In his first days of office, President Trump did not waste any time, particularly with immigration. On his first day of his second term, Trump signed ten executive orders relating to immigration. This flurry of executive orders was to help fulfill Trump's campaign promise of mass deportation, a policy goal I had criticized last October. I am not going to get into particulars with each executive order today, whether it is about birthright citizenship, enhanced vetting, or expanding "expedited removal." I will say that this brings up a major, overreaching concern I had with Trump's immigration policy during his first term, which is that takes issue with legal immigration as much as he does illegal immigration. I strongly believe that such a stance on immigration is inopportune and unacceptable from an economic lens, as well as with regards to civil liberties.
Along with international trade, immigration is the topic I have found myself most critical of the Trump administration. You might think that Biden was more amenable to immigration or his stance was so much more lax than that of Trump's. The idea of a border crisis was echoed by the think tank Heritage Foundation in multiple analyses. Fox News blamed Biden and his "border crisis" for causing a "tidal wave" of immigration, increasing the number of terrorists in the country, and also worsening K-12 education. The House Committee on Homeland Security and House Committee on Oversight also presented Biden as being weak on immigration and cracking down on the border crossings.
The problem with asserting that Biden did not crack down on the border or that he was lenient on immigration is that it is not true. The Cato Institute was kind enough to provide a four-part series on why Biden did not cause the border crisis (Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV). Here are some nuggets from the research:
Border enforcement did not decline during the Biden administration. You can look through the Department of Homeland Security data for yourself, but Biden expelled more immigrants than Trump. As we can see from the chart below, Biden wasted no time in expelling more immigrants in his first month in office than Trump ever managed during his entire first term.
Not only did Biden expel more immigrants, Biden also expanded border detention and detention capacity from what Trump had during his first term. Right before the pandemic started, Trump's Custom and Border Protection (CBP) had 2,811 individuals in custody in February 2020. In the Biden administration, the peak reached to over 19,000 individuals, which was nearly twelve-fold in comparison to Trump.
In February 2021, Biden opened up an additional processing facility and three more facilities two months later. Biden also sent 1,500 National Guard members to the border, as well as more asylum officers. Furthermore, Biden increased U.S. removal flights by 55 percent in comparison to the Trump administration. It was not only border detention that increased, but Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention, as well (see below, as well as ICE data here).
As Migration Policy brings up, there were significantly more encounters at the border during the Biden administration than there ever were during Trump's first term.
Far from being lax or lenient on the border, Biden was quite strict when it came to the border. If anything, Biden did more in terms of arrests, detentions, and expulsions than Trump did at any point during his first term in president. It might seem convenient to blame Biden because the influx of immigrants happened under Biden's watch. But there were factors that were not of Biden's doing or were in his control.
One had to do with the pandemic itself. The economic impact of the COVID-era lockdowns caused enough of an economic downturn in the economies in the Western world. In the United States, the economic damage from the lockdowns was an estimated $9.8 trillion. Imagine what it did to parts of the world that were less economically stable, such as Central and South America. People want to leave that carnage for greener pastures, and understandably so. Combine that with the spike with the demand in labor that took place in February 2021 when businesses started opening up again.
Then there was Title 42, which was Trump's idea to use the pandemic as a guise to expel immigrants and refugees. As I pointed out in my May 2023 analysis of Title 42, Title 42 most likely ended up incentivizing repeat border crossings. It was a combination of decreased labor demand, eliminating Title 42, and increasing the legal entries of asylum seekers that brought the spike in border crossings down in 2024.
What worries me is that the "Biden was weak on immigration" argument has been used as a pretext by the Trump administration to be even more gung-ho on cracking down on immigration. This myth will contribute to the decline of immigration overall. The truth is that legal immigration decreased under Trump while illegal immigration increased. Much like Trump did first term, he will likely go after legal immigration much more than he will illegal immigration, especially since legal immigration is higher and illegal immigration much lower than it was during Trump's first term. Immigration is a net boon for the United States, even when you factor in those immigrants that are considered "low-skilled." Trump clearly did not learn that lesson during his first term as President. It looks like he will spend his second term undermining immigration, thereby undermining American prosperity.
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