treading on liberty. But Title 42 has

40:11

to stick in perpetuity. Like, whatever you thought

40:14

about Title 42, it was effective, it wasn't

40:16

effective, it was good, it was bad. At

40:18

a certain point, it's got to go away. It is

40:20

tied to the pandemic and the public health emergency passes.

40:22

It's going to go either way. How

40:24

much of a difference does it make when

40:27

Title 42 does eventually go away? Yeah, you

40:29

know, we've now been, we're coming up on

40:31

a year this May of without Title 42,

40:33

going back to it. There have been some

40:35

things we can observe about what's changed. So,

40:38

it's leading to fewer repeat crossings. So,

40:40

the big thing is there are fewer

40:42

people doing this, you know, crossing over

40:44

and over and over again because we're

40:47

back to a situation where the US

40:49

government is imposing harsher consequences on people

40:51

and, you know, long-term multi-year bans on

40:53

reentry, criminal prosecutions, those are back in

40:55

effect. What is happening is

40:57

that we are seeing more families crossing now.

40:59

And this makes some sense, you don't want

41:01

to really take a child across the border

41:03

multiple times if you get expelled. You know,

41:06

no parent's going to want to put their kid through that.

41:09

So, we are seeing now where, you

41:11

know, if a family crosses, there's more

41:13

likely that the family enter,

41:15

they cross the US-Mexico border,

41:17

then we have to decide what to do with

41:19

them under those two removal processes. And so, most

41:21

families are having to go to the second process,

41:23

the regular removal immigration court

41:25

process. So, ending Title 42

41:28

has probably led to more families

41:30

crossing just because I think parents

41:32

and children are more vulnerable to

41:34

deterrence-based policies to some extent, just

41:36

because, you know, any parent naturally

41:39

doesn't want to put their child through an

41:41

awful border crossing experience more than once. But

41:43

single adult migrants, you know, we are seeing

41:45

fewer of them crossing because there was less

41:47

of that churn of migrants crossing over and

41:49

over and over again and getting sent back.

41:52

But the key difference is, what's really

41:54

shifted is the demographics are different now.

41:57

From 2014 to 2021, it was... was

42:00

Central American migrants, was the big

42:02

issue. Starting in 2021, especially as

42:04

COVID pandemic

42:07

destabilized South America, and

42:10

really through everybody for a loop,

42:12

a lot of Venezuelans started coming

42:14

north to the border. About one

42:16

in four people have left Venezuela

42:18

in the last decade, around 7.7

42:20

million. The overwhelming majority are still

42:22

in South America. The United States

42:24

is not the foremost refugee hosting

42:26

country in the region. Other countries

42:28

are hosting per capita, much

42:31

higher populations than the United States is.

42:33

And starting in 2021, though, we did start

42:35

seeing more people could start coming from countries

42:38

like Venezuela and Cuba. In fall

42:40

of 2021, Nicaragua relaxed its

42:42

visa requirements for Cubans and

42:45

said, hey, Cubans, you no longer need a

42:47

visa to fly here. And so suddenly, tens

42:50

of thousands of Cubans started flying to Nicaragua

42:52

and heading north to the United States. And

42:54

very crucial thing

42:56

to understand about this is that the

42:58

United States doesn't have repatriation agreements with

43:00

every country in the world. And in

43:02

particular, we don't have repatriation agreements with

43:04

Venezuela or Cuba. Many people

43:07

kind of have a sense about this

43:09

with Cuba for 50 years, basically Cubans

43:11

were almost immune from deportation. If

43:13

you made it onto US soil, I mean, some

43:15

people have heard of wet foot, dry foot. Well,

43:17

wet foot, dry foot was an acknowledgement that Cuba

43:20

said, if somebody's made it onto US soil, we

43:22

will not allow them to come into the country

43:24

and back. So you can't deport them to us. And

43:27

the key difference here, we saw

43:29

this with Venezuela as well. You

43:31

had Venezuelans coming to the border and

43:33

crossing, and the United States had effectively

43:35

even under Title 42, Mexico wasn't

43:39

taking them at first, and Venezuela

43:41

wasn't taking them. So like Cubans

43:43

before them, once they got onto

43:45

US soil, they reached a

43:47

point where they basically had no real ability of

43:49

the United States to do anything in that circumstance.

