[ As he extends Trump-era policies, President Biden discovers that
many voters are no longer willing to give him the benefit of the
doubt.] [[link removed]]

DEMOCRATS’ FREE PASS ON IMMIGRATION IS OVER  
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Caitlin Dickerson
September 25, 2021
Atlantic Monthly
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_ As he extends Trump-era policies, President Biden discovers that
many voters are no longer willing to give him the benefit of the
doubt. _

, PAUL RATJE / AFP / Getty

 

Throughout the last administration, Department of Homeland Security
officials at all levels—from Senate-confirmed power brokers in
Washington to rank-and-file agents along the border—often complained
that they were facing a double standard: They were doing the same
work, using the same methods, as they had under previous presidents,
they said, but because their boss was now Donald Trump, the public was
quick to assume they were acting out of racism or malice.

At times, of course, Trump’s policies did break with those of
previous administrations, including the zero-tolerance policy that
separated thousands of migrant children from their parents. But in
many ways, the DHS officials were right: Stories highlighting
conditions and practices that predated the Trump presidency by years
or even decades suddenly became front-page news. Reporters had
doggedly covered those issues for years, but before Trump was
inaugurated, their stories rarely generated any lasting national
attention.

Up until recently, the Biden administration seemed to have been
banking on the persistence of this double standard, whereby the
left-leaning parts of the public assume general goodwill on the part
of Democratic politicians and therefore give them a pass. The
administration has taken up court battles to protect some of Trump’s
harshest asylum policies and commenced flying multiple planeloads of
migrants back to Haiti. Now-viral images show that, in recent days,
Border Patrol agents have been charging at—and in some cases
verbally assaulting—Haitian migrants marooned at the Mexican border
across from Del Rio, Texas.

But the assumption that these tactics would go unchallenged when
deployed by a Democratic administration, as was often the case in the
past, appears to have been a serious miscalculation. The spotlight
that Trump shined on the southern border for four years is still
plugged in. The public is still paying attention. And images that
evoke the era of slavery—with fair-skinned men on horseback rushing
Black migrants, whiplike reins flailing behind them—have added to a
long-simmering push from the left to consider immigration policy not
simply in terms of economics or national security, but also in terms
of race.

Key allies of President Joe Biden are responding in ways that suggest
the era of presumed goodwill may be over. The recent treatment of
Haitians “turns your stomach,” Senator Chuck Schumer, the
Democratic majority leader, said this week in a speech on the Senate
floor. “We cannot continue these hateful and xenophobic Trump
policies that disregard our refugee laws.” Members of the
Congressional Black Caucus were whisked to the White House for a
meeting this week, and Al Sharpton, who traveled to the border
recently, told _The Washington Post_
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that, like thus-far-unsuccessful efforts toward police reform, the
treatment of Haitian migrants was an example of how Biden was failing
Black Americans. Biden “said on election night: Black America, you
had my back, I’ll have yours,” Sharpton said. “Well, we’re
being stabbed in the back, Mr. President. We need you to stop the
stabbing—from Haiti to Harlem.”

Belatedly realizing that the political climate seems to have changed,
the Biden administration is now scrambling to do damage control. Vice
President Kamala Harris called the images from Del Rio “deeply
troubling.” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said he
was “horrified,” and he suspended horse patrols there
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The president himself said on Tuesday that the encounters were
“dangerous” and “wrong,” and that “those people will pay.”
All of this seems slightly disingenuous: As the administration well
knows, Border Patrol agents have been policing on horseback for more
than 100 years
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And in this case, they were doing so under orders from their
supervisors, who serve at the pleasure of the president. The
scapegoating of rank-and-file agents will likely alienate a workforce
that feels it was ordered to show force and then hung out to dry.
Putting the focus on the horseback patrols also draws attention away
from a larger issue: The administration has taken the legally dubious
position of blocking most Haitian migrants from requesting
asylum—and in this case, pushing them back onto the Mexican side of
a dangerous river from which border agents often have to save people
from drowning.

These events have stoked a broader conversation about race, not only
because of the specifics of the encounters in Del Rio, but because of
the way our current system is set up. One would be hard-pressed to
imagine a scenario in which, following a coup or an earthquake in
France, a large crowd of Parisians would show up in Matamoros, Mexico,
and face the same treatment as the Haitians—because they would not
be required to present themselves at the border in the first place.
People from wealthy Western countries don’t need visas to come to
the United States. For a few hundred dollars, they can simply hop on
planes and enter the U.S. as tourists. Then, at some point on their
“vacation,” they can show up at a government office and request
asylum as part of a non-adversarial administrative process. Or they
can simply stay in the U.S. illegally without seeking permission, as
thousands of Western Europeans and Canadians do each year.

