On Tuesday, the Biden administration issued a new sweeping executive order further limiting access to asylum at the US-Mexico border. The long-anticipated move, which relies on an authority previously invoked by the Trump administration to restrict immigration, will allow border officials to temporarily suspend asylum processing between official ports of entry and swiftly return migrants to neighboring Mexico and countries of origin at times when crossings rise to a certain threshold. The directive, which mirrors a now-defunct Senate border deal, is set to go into effect on Tuesday at midnight.

“President Biden believes we must secure our border,” a White House statement reads. “That is why today, he announced executive actions to bar migrants who cross our Southern border unlawfully from receiving asylum. These actions will be in effect when high levels of encounters at the Southern Border exceed our ability to deliver timely consequences, as is the case today.”

This latest and likely most drastic crackdown on asylum by a Democratic president in recent years comes at a time when migrant encounters at the southern border are in decline after record-breaking levels of migration. The move consolidates President Biden’s marked rightward shift on immigration and signals how far the administration is willing to go to rebut Republicans and Donald Trump’s “open borders” accusations. Critics and advocates say that, in trying to come on top of a sticky electoral issue ahead of the November vote, Biden might just end up outdoing his opponent’s hardline record by gutting access to asylum.

“It’s notable to see the White House prep a POTUS event on policies that Dems used to call illegal,” Andrea R. Flores, who once served as director for border management on Biden’s National Security Council, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, prior to the announcement. “Pundits will say this is a smart move to the center on immigration, but this issue has moved so far to the right that Dems are embracing extreme asylum bans even when border numbers are down.”

The executive order is based on section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act which allows the president to suspend the entry of foreigners if “detrimental to the interests” of the United States. The directive places a cap on the processing of asylum claims and migrants that would be triggered once unlawful border crossings reach an average of 2,500 per day over a week. The partial ban would only be lifted 14 days after the weekly average of daily encounters fall to 1,500.

Last month, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) recorded a daily average of 3,700 encounters between ports of entry—a significant decrease from the 8,000 registered in December, but still high enough to set off the border closure. The executive order, which includes exemptions for unaccompanied minors and migrants fleeing imminent harm, is likely to prompt legal challenges—and potential court orders blocking the effort—similar to the ones the Trump administration faced.

BREAKING: The Biden administration just announced an executive order that will severely restrict people's legal right to seek asylum, putting tens of thousands of lives at risk.

This action takes the same approach as the Trump administration's asylum ban. We will be challenging…

— ACLU (@ACLU) June 4, 2024

In a 10-minute announcement, Biden blamed Republicans for not taking congressional action to secure the border. “Frankly, I’d have preferred to address this issue through bipartisan legislation,” he said, adding that “Republicans left me no choice.”

The president also tried to distance himself from the Trump administration. “I will never demonize immigrants,” he said. “I’ll never refer to immigrants as poisoning the blood of a country. And further, I’ll never separate children from their families at the border. I will not ban people from this country because of their religious beliefs. I will not use the US military to go into neighborhoods all across the country, to pull millions of people out of their homes and away from their families, to put detention camps while we’re waiting deportation, as my predecessor says he will do if he occupies this office again.”

The timing of the policy move follows the results of the presidential elections in Mexico that saw Claudia Sheinbaum, a protege of outgoing leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador, elected the country’s first woman president. The recent drop in migrant crossings into the United States is due in no small part to the Mexican government’s increased clampdown on migration. The return of migrants and asylum seekers per the executive order would inevitably require Mexico’s cooperation.

Almost since the moment Biden took office having vowed to restore “moral leadership” on immigration, he has been hit with a barrage of attacks from Republicans determined to weaponize the immigration debate to score political points. Despite calls from advocates and immigration experts to espouse an openly pro-immigrant agenda and underscore a fundamental contrast between Biden and Trump, the administration and Democrats have instead gradually ceded ground to the right.

“This is a dark day for the Biden administration,” Azadeh Erfani, senior policy analyst at the National Immigrant Justice Center, said. “After campaigning on restoring asylum access, Biden is now fully embracing Trump’s policies as his own, including now using the same statute that led to the Muslim and African bans.” This crackdown on asylum, she added, is unlikely to have the intended effect of managing the border. “If we learned anything from the Trump years,” Erfani said, “it is that even the cruelest policies cannot succeed in “deterring” people fleeing for their lives.”

