Follow this authorEduardo Porter's opinions

According to the Migration Policy Institute, Biden issued 535 executive actions related to immigration in just three years, well above the 472 executed by President Donald Trump. Biden, moreover, is looking beyond the brute force favored by his predecessor to stop, cage and expel asylum seekers, crafting policies to deter unlawful entry and steer migrants toward official channels.

Despite all the creative policymaking, though, U.S. border agents have recorded some 6.3 million encounters with migrants since Biden took office. More than 2.4 million were allowed into the country. And they keep coming. In December, they hit 370,000, a record. Of them, 250,000 were encountered dashing unlawfully across the border — exactly the practice the administration has tried so hard to stop.

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The humanitarian parole offered to nearly 300,000 asylum seekers from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela who applied through official channels was meant to dissuade them from trying to sneak across the border and then turn themselves in. So were the 350,000 appointments with U.S. agents offered to migrants who used the CBP One app while on their way across Mexico.

Efforts to coordinate migration policies with some Latin American countries — opening offices in several to handle applications from migrants closer to their homes — were designed to manage the movement of migrants up the Western Hemisphere before they got to the United States.

And there were sticks in the policy mix, too. The administration cut a deal for Mexico to accept tens of thousands of asylum seekers turned back each month. It started repatriation flights to Venezuela. And it declared that anyone caught trying to enter the United States without authorization would be, in most cases, deemed ineligible for asylum.

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And yet for all the brainpower put into crafting incentives and deterrents, the administration’s border management strategy doesn’t rate much more than an A for effort. The new tools just haven’t worked at holding the line.

The deterrents aren’t deterring. The presumption of ineligibility for asylum has proven toothless because migrants caught between points of entry still must be screened and there isn’t enough processing capacity. A program to quickly remove ineligible families has handled only a tiny number of cases........

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