The White House is raising alarm bells about the border crisis, and a clear demonstration of this is that President Joe Biden wants to activate an old immigration idea of former President Donald Trump.
According to a report from the New York Times, Biden plans to prevent those who cross the border from requesting asylum already on U.S. soil through executive action, a potential measure that Trump wanted to implement in 2018 but was blocked by federal courts and widely criticized by Democrats.
"The move would suspend longtime guarantees that give anyone who steps onto U.S. soil the right to ask for safe haven," the NYT reads.
The report indicates that Biden's potential decision, which has not yet been made, is evidence of how much Biden's stance on immigration policy has changed as this year's presidential election approaches amid a strong immigration crisis popularity.
One of the impulses behind Biden's intentions is that such a presidential executive action does not require the intervention of Congress, where virtually all relevant bipartisan negotiations are at an impasse.
Sources with knowledge of the situation said Biden could cite his authority to act under Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which allows the president to suspend immigration for anyone deemed a danger to the national interests of the United States.
"Trump used the same authority to impose a ban on people from several predominantly Muslim countries during his presidency," the NYT reported.
The measure, although it would not be enough on its own to control the immigration crisis, could serve for the White House to respond to criticism from Republicans and the media that constantly point fingers at the Biden Administration about the situation at the border.
However, a measure of this caliber would still be very "risky" in electoral terms for the president since progressive groups or organizations that defend the rights of migrants would oppose the policy and would begin to strongly question the Democrat who came to the White House promising to implement a supposedly more humane immigration system than his predecessor Trump.
"The courts were emphatic that the Trump administration could not deny asylum based simply on how one entered the country," Lee Gelernt, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, told the NYT. "Hopefully, the Biden administration is not considering recycling this patently unlawful and unworkable policy."