43:51

And again, this is not new. There

43:54

had been a way for Cubans, but as more people

43:56

from across the hemisphere started arriving, this became a bigger

43:58

and bigger issue for the United States. States, and

44:01

especially because the Venezuelan diaspora is so

44:03

large as more and more people started

44:05

coming, this became a bigger and bigger

44:07

problem for the United States because you

44:09

had tens of thousands of people crossing

44:11

from Venezuela and realistically, geopolitically-wise, nothing

44:13

we could do about that. Yeah. I

44:16

just want to hammer home an obvious thing that's

44:18

implicit when you're saying is you can't deport people

44:20

to a country against that country's will, just to

44:22

be clear. Like you cannot, you

44:24

can't do it. You need clearance with them legally

44:26

to set, to run your plane there, to do

44:28

whatever. So if the country says we're

44:30

not taking them, you can't send them there. Yeah.

44:34

And Venezuela does not permit the United States

44:36

to fly deportation flights. So you can technically

44:38

deport people via commercial air, but there are

44:40

no direct flights from the United States to

44:42

Venezuela. So you actually have to like, task

44:44

an ICE agent to get on a flight,

44:46

a commercial flight, watch somebody go

44:49

to the connecting airport and like watch them get on

44:51

the plane back to Caracas. So

44:53

realistically, only like less than 200

44:55

people a year were being deported

44:57

to Venezuela. So eventually,

44:59

you know, the Biden administration reached a

45:01

deal with Mexico and in October of

45:04

2022, Mexico said, we

45:06

will let you deport Venezuelans here

45:08

under Title 42, expel them under

45:10

Title 42. And

45:12

that deal was expanded in January

45:15

of 2023 to Cubans, Haitians, and

45:17

Nicaraguans. But Mexico said, we

45:19

want something out of this. And what we want

45:21

something out of this is shared responsibility for migration.

45:23

And so they said, here's the deal that they

45:25

worked out. It was, we will take 30,000 Cubans,

45:29

Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans expelled back

45:32

to Mexico every single

45:34

month. But in exchange, you

45:36

have to accept 30,000 different

45:38

Venezuelan Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Haitians

45:41

through humanitarian parole each month.

45:44

And that was as part of the sort

45:46

of like shared regional migration framework. So

45:49

this is now the CHNV parole program,

45:51

which you've seen a lot of Republicans

45:53

attack, as you know, there

45:55

was a completely inaccurate talk about these

45:57

were like charter flights coming into the

45:59

country. You have to use to buy a

46:01

plane ticket inside a program. You get screened a

46:03

little bit like immigrating legally. But this was very

46:05

much part of a carrot and stick approach from

46:07

the Biden administration. It was, we

46:09

will crack down and send you back

46:12

to Mexico. But if

46:14

you don't come here in the first place,

46:16

if you apply for one of these programs,

46:18

here's a new option that's available, that's never

46:20

been available to you off the border. Keep

46:22

you from ever coming to the border in the first place.

46:24

Yeah. So let's just zoom out for

46:26

a second because there's a lot, again, this is all pretty

46:29

complicated, right? The general thing is

46:31

title 42 goes away. And

46:33

I guess, Mike, here's one question. There has

46:36

been an enormous spike in crossings of the

46:38

border. Yes. And I think

46:40

that sometimes people who may listen to this

46:42

podcast and have my politics, the

46:45

Fox stuff is all this constant 24 or seven.