In January, Biden had already promised to “shut down” the border when calling on Congress to pass a restrictive bipartisan Senate border deal that primarily delivered on Republicans’ border enforcement priorities. The proposed bill, which Trump successfully torpedoed to keep the border a salient issue he can hammer on to appeal to his base, has twice failed to gain enough support. Most recently, Senate Republicans—including Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, one of the champions of the original bipartisan push—blocked a renewed attempt by Democrats at passing a deal, decrying it as political theater.

With lawmakers from both parties playing the blame game, Biden has latched on Republicans’ obstruction as a campaign target. “Congressional Republicans do not care about securing the border or fixing America’s broken immigration system,” Biden said in a May statement after the border deal. “If they did, they would have voted for the toughest border enforcement in history.” In the process, he is doubling down on the enforcement-first rhetoric to claim, “I’ve done all I can do.”

The most infamous example is in Texas. In 2023, lawmakers passed SB 4, which makes it a state crime to cross the border into Texas between ports of entry. The law allows police officers to detain people suspected of entering the state illegally and empowers state judges to order deportations. (Initial punishment for a misdemeanor would carry jail time and repeat offenders could face felony charges and up to 20 years in prison.) Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), has called the measure “the most extreme anti-immigrant state law in the last 50 years, bar none.”

And this extreme law is spreading, with copycat anti-immigration bills cropping up in Republican-led states across the country. At least nine states have considered bills mirroring SB 4 so far this year, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In March, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds approved legislation, to go into effect in July, criminalizing “illegal re-entry.” Just last month, Louisiana lawmakers pushed through a bill allowing local law enforcement to enforce immigration law.

These anti-immigration laws raise the spectrum of an infamous measure adopted by Arizona in the not-so-distant past. In 2010, Arizona enacted SB 1070, a “show me your papers” law that, among other things, required state law enforcement to determine the immigration status of people under “reasonable suspicion” of being in the country without legal authorization. Following legal challenges, the United States Supreme Court struck down several provisions of the discriminatory law—with the exception of the mandate that authorities routinely ask for proof of legal status.

Crucially, the justices concluded in Arizona v. United States that “federal power to determine immigration policy is well settled.” But Texas, and other states, are hoping to challenge the current legal framework and, if it topples, have laws ready to go to police immigration.

Oklahoma’s legislation makes it a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail or a maximum fine of $500 “if the person is an alien and willfully and without permission enters and remains in the State of Oklahoma without having first obtained legal authorization to enter the United States.” (It also requires them to leave the state within 72 hours of being convicted or released from custody.)

Stitt said upon signing the bill that the measure would not give “law enforcement the authority to profile individuals.” But opponents say the new legislation is one of the most extreme anti-immigrant laws in all of the United States—weaponizing state authorities against communities of color and potentially leading to racial profiling. “Local law enforcement lacks the expertise and the constitutional authority to interpret and enforce immigration law,” the ACLU of Oklahoma said in a press release critical of the legislation.

In both Texas and Oklahoma, Republican governors have called the laws necessary amid inaction from a Democratic administration at the federal level. But the bills represent a challenge to both well-established law and constitutional provisions.

SB 4 has been embroiled in a back-and-forth legal battle. The US Department of Justice, El Paso county, and two nonprofit groups have sued the state of Texas challenging SB 4 as unconstitutional because it violates the Supremacy Clause establishing that federal laws take precedent over state acts that conflict with the exercise of federal power. SB 4, the Biden administration argued, also ignores US Supreme Court’s precedents reaffirming federal authority to regulate immigration. “SB 4 impedes the federal government’s ability to enforce entry and removal provisions of federal law and interferes with its conduct of foreign relations,” according to the DOJ.

In February, a federal judge blocked SB 4 from going into effect, ruling that the law “threatens the fundamental notion that the United States must regulate immigration with one voice.” Texas appealed and the conservative Fifth Circuit granted an administrative stay suspending the lower court’s decision. The Supreme Court later allowed Texas to enforce the law pending ongoing litigation over its legality. But then a Fifth Circuit panel placed the implementation of SB 4 on temporary hold. “For nearly 150 years, the Supreme Court has held that the power to control immigration—the entry, admission, and removal of noncitizens—is exclusively a federal power,” the court wrote.