That experience is wholly unlike what an impoverished Haitian or
Central American seeking asylum faces. Without a right to counsel,
they must argue their case for safe haven in court, against a federal
prosecutor whose job is to try to deport them and a judge who, like
the prosecutor, works for the attorney general. Some of the asylum
seekers are jailed during this process. Of those who are released,
some choose to abandon the process and decide to continue living here
illegally. But that’s only if they make it to the United States in
the first place. Without access to tourist visas, the only way for
poor people from poor countries to request asylum is to pay smugglers
thousands of dollars, many of them using their life savings or going
into debt, and hope that they survive the journey.

It is an irony worth noting that this flare-up along the border is
occurring during a significant labor shortage. Despite our reflex to
categorize migrants like the Haitians stuck in Texas as people in need
of either safety or jobs, most want both. More specifically: Not
everyone who comes to the United States for a job needs humanitarian
protection, but everyone who comes for humanitarian protection needs a
job. Yet our laws are so outdated and our elected officials so
dependent on divisive talking points that we can’t figure out a
lawful way to solve a problem that should be quite fixable.

The U.S. has a long history of singling out Haitians for exclusion.
Throughout the Cold War, we welcomed hundreds of thousands of people
fleeing communism in places such as Hungary, Yugoslavia, Poland, and
China. But Haitians—who hailed from the poorest country in the
Western Hemisphere, which at the time was run by a pair of brutally
violent, successive, father-and-son dictators—were for the most part
denied such invitations. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan signed an
agreement with the younger dictator, Jean Claude “Baby Doc”
Duvalier, giving the U.S. Coast Guard permission to board Haitian
boats at random and question passengers in order to head off any
approach of the United States. As Haiti deteriorated further amid a
coup in 1991 that involved “disappearances, torture, rape and
massacres,
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according to the scholar A. Naomi Paik, President George H. W. Bush
moved to interdict refugees who braved the Atlantic on rickety rafts,
sending them to other impoverished parts of the Caribbean. Those
countries—Belize, Honduras, Trinidad and Tobago—quickly became
overwhelmed. Instead of relenting at that point, the Bush
administration opened a camp in Guantánamo Bay to temporarily house
Haitian asylum seekers. About 10,000 of them were paroled into the
United States after passing an initial screening, but then, according
to a Congressional Research Service report, “President Bush ordered
the Coast Guard to intercept all Haitians in boats and immediately
return them without interviews to determine whether they were at risk
of persecution.”

The targeting of Haitians for unusual stringency continued into the
Clinton era. In 1997,  Congress excluded Haitians from a bill to help
Eastern Europeans and Central Americans who had been boxed out of
asylum protections based on technicalities. (This prompted passage of
the pointedly titled Haitian Refugee Immigration Fairness Act the next
year.) And in 2002, President George W. Bush’s Justice Department
acknowledged that, without announcing a formal policy change, it had
instructed regional offices in South Florida to change their parole
criteria for Haitians specifically, the congressional report says.
This quiet change required that Haitians remain jailed after they had
successfully passed initial asylum screenings—even though other
groups of migrants were freed after clearing that hurdle.

Presidents, both Democratic and Republican, have briefly enacted
policies acknowledging that Haitians qualify for asylum or other forms
of protection [[link removed]], only to
revoke them soon after—sometimes within a few weeks—because too
many Haitians were seen to be taking advantage of them. This whiplash
has at times felt arbitrary or even cruel. For instance, after the
2010 earthquake that killed a quarter of a million people and nearly
leveled Haiti’s capital, tens of thousands of Haitians were granted
Temporary Protected Status, allowing them to live and work in the U.S.
legally. Recent reporting suggests that most of the people who are now
stalled at the American border also fled their country after the 2010
earthquake but stopped first in South America. They simply didn’t
get here in time before the door slammed shut again.

The images captured by journalists at the border this week carry the
weight of history. One shows a toddler with braided hair sitting on an
adult male’s shoulders
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its tiny arms crossed and its face scrunched with tears. The man grips
the child fiercely as he wades through the neck-high waters of the Rio
Grande, in which countless migrants have drowned. His face is set with
the determination necessary to survive a system that was not created
to help you.
The broader pressure that President Biden is facing to reckon with the
racial overtones of America’s immigration policy may require an
acknowledgment of that history, and of the searing pain this moment
has caused for many Black and brown immigrants, their children, and
their grandchildren. These photos from Del Rio haven’t cut fresh
wounds. They’ve reopened old ones.

Caitlin Dickerson
[[link removed]] is a staff
writer at _The Atlantic._

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