46:49

But when you look at the numbers, they're pretty wild. We're

46:52

talking Ellis Island at its peak, almost

46:54

level numbers of people now as a

46:56

much smaller country. But there's a ton

46:58

of people, it's record setting, it was

47:01

happening for several months. And

47:03

there really hadn't ever been anything like this

47:05

at the southern border. So it wasn't purely

47:07

hysteria. Yes and no. So

47:09

I think if you look

47:11

at overall crossings, for about a 25 year period from

47:14

the 1970s through to 2007, basically

47:20

when the Great Recession hit, routinely,

47:22

over a million apprehensions a

47:24

year, routinely. And of

47:26

course, back then, apprehensions is not the

47:28

same as crossings because they weren't apprehending

47:31

everybody crossing, not a surprise there. And

47:33

even by 1977, President Carter is already saying an

47:37

estimated 2.5 million crossings a year.

47:40

So, one in three people are being

47:42

apprehended. And it wasn't until,

47:44

according to official DHS estimates, it wasn't until

47:47

2012 that a majority of the people crossing

47:49

the border were taken into custody. So what

47:51

that means is you look back at what are official

47:53

estimates in fiscal year 2000, 25

47:56

years ago, you had 1.67 million apprehensions. And

48:00

according to DHS estimates, about 2.1

48:02

million successful unlawful entries on top

48:04

of that. So it's

48:06

about 3.8 million total crossings. That's 25

48:09

years ago. So we have

48:12

seen this level of very high

48:14

crossings before. The key distinction

48:16

now is these are not people

48:18

who are primarily trying to evade

48:20

arrest. The majority of people

48:22

now are turning themselves in to access

48:25

the humanitarian protection system. They're no longer

48:27

Mexicans. And we increasingly high numbers

48:29

of people who don't have any family or

48:31

friends in the U.S. Don't know

48:33

anybody here and need a lot

48:35

more support services when they get here

48:38

than has happened in the past. This is

48:40

a transformation of what's happening down there. Because

48:42

when you go back to 2000, it's people

48:45

essentially, primarily Mexicans, sneaking

48:47

across the border. You

48:49

know, if you've watched El Norte or whatever, you

48:51

know, they're sneaking across the border, although that was

48:53

Central Americans. They're sneaking across the border probably with

48:55

some family or people they know there, and they're

48:57

trying to work, and they might go back or

48:59

they might stay. This is

49:02

people showing up with often no family from

49:04

not just the Western Hemisphere, but sometimes all

49:06

over the world. I mean, the vast majority,

49:08

the Western Hemisphere and, you know, pluralities of

49:10

Venezuela and Cubans right now, that shifts around,

49:13

going to be apprehended to apply

49:15

for asylum. And basically

49:18

an entirely of an

49:20

extremely high-volume alternate system

49:23

of entry that has basically been built up

49:25

at the southern border in a place that

49:27

doesn't have, like it's compared to Ellis Island.

49:30

Ellis Island was built to do that. We've

49:32

now got this system where there's,

49:34

because of, in some ways, I

49:36

would say, how little we're letting in people for

49:39

the other means, the

49:41

demand pushing to the border where,

49:43

like, this system is completely ill-equipped

49:46

to do what it's now being stood

49:48

up to try to do, which is

49:50

deal with an enormous capacity of folks

49:52

presenting who basically want

49:54

to immigrate legally, and they're using asylum

49:57

because that's what's available. Some of them

49:59

definitely do. deserve asylum, but not all.

50:01

But they can't assess that themselves because they

50:03

just want to come to the United States.

50:06

And so I guess the question is like,

50:08

why have we gotten to this point? Like,

50:10

has the Biden administration made decisions that have

50:13

produced this or is this a sort of

50:15

natural forcing mechanism from global demand? How do

50:17

you see it? Yeah, I mean, I really

50:19

do see this on a spectrum. And you

50:22

look at what has happened over the last

50:24

decade, and this has been building, you have

50:26

to keep in mind that this isn't new,

50:28

this didn't start under the Biden administration. And

50:32

we had now three separate presidential

50:34

administrations that have been trying to

50:36

deal with this. And Congress has

50:38

been completely absent. We

50:40

have not updated our legal

50:42

immigration system since November of

50:44

1990. The first website can

50:47

be put online at CERN in December of 1990.