If SB 4 prevails, immigrant rights advocates worry it could present the conservative supermajority on the US Supreme Court with an opportunity to reverse its own previous ruling. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, whose power grab aspirations knows few boundaries, suggested as much to CNN, saying the state would “welcome a Supreme Court decision that would overturn the precedent set in the Arizona case.” He has argued that the enforcement of SB 4 is supported by Scalia’s dissent in the 2012 case, where the late justice wrote that Arizona was entitled to “its own immigration policy” as long as it didn’t conflict with federal law and found no reason why the state couldn’t make it a state crime to deport people. (Both Justice Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented in part with the majority, with Thomas’ opinion indicating he would have upheld all provisions of SB 1070.)

SB 4, Kate Melloy Goettel, senior legal director at the American Immigration Council, stated, “sets a disastrous precedent” for other states across the country to enact bills that could “result in significant civil rights abuses, leading to widespread arrests and deportations by state actors without key federal protections.” 

Garcia was subsequently found guilty of two felony charges related to his actions that day. But a year later, he seemed unrepentant: In fact, Garcia joined a press conference in Miami to commemorate the anniversary of the insurrection.

He wasn’t the only Latino there. As journalist Paola Ramos documents in her new book, Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America, the occasion drew members of the “parental rights” group Moms for Liberty and the Proud Boys, and many Latinos. “If we don’t agree with the left, or the media’s bias,” Garcia said at the press conference, “we get called ‘white supremacists’ or ‘racists.’ There’s nothing racist about a guy called Gabriel Garcia.” 

In Defectors, Ramos, a contributor for Telemundo News and MSNBC, investigates the “quiet radicalization of Latinos [that] is taking place across the nation in plain sight” and the factors behind the pull. Dispelling common stereotypes of Latinos in the United States as a unified bloc of voters allegiant to the Democratic Party and progressive values, Ramos writes that “to understand our history, which tells us that Latinos can carry white supremacist tendencies—whether they’re racially coded as white or not—is to understand that Latinos can easily act as the majority we are supposed to reject.”

I spoke with Ramos about how cultural assimilation can lead to nativism, the deep-seated anti-immigrant sentiment among some Latinos, and the shortcomings of dismissing a small but growing segment of that population as an anomaly.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clairty.

In the book, you write that “mythologies about Latino identity ignore the very real political and cultural changes brought about by the MAGA movement’s efforts.” Why is it an oversimplification to attribute Republicans’ and Trump’s inroads with Latinos in recent elections to just a “rightward shift” from 2016 to 2020?

I think the whole point of the book is that I try and force people to understand the story beneath the numbers, which is, to me, this idea that there are larger cultural, historical, and psychological forces that are driving a small—but I believe a growing number—of Latinos towards extremism and Trumpism. When you zoom into that, you see that there is this racial baggage, colonial mindset, and political traumas that we carry with us. I think what we’re seeing now is the way in which Trumpism is revealing those elements.

What are the main influences you identified as driving a small but significant number of Latinos to the right?

I structured the book in three ways: tribalism, traditionalism, and trauma. Tribalism I refer to as internalized racism. Our story is also part of the story of having been colonized. With that came a caste system, colorism. What I refer to as traditionalism is the way in which colonization enforces patriarchal and binary norms. What does that mean in today’s culture wars? What does that mean in today’s debates around Christianity and Christian nationalism? And then what I refer to as trauma is understanding the very complicated relationship that we have with communism, but the way also that we’ve had very complicated relationships with strongmen rule and authoritarianism and the history of the United States’ involvement in Latin America. All of those ‘T’s’’ manifest in very complicated ways in American politics. I think the easy story is to mark us off as this liberal, progressive, united bloc. But it’s actually a messy story, particularly when you understand the darker parts of our history.

How has the United States’ legacy of spreading American exceptionalism in Latin America impacted the country’s own ongoing “battle with democracy”?

The way that in this country defeating communism became synonymous with patriotism, with the ultimate definition of what it means to be an American…

From the way that we’ve been involved in Cuba, Nicaragua, Chile, El Salvador, where there were these very concerted efforts to overthrow, in some more violent and other more subtle ways, elements of socialism. Now what we see is not only a diaspora of Latinos that flee from those countries, but also a United States government that reinforces the idea of Democrats being synonymous with communism, which is part of the Trumpism strategy. There’s this tendency to go back to those wounds that are very familiar to Latinos. You’re fleeing communism? Well, communism can also happen in the United States. This idea that when democracy feels somewhat messy in the United States, then you resort to the strongman rule. 

