“President Joe Biden is pulling from former President Donald Trump’s immigration playbook,” CNN reported on Tuesday. The occasion was Biden’s announcement this week of a draconian executive order to temporarily shut down asylum requests at the U.S.–Mexico border and introduce other drastic restrictions on the basic right to asylum.
CNN was not alone. Numerous commentators, particularly critics of Biden’s plan, noted that the decision to halt the asylum process reflects an extremity of border authoritarianism worthy of Trump. “This action takes the same approach as the Trump administration’s asylum ban,” the American Civil Liberties Union said on X, vowing to go to court.
There’s much truth to it. Biden’s border policies have been no less than Trumpian. This is especially true of his use of executive authority to harden border rule, as Trump had done with his 2017 Muslim ban and his own extremist asylum restrictions in 2018.
Yet Biden’s new asylum restrictions, the details of which were announced on Tuesday, are neither an aberration from his administration’s border policies, nor are they a shift away from decades-long Democratic Party standards, since at least the Clinton era.
This is not to underplay the extremity of Biden’s new plan. Under Biden’s executive order, the administration will halt asylum requests at the border once the average number of daily encounters has reached 2,500 between legal ports of entry, which has been consistently the case since Biden took office in 2021. Requests will be reopened two weeks after the daily average falls under 1,500 for seven consecutive days. The restrictions went into effect last night.
The order has some exemptions in place for unaccompanied minors, for those with acute medical emergencies, for “severe” trafficking victims, and for people who have already made appointments on the Customs and Border........