50:50

So our legal immigration system

50:52

predates the World Wide Web.

50:54

Our humanitarian protection system, this

50:56

idea of expedited removal, incredible

50:58

fear interviews, that comes

51:00

from 1996, in like the peak

51:02

of the Macarena. These are 1990

51:06

20th century systems that did

51:08

not anticipate the modern world we

51:10

find ourselves in today. And

51:13

so presidents have used whatever limited executive

51:15

authority that they have here, and sometimes

51:17

very expansive executive authority. But the core

51:19

resource challenges and the bottlenecks in the

51:22

system just need Congress to

51:24

step in. So as this

51:26

has built and built and built, smuggler

51:29

networks have also built and built and built.

51:31

This did start out 10 years ago,

51:34

it was mostly smugglers in Guatemala, Honduras,

51:36

and El Salvador. And then as more

51:38

and more people are seeing, as the

51:40

legal immigration system became less accessible, if

51:42

you don't prompt cut legal immigration, then

51:44

COVID slashed legal immigration for

51:47

years, and consulates are just recovering now.

51:49

There are backlogs in India right now

51:51

in China, in China in particular, if

51:54

you look at the numbers here, more

51:57

people got visas from China in 2019. than

52:00

in 2020 to 2023 combined in a four

52:02

year period after that. That was how much

52:05

COVID devastated the system there. And

52:07

it's not really a surprise that

52:09

when legal immigration to the United

52:12

States dries up and you have

52:14

global coverage and politicians screaming about

52:16

an open border, that you start

52:18

seeing more people say, well, hey,

52:21

seems like there might be. And

52:24

this becomes this sort of self-reinforcing

52:26

cycle. Wait, do you think domestic

52:28

political attention drawn to the border

52:30

perversely ends up as an advertisement for

52:32

people to come? Undoubtedly. There's I mean,

52:35

really, especially because a lot of this

52:37

stuff spreads through WhatsApp and TikTok. And

52:39

so you see, social media

52:41

has also been a huge driver. And also

52:43

it is just easier than ever to migrate.

52:47

You now have translation apps. You can

52:49

now be from whatever part of the world

52:51

and you can have your language translated

52:53

into Spanish. That was not 10 years ago.

52:55

Right. You now have social media telling people,

52:57

giving people guides to get here. You've

52:59

got smugglers who are coming. All of

53:02

this didn't exist in the past. And

53:04

this has been a real shift. I mean, I

53:06

know you have certain political commitments or normative commitments

53:08

about what you would like to see happen in

53:11

policy. And you're being very careful and descriptive here.

53:13

Do you think if Donald Trump replaced

53:15

Joe Biden tomorrow with Stephen Miller to side,

53:18

right? Like would they be able to drive

53:20

it to zero? There's a sense that

53:22

the attacks on the Republicans, this is a

53:24

lack of will. Right. That like unilaterally that

53:26

Joe Biden actually wants this to happen.

53:28

He wants people showing up at

53:30

the southern border because they're going to be future

53:33

democratic voters, which is itself like ludicrous and dubious.

53:35

And in fact, actually maybe not true because like

53:37

the history of people fleeing

53:39

failed leftist states. They

53:42

become democratic voters, by the way. Is

53:44

that fair? Is there some lever he could

53:46

hit, some screw he could turn to make

53:49

this stop, basically? No,

53:52

I think you would see a big

53:54

drop in part because people operate on

53:56

a wait and see policy. So when

53:58

Trump took office, border crossing. crossings plummeted.