I do think the majority of people that I’ve interviewed do actually have very traumatic experiences with the past. I don’t want to underestimate that. Where the manipulation happens is on the Republican Party side, where they’ve been able to really master is a way of exploiting that trauma through the spread of mis- and disinformation wars. They’ve also found a way to exploit that racial tension by creating this idea that there’s a crisis at the border, or fearmongering criminal talk.

The first chapter of your book focuses on anti-immigrant sentiment among some Latinos in the United States, including a first-generation Mexican immigrant turned border vigilante, Anthony Aguero, who sees recent migrants as people who are vastly different from him—even a threat. A recent Axios poll shows an increase in the percentage of Latinos who say they support building a border wall and ramping up deportations. What did you learn from your reporting about what leads some Latinos to embrace nativism?

There’s a blurry line. We can be minorities, but we too can perpetuate racism. Latinos, particularly the more generations are in this country, are not immune to nativism. The more we assimilate, the more we conform to American principles and the idea of “otherizing” is a real force, whether you’re Latino or whether you’re white. That’s why something like the great replacement theory is so forceful and is so potent. The dynamic of nativism at its core is this idea that culture is being threatened by the “other.” A lot of Latinos, no matter how American you are, have to work twice as hard to prove belonging. You’re third or fourth-generation Latino, but there are always these sentiments of not belonging or being “otherized” by fellow Americans and there’s this constant wrestling with the idea of having to prove yourself.

For a small group of Latinos, that journey can become very painful to the point that you can end up with some Latinos like Anthony Aguero who become fervent anti-immigrant vigilantes along the border because they’re pulled by those two notions of proving that they belong and proving that they are not like the “others.” It’s very easy to become radicalized just to prove that you are not them.

Anti-immigrant sentiment is so powerful, pervasive, and infectious that even newly arrived immigrants can sort of lean into that.

Do you think extreme anti-immigrant policies—like SB 4 in Texas, which in some ways is reminiscent of SB 1070, the “show me your papers” measure in Arizona, and Proposition 187, which denies undocumented immigrants access to public benefits in California—can lead to backlash and reverse this trend? 

This book is about a small but growing segment of Latinos. I do still think that the majority of Latinos are still more united.

I think what’s interesting about this moment is that I see it as a cultural reckoning. Is this the election where you have some Latinos continuing the numbers of 2020? And if that is the case, then perhaps parts of the white vote and the Latino vote are a lot more similar than not, and part of what’s driving that similarity is the issue of immigration.

But I still believe that the majority of Latinos are united by this solidarity as having immigrant roots. I think of the way that Arizona turned blue because of the trauma that so many of those immigrant children experienced as they were seeing their parents being deported by Sheriff [Joe] Arpaio. I still do believe that is at the core of what will drive the majority of Latinos this November—this idea that in the face of someone like Donald Trump, Latinos have more in common against that image than not.

We’re in an interesting moment where there’s still a little bit of distance between the border and some Latinos, between Donald Trump and some Latinos—but the moment that it starts to creep into their own reality where potentially someone can knock at your door and racially profile you no matter how long you’ve been in this country, then perhaps we’ll start to see a shift.

You argue that the Democratic Party has failed to see Latinos in their totality. What should Democrats do differently in 2024?

I do think that the Democratic Party, at least this time, is mobilizing earlier. They’re doing outreach a lot earlier than they have in previous years, they’re paying a lot of attention to Spanish-language media.

I always go back to: don’t dismiss the small shifts, the surveys, and the polls so quickly. Don’t dismiss these rightward shifts as anomalies or outliers. Because that means truly dismissing Latinos, once again, as really complex humans that carry a lot of complicated history, pasts, and traumas into this country. It goes back to this idea that Latinos are a monolith. Dismissing it can lead to results like we saw in 2020 when Trump did over 10 points better than he did in 2016. 

I hope that we can start to break that apart and have hard conversations about what it means to be an extremely complex, misunderstood community in this country.

They carried vinyl banners that read “Justice for Migrants” and “Give Back Shelby Park,” a reference to the 47-acre field on the banks of the Rio Grande named after a Confederate general that Abbot and his $10 billion Operation Lone Star have turned into a razor wire-enclosed outpost for Texas state forces. On the Mexico side, a sign in Spanish warns potential crossers of the dangers of the floating barrier made of buoys with sharp metal disks between them: “People have died; look for another path, please.” 

