Biden’s Dilemma at the Border

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A Reporter at LargeJune 19, 2023 Issue
Biden’s Dilemma at the Border
America’s broken immigration system has spawned a national fight, but Congress lacks the political will to fix it.
By Dexter Filkins

June 12, 2023
Two people wear fatigues shown from the waistdown.
A group of migrants found hiding in a desert cave in Texas is taken into custody by border authorities.Photographs by John Francis Peters for The New Yorker

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Earlier this year, in a helicopter above the Mexican border, a team of Texas state troopers searched for people crossing into the United States. As they flew over a neighborhood west of El Paso, the radio crackled with the voices of Border Patrol agents on the ground below, calling out migrants who were evading them.

“We got four bodies headed north.”

“Five out in the northeast quadrant.”

“Behind you—six bodies.”

While people fled across the landscape, the troopers in the helicopter tracked them and passed their locations to the Border Patrol agents, who raced after them in trucks. “I got ten bodies to the southwest,” Captain German Chavez, the pilot, said into his radio. “There’s two,” he announced, maneuvering the helicopter above a row of houses, then said, “I lost them.”

All day, groups of migrants rushed to find cover, while federal agents fanned out after them. By nightfall, dozens had been apprehended. But, Chavez said, “for every five or six groups we see, we’ll get one or two—if we’re fast enough.”

The team in the helicopter had been dispatched as part of a campaign to stanch the flow of migrants, who have crossed the border in record numbers in the past two years. The following afternoon, Chavez was flying across the West Texas scrubland when the Border Patrol called again, to report that about a thousand migrants were charging the border at the edge of El Paso. “We need your help,” the agent said.

Within minutes, Chavez was above the Rio Grande. On the Mexican side, a row of railroad cars were parked a hundred yards from the border, and people were rushing out. As they moved toward the river, Mexican guards stepped aside, letting them pass. Then the migrants waded through the water: women with babies, men with duffels, children. On the American side, a couple of Border Patrol agents looked on. The migrants gathered on a thin strip of land along the Rio Grande, sealed off from the rest of El Paso by a high wall. Once in American territory, they began sitting in the dirt. “They’re turning themselves in,” Chavez said.

Broadly speaking, the people who enter the country without permission fall into two groups. The first includes those who sneak in and try to evade capture. The second includes asylum seekers, who either apply at official ports of entry or make their way across the border and offer themselves up for arrest. Since early 2021, the second group has grown strikingly.

After about an hour, while the helicopter circled overhead, a string of Border Patrol buses arrived, entering through a gate in the wall. A busy highway ran on the city side, and, as the migrants began boarding, drivers streamed by, oblivious; across the highway, kids played basketball. By sundown, the buses and the migrants were gone. Chavez turned his helicopter back to base.

A spokesman for the Border Patrol refused to say what had become of the group that arrived in El Paso that day; given the vagaries of American immigration law, it was difficult to determine with much certainty. But, in the past two years, millions of migrants, spurred by political and economic turmoil in their home countries and by President Joe Biden’s welcoming stance, have come to the southern border and crossed into the United States. Though hundreds of thousands have been denied entry, hundreds of thousands more—from countries as far away as China and Tajikistan—have made their way in, often by claiming that they will face persecution or violence if they return home. “People were saying if you made it to the border there’s a good chance you’ll be allowed in,” one migrant from South America told me.

The landscape of the southern border as seen from above with a group of people in the distance.
Disastrous conditions in Central and South America and in the Caribbean have helped propel an unprecedented stream of migrants to the southern border.
The influx has transformed towns and cities along a two-thousand-mile frontier, running through California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Emergency-room doctors struggle to treat new arrivals. Smugglers speed down local roads to take migrants into the interior, and thousands of agents fly helicopters, operate drones, and pursue them over land.

The unrest at the border has become one of the most contentious political issues in a deeply divided United States. Ultimately, it is enabled by an underfunded and antiquated system that Congress—paralyzed by mutual animosity—has failed to address. But politicians on both sides are eager to blame each other. Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, accused Biden of abandoning his constituents, saying, “He does not care about Americans. He cares more about people who are not from this country.” Biden argued that the G.O.P. blocked reforms because it believed that turmoil was to its advantage: “Immigration is a political issue that extreme Republicans are always going to run on.”

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In recent months, anxieties around the border reached a furious pitch. At the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic, Title 42, an obscure provision of the Public Health Service Act of 1944, was temporarily revived for use at the southern border, allowing agents to expel migrants in fifteen minutes. Since then, it has been deployed millions of times, becoming the primary means of closing the border. Last month, with the pandemic largely over, Title 42 expired.

Along the border, immigration officials and residents braced for a deluge. “There are thousands of people wanting to come in, bottled up on the other side,” Ruben Garcia, the director of Annunciation House, in El Paso, which has helped resettle tens of thousands of immigrants in the past two years, told me. A political scramble also ensued. The Biden Administration announced measures to make it more difficult to enter without prior permission, along with a series of expanded pathways to come legally. Conservative leaders responded with lawsuits, claiming that Biden was changing the system to flood the country with foreigners. Immigrants’-rights groups also sued, arguing that any attempt to restrict asylum was equivalent to President Donald Trump’s most severe measures; one organization suggested that Biden was pulling his policies from the “dustbin of history.”