54:01

January 2017 was the

54:04

lowest border crossings in 50 years. And

54:06

that had nothing to do with Trump

54:08

actually changing any policy. The policy remained

54:10

identical. It happened because people take a

54:12

wait and see approach. And so we

54:14

have seen this pattern before. The end

54:16

of Title 42, for example, the Biden

54:18

administration said, we are going to be

54:20

harsh, we are going to crack down,

54:22

we've imposed these new asylum restrictions. And

54:24

border crossings did drop significantly. And then

54:26

people started testing it and found out

54:28

that these fundamental resource limitations are still

54:30

there. And so as much as the

54:32

Biden administration, you know, right now, about 90% of

54:35

people who cross the border without permission right now or

54:38

across it illegally are denied asylum,

54:40

will be denied asylum eventually. But

54:43

they can't be denied asylum until they get in

54:45

front of an immigration judge five to seven years

54:47

from now. And so the

54:49

Biden administration can't put this asylum restriction in

54:52

place literally does not have the resources to

54:54

do that. And so I think not just

54:56

a Trump administration, but any administration that really

54:58

wants to crack down, you would

55:00

see an immediate drop. And

55:03

then you would see the numbers start trickling up

55:05

again. And the real question mark

55:07

here is Mexico. You cannot

55:09

deal with migration without working out

55:12

a deal with Mexico. And it's

55:14

also elections in Mexico this time.

55:16

Next year, we will have a

55:18

new Mexican president. And it

55:20

is going to be a woman. And

55:22

we have seen how President Trump

55:24

had dealt with female heads of

55:26

state. And there is

55:29

a lot of Mexico's pride on the

55:31

line here. And you see Mexico really

55:33

bristling at the ways in which a

55:35

lot of people on the right now are going after

55:37

them, called to bomb Mexico. And in fact, and this

55:39

has really been an issue here. And so

55:42

this is something that they view as a battle of

55:44

wills. In fact, I testified in front of a congressional hearing

55:46

two weeks ago, I was next sitting next to Gene

55:48

Hamilton, one of the Stephen Miller's

55:51

close allies and one of the architects

55:53

of family separation. And he said in this

55:55

hearing very openly, he said, we

55:57

need to win a battle of wills with

55:59

Mexico. them. We need to overcome

56:01

them, overcome their will. And he

56:03

said, that's how you do it. You overcome Mexico's

56:06

will. And international

56:08

diplomacy is not that simple.

56:11

Mexico is now our number one trading

56:13

partner. That used to be China

56:15

now, it used to be Canada, China, and it

56:18

would change back and forth. It's now Mexico. So

56:20

the Trump administration's threat of 25% tariffs in 2019,

56:22

you can't threaten that today. Imagine 25% tariffs in

56:24

a time when we're worried

56:30

about inflation. That would set

56:32

off an economic death spiral. And so

56:34

I think Mexico would probably rightly look

56:36

at this and say, who are you

56:38

kidding? Now, AMLO has actually said, AMLO,

56:40

the president of Mexico has said, Andres Manuel

56:43

Lopez Obrador, he has said, actually,

56:45

sure, I'll work with the Biden admin when

56:47

the big Senate deal came out. Or he

56:49

said, I'll take migrants, but you have to

56:52

give me something in exchange. And what he

56:54

wanted in exchange was far beyond what the

56:56

United States is willing to give. It was

56:58

legalization for all the undocumented immigrants, $20 billion

57:00

in development assistance for Central and South America

57:02

and end to Cuba sanctions and end to

57:04

Venezuela sanctions. The United States foreign

57:07

policy established, we're just not willing to do those

57:09

right now. So it's hard to see

57:11

whether that was a deliberately too high

57:13

demand, sort of intended to provoke a

57:15

who are you kidding response. But

57:17

it's a sign that they want more than

57:19

what they've gotten because Mexico has been dealing

57:22

with this too. And so

57:24

I think Mexico itself sees that it

57:26

is the United States greatest hope on

57:28

actually being able to get migrants to

57:30

stop coming to the border. And they're

57:33

saying, well, okay, if you're going to

57:35

make billions of dollars of our own

57:37

funds on this, but yeah, what's

57:39

in it for us? We'll be right

57:41

back after we take this quick break. Today

57:51

and every day Planned Parenthood is

57:53

committed to ensuring that everyone has

57:55

the information and resources they need to

57:57

make their own decisions about their bodies, including

58:00

abortion care. Lawmakers who oppose

58:02

abortion are attacking Planned Parenthood, which means

58:04

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58:06

than 2 million people is at stake.

