Bipartisan Action Needed to Address Immigration Surge

Amid persistent violence, poverty, and instability in Central America and the Caribbean, border crossings have reached historic heights. There were a quarter million encounters at the US-Mexico border in December 2023 alone, more than any month on record.

We need bipartisan action to address the immigration crisis. This is an untenable situation for the legal system as well as the millions of immigrants caught in it. Critics of President Biden are falsely claiming that it’s within his power to unilaterally close the border–a move that would be almost certainly struck down by the judiciary.

In 2020, Trump used the COVID-19 pandemic as a pretense to quickly turn migrants away at the U.S.-Mexico border. The policy, known as Title 42, faced swift legal challenges as it denied migrants the right to seek asylum. Title 42 effectively ended amid numerous legal hurdles when President Biden ended the pandemic public health emergency in 2023.

Before Trump, the southern border has only been shut down by the executive branch twice: immediately after President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 and in response to the 1985 abduction of a DEA agent during President Reagan’s Administration. Both of these border shutdowns were extremely brief–a number of days–and therefore faced no judicial scrutiny.

These facts, of course, do not stop President Biden’s detractors from trying to score political points. Trump and elements of the GOP have made it clear that they intend to sabotage any attempt to solve the border crisis before the 2024 elections, prolonging the harm done to migrants as well as our overwhelmed legal system. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters that Trump “didn’t seem to want us to do anything at all” about a bipartisan border deal.

We can’t keep kicking this can down the road. We need Congress to do its job and hammer out its first major reform of our immigration system in decades.