Five months before the election, Biden "steals" an old Trump proposal and will sign an executive order to limit asylum requests

President Joe Biden will sign an executive order this Tuesday to limit asylum requests by migrants who illegally cross the southern border, according to White House officials, who revealed the news to various national media outlets.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the Democratic president’s order will dictate that asylum applications will be officially canceled once the average number of daily encounters reaches 2,500 at entry points.

According to the report, this order comes in the face of growing concern from the Biden Administration about the presidential elections. Migration is one of the most important issues for voters across the country amid an unprecedented border crisis.

According to the WSJ, the measure has caused much controversy within the Biden administration, with officials spending months debating it internally until they finally reached the decision to launch an order reminiscent of an old proposal by former President Donald Trump in 2018.

According to the WSJ, the former Republican president attempted to enact a nursing home ban nearly identical to Biden’s in his second year in power. However, multiple federal courts blocked the move, ruling that the order was a violation of asylum laws.

Asylum laws allow migrants to request humanitarian protection regardless of how they enter the country. For this reason, legal experts say Biden’s order is likely to be overturned as well.

Still, Biden’s disposition demonstrates two things, according to the WSJ.

The first is that the Democratic president is increasingly changing his position on migration as the presidential elections approach. This is in stark contrast to his 2020 election campaign when he promised to implement one of the most liberal immigration policies in US history.

Secondly, the White House is seriously concerned about the November elections. Biden’s political advisors welcome the fact that the Democratic president can defend himself against criticism about his border management, one of Biden’s weakest points, according to national surveys.

The WSJ reported that Biden will sign the order under pressure from allies, members of the Democratic Party and prominent donors who have asked him to take concrete actions to address the border crisis.

Additionally, he will also sign the order ignoring the advice of his legal advisors, who told him that the measure would clearly be “struck down in court—and, even if it survived legal scrutiny, would prove tough to fully implement without a massive infusion of funds from Congress.”

Meanwhile, Republicans have already begun speaking out about the executive order, arguing that Biden wants to mislead American voters about his actual border policy heading into the election.

“President Biden has engineered a wide-open southern border and is now trying to convince Americans that he wants to address the chaos he created,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA). “The American people know better. He intentionally created this crisis and an executive order won’t change that.”