58:08

The right to control our bodies and

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58:13

been stolen from us. And now, politicians

58:15

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58:17

that would block people from getting the

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58:22

Parenthood believes everyone deserves health care. It's

58:24

a human right. That's why

58:26

they fight every day to push for

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58:40

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58:42

can reclaim our rights and

58:44

protect and expand access to

58:46

abortion care. Visit Planned parenthood.org/future.

58:49

That's Planned parenthood.org/future. I

58:57

want to talk about one more policy thing

58:59

under the Biden administration, because there's the unilateral

59:01

stuff they can do. But then, of course,

59:03

there's the big border bill. And you said

59:05

that we haven't updated it since 1990. This

59:07

was the big attempt to update not the

59:09

whole immigration system, but stuff around the border.

59:12

It was a bipartisan deal that

59:14

was worked out between Republican and

59:16

Democratic senators. James Langford of

59:18

Oklahoma and Chris Murphy of Connecticut, and then

59:20

a few other people, Katie Britt of Alabama,

59:22

and a few other folks got together. I

59:25

think Kyrsten Sinema was Kiana from Arizona, the

59:27

independent. Tom Tillis, it was Tillis Langford, Murphy and

59:29

Sinema. Right. So the four of them got together.

59:31

They hammered out this thing. Conservatives

59:33

were crowing. Well, initially they came

59:35

out of it crowing saying, we've

59:37

got the best sort of border

59:39

crackdown legislation we can imagine. And

59:41

they're not asking for anything on

59:43

the Dreamers or anything like that.

59:45

It's just a

59:48

border bill. Donald Trump came out and

59:50

killed it immediately because he wanted the

59:52

border to be in the worst

59:54

shape possible as a sort of political tool. But

59:56

tell me about the actual substance of that bill.

59:58

Yeah. I mean, was an actual

1:00:01

serious attempt to discuss these issues. They're

1:00:03

very clear that they actually did get

1:00:05

in a room and talk through these

1:00:07

resource limitations and what statutory

1:00:09

changes might be necessary and come to

1:00:12

what seems to be a compromise. Now,

1:00:14

was it a perfect compromise? No, in

1:00:16

fact, we've argued that it was just

1:00:19

overly complex and the authority

1:00:21

had too many weird aspects

1:00:23

of it that were parts of compromise for

1:00:25

it to really have functioned that well, but

1:00:28

it was definitely a big swing at

1:00:30

actually fixing the issue. So for example,

1:00:32

it would have hired thousands of new

1:00:35

asylum officers, which as I've mentioned is

1:00:37

the fundamental bottleneck, right? Bottleneck, right. And

1:00:39

it would have hired hundreds of new

1:00:42

immigration judges, new agents, new

1:00:44

resources in general to deal with this to

1:00:46

really say like, okay, this is a resource

1:00:48

issue. If we have enough resources, we can

1:00:50

get a functional system again. And

1:00:52

it did have a new authority to essentially

1:00:54

suspend asylum, to return a little bit to

1:00:57

the Title 42 type policies of the past.

1:00:59

And it also greatly shortened the asylum

1:01:02

process. Instead, one of the biggest structural

1:01:04

changes was if you come across

1:01:06

the border and you go through credible fear, even

1:01:09

if we can't give you a credible fear

1:01:11

interview soon because we don't have an asylum

1:01:13

officer available, we don't send you to

1:01:15

immigration court. We just keep you in this credible fear

1:01:17

thing. So maybe you have to wait six months for

1:01:19

a credible fear interview, but you're still

1:01:21

in this expedited removal framework so that you

1:01:24

have fewer rights, fewer rights to appeal. And

1:01:26

in fact, under the new process, people would

1:01:28

just never go to court. They'd never get

1:01:30

to see a judge. If

1:01:32

a bureaucrat denied them, that was it. You

1:01:34

could not even appeal to a federal court.

