By Seung Min Kim, Colleen Long, Elliot Spagat and Stephen Groves
Adapted for radio by S. Baxter Clinton
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden on Tuesday unveiled plans to enact immediate significant restrictions on migrants seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border as the White House tries to neutralize immigration as a political liability ahead of the November elections.
The long-anticipated presidential proclamation would bar migrants from being granted asylum when U.S. officials deem that the southern border is overwhelmed. The Democratic president had contemplated unilateral action for months after the collapse of a bipartisan border security deal in Congress that most Republican lawmakers rejected at the behest of former President Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.
Biden said he preferred more lasting action via legislation but "Republicans have left me no choice.” Instead, he said he was acting on his own to “gain control of the border” while also insisting that “I believe immigration has always been the lifeblood of America.”
Biden said Trump “told the Republicans ... that he didn't want to fix the issue, he wanted to use it to attack me. It was a cynical, extremely cynical, political move and a complete disservice to the American people who are looking for us not to weaponize the border but to fix it.”
Trump, on the other hand, used his social media account to assail Biden again over immigration, saying the Democrat had “totally surrendered our Southern Border” and his order was “all for show” ahead of their June 27 presidential debate.
The order will go into effect when the number of border encounters between ports of entry hits 2,500 per day, according to senior administration officials. That means Biden’s order should go into effect immediately, because the daily averages are higher now. Average daily arrests for illegal crossings from Mexico were last below 2,500 in January 2021, the month Biden took office. The last time the border encounters dipped to 1,500 a day was in July 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