1:01:37

It just essentially cut courts out

1:01:39

of the process completely and became

1:01:41

a bureaucratic process, purely

1:01:43

in front of officers in

1:01:46

the government with really no input

1:01:48

whatsoever from an independent third party,

1:01:50

whether that be an immigration judge

1:01:52

or later a federal

1:01:55

circuit court appeals judge. But

1:01:58

it also said people still... have a

1:02:00

right to seek asylum. It also didn't

1:02:02

set as a goal zero people crossing

1:02:04

the border. It acknowledged people will keep

1:02:07

crossing. And it's not bad that someone

1:02:09

crosses. We just need to have a

1:02:11

process in place in order

1:02:13

to ensure that they are someone with

1:02:16

a legitimate claim for asylum. But

1:02:18

you saw Speaker Johnson say the goal

1:02:20

should be zero, zero people crossing. And

1:02:23

I think that is right now the fundamental

1:02:25

difference between the two parties. You are seeing

1:02:27

an increasing on the Republican side of things,

1:02:29

an increasing abandonment of the

1:02:32

idea that people can seek asylum

1:02:34

at the border. And on

1:02:36

the Democratic side, you have increasing willingness

1:02:38

to crack down and impose new restrictions, but

1:02:40

they have not abandoned the idea that people

1:02:43

will come to our borders. They will be

1:02:45

seeking protection and we should have a system

1:02:47

in place to determine whether or not they

1:02:49

qualify. And I think that is the rhetorical

1:02:52

fight going on right now between zero and

1:02:54

we actually should have a system in place to

1:02:56

screen people and zero is unrealistic. What sort of

1:02:59

end this on legal immigration? Because we spent a

1:03:01

lot of time on Biden and the border, but

1:03:03

for all the things you talked about before,

1:03:06

how the previous administration, Trump had used every

1:03:08

means possible, including throwing out applications

1:03:10

that didn't put N.A. in blank

1:03:12

spaces. What's the sort of top

1:03:14

line of what the Biden administration has done on

1:03:16

legal immigration and those pathways? Yeah, I mean, you

1:03:19

use a metaphor here. You know, when Biden took

1:03:21

office, the legal immigration system was like a cruise

1:03:23

ship that was on fire and listing. It hadn't

1:03:25

fully sunk yet, but things weren't looking good. So

1:03:28

right now, the fire is out. They've

1:03:31

mostly righted a lot of the list,

1:03:33

but the engines aren't really going yet.

1:03:35

And that's doing part two. Again, they

1:03:37

had to dig themselves out of a really

1:03:39

big hole, not just caused by the Trump admin,

1:03:41

but also caused by COVID. And like, when

1:03:44

you just stop adjudicating a lot of things for months

1:03:46

and months and months and months on end, that

1:03:49

creates a huge backlog. But last year, in

1:03:51

fiscal year 2023, USCIS, for the first

1:03:54

time in over a decade, actually reduced the

1:03:56

overall number of applications pending at the end

1:03:59

of the year. Oh, wow. But it's

1:04:01

mixed because it's also it's like a balloon.

1:04:03

If you squeeze one place, you know, it

1:04:05

expands elsewhere. So every time they sort of

1:04:07

gone after one kind of backlog, that causes

1:04:10

another thing to get neglected. And they are

1:04:12

hiring constantly. Congress two years ago gave 250

1:04:14

million for backlog reduction last year, 135. And

1:04:18

the DHS bill that just passed another 160 million. So

1:04:20

they are actually giving a funding to

1:04:23

the agency, which crucial understand

1:04:25

here, it's a fee funded agency. Congress usually

1:04:27

doesn't give them any money at all. They

1:04:29

have to charge fees to people. And

1:04:31

so fees are going up. Starting April 1st,

1:04:34

for example, pretty much any employment based petition

1:04:36

that people file to bring someone here to

1:04:38

work legally, will have a

1:04:41

$600 asylum program surcharge packed

1:04:44

on so that they can hire asylum

1:04:46

officers because asylum officers are not paid

1:04:48

for by Congress. So they

1:04:50

essentially are paid for are now going

1:04:52

to be paid by employers and people

1:04:54

filing for things. So we're making the

1:04:56

legal immigration system more expensive to deal

1:04:58

with the border because Congress doesn't fund it.

1:05:01

So that's one thing we can fix. But generally

1:05:04

speaking, there are still a lot of

1:05:06

backlogs and the system is by no

1:05:08

means perfect. And that's just

1:05:10

processing backlogs. We still, there's nothing the

1:05:13

Biden admin can do about structural

1:05:15

green card backlogs created by the

1:05:17

fact that Congress hasn't updated this

1:05:19

since 1990. If

1:05:22

you look at Indian nationals, for example, so crucial,

1:05:25

there's a 7% quota on all

1:05:27

visas. No country can get more

1:05:30

than 7% of any visa category in

1:05:32

any given year, which is the idea was

1:05:34

to ensure that no one country dominates. But

1:05:36

what that means is that for certain categories

1:05:38

of nationals, like Indian nationals, the

1:05:40

waiting times are over 100 years. There

1:05:43

are visa categories right now where

1:05:45

even if you are eligible, you qualify,

1:05:47

you file the application, you're approved. And

1:05:49

they'll basically say, here's a ticket, go

1:05:51

get in this line, we'll give you

1:05:53

your visa when you're dead of old

1:05:55

age. And so that's

1:05:57

the sort of stuff that Congress can fix. Biden

1:06:00

can't. And in terms of

1:06:02

raw numbers, we have seen an increase, right,

1:06:04

of legal immigrants coming to the US. Just

1:06:06

again, like at the broadest level of like,

1:06:08

yes, I know there's a complex system and

1:06:10

it's not just one dial, but there is

1:06:12

a difference. Like if you want fewer people

1:06:14

coming to the United States, like

1:06:16

if you really want to dramatically reduce immigration, and

1:06:19

that's like a key thing for you, like Donald

1:06:21

Trump is probably closer to your views. If

1:06:23

you don't feel that way, if you

1:06:25

would like to continue what we have

1:06:27

or expand it, Joe Biden is probably

1:06:29

closer to your views. And I also

1:06:31

think it's important to also look at

1:06:33

the link between the border and legal

1:06:36

immigration. You know, as legal immigration becomes

1:06:38

more and more inaccessible, people get

1:06:40

driven to the border. So you

1:06:42

can't look at the border with

1:06:44

a myopic view that starts and

1:06:46

ends right down there on the line

1:06:49

between the US and Mexico. You really

1:06:51

do need a broader perspective that looks

1:06:53

at the systemic issues throughout the entire

1:06:56

legal immigration system that are causing

1:06:58

people to do this. Aaron Reikland

1:07:00

Melnick is the Policy Director of the

1:07:02

American Immigration Council. That was so, so

1:07:04

informative. And I'm going to have to

1:07:06

like process this for a while. But seriously,

1:07:08

that was that was fantastic. Thank you

1:07:10

so much. Thanks for having me. Once

1:07:18

again, cannot thank Aaron Reikland Melnick enough for

1:07:20

that conversation, which was exactly what I was

1:07:22

looking for when we launched this new undertaking

1:07:24

for this election year. Aaron is

1:07:26

the Policy Director of the American Immigration Council. We'd

1:07:29

love to hear from you after having done this

1:07:31

first one, if you found it helpful. If it's

1:07:34

the kind of thing that you would share with

1:07:36

friends or people that you know, people in your

1:07:38

life, we're sort of thinking about this campaign, you

1:07:40

can email us with [email protected]. You can get in

1:07:42

touch with us using the hashtag with pod across

1:07:45

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1:07:47

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1:07:49

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1:07:51

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1:07:53

on blue sky, all of which is Chris

1:07:56

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1:07:58

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