“There’s so much concertina here, I don’t think they’ll ever be able to rescue the river,” Rubin says of the wire-fencing Gov. Abbott put up along the Rio Grande to prevent migrants from crossing. “It’s quite something to see.” Another sight to behold is the militarized presence of a plethora of law enforcement agencies crowding that sliver of the 2,000-mile long US-Mexico border. Besides US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the Texas National Guard, state troopers from as far away as Florida and Missouri have been sent to deal with the supposed “invasion” decried by Republican governors. But in the face of a decrease in migrant crossings, these heavily armed law enforcement personnel are finding little in the form of an enemy to fight.

“We stand here, we watch and we tell the immigrants to turn around,” a Louisiana soldier dressed in body armor told NOLANews. If a migrant manages to come through the barrier, they contact the Texas Department of Public Safety (TDPS) which then calls CBP. “They’re running up and down the river on airboats,” Rubin says. “They don’t have much to do at all. There’s not a lot going on.”

Migrant encounters with US law enforcement in the Del Rio sector, which includes Eagle Pass, peaked in December at 71,000, but have slowed dramatically since then. In March, those encounters dropped to 11,000. Gov. Abbot and the TDPS have taken credit for the sharp drop. “Our stiff resistance is working,” the Texas governor wrote on X in February. But experts and US government officials say the changes have less to do with Texas than with seasonal migratory patterns and more strict crackdowns from Mexico.

“It’s interesting to hear the state of Texas taking credit for the decrease when so much of its security presence in Eagle Pass now also existed in December,” one Department of Homeland Security official told the Washington Post. Mexico, Rubin says, is “doing the work Greg Abbott is taking credit for.” 

Eagle Pass, the seat of Maverick County, has emerged as the epicenter of a political and constitutional standoff between Texas and the federal government. Last year, Texas sued the Biden administration after Border Patrol agents cut parts of the concertina wire to respond to medical emergencies, claiming the cutting “disrupted the State’s border security efforts.” In a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court decided in favor of the Biden administration, allowing federal officials to remove parts of the barrier. That same month, three migrants—a woman and two children—drowned after the Texas National Guard seized control of Shelby Park and prevented US Border Patrol, which conducts migrant rescues, from accessing the area. 

Maverick County has seen a record number of migrant deaths, resulting in a shortage of body bags and corpses being left in fridges for months, the Washington Post recently reported. In 2022, CBP reported 895 migrant deaths at the southern border—256 were in the Del Rio sector, more than any other area. 

Meanwhile, the Texas Military Department is building a massive 80-acre base camp near Eagle Pass to hold up to 2,300 members of the National Guard that could cost taxpayers as much as $500 million. Troops will have access to a dining facility serving chef-prepared and buffet style meals, a fitness center, and basketball and volleyball courts, according to a contractor’s proposal reviewed by the Texas Observer. During the vigil, Rubin and other volunteers got a glimpse of the under-construction site, but they were told to leave the premises. From what he could gather, “it’s a very unpleasant place,” 

Why? Because on Sunday, the Republican went on Fox News and accused President Joe Biden of “using illegal immigrants as political pawns.” And given his own record, it is unclear if understands what the word means. 

Chessboards aside, Oxford Languages says a pawn is “a person used by others for their own purposes.” This, of course, describes how Abbott has himself treated migrants who have crossed the border into Texas.

Since 2022, he bussed thousands of them to Democratic-controlled New York City and Washington, D.C. The arrival of more than 150,000 migrants in New York since that time has created a humanitarian crisis that the city government has struggled to adequately manage, leaving many migrants bearing harsh conditions and stuck in shelters.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams has sued more than a dozen charter bus contractors that helped transport the migrants to the city under Abbott’s direction, alleging that the companies violated the city’s Social Services Law, which requires that anyone who brings “a needy person from out of state” to New York City to cover the resulting expenses. Last month, one of the bus companies agreed in court papers to halt transporting migrants from the southern border to the city, Politico reported. 

But this week, when Abbott came to New York for a Republican fundraiser, he made it clear he has no plans to stop sending migrants to New York for his own purposes—at least for as long as Biden remains president. “We are going to have to maintain this process until we get a new president this next November who will secure the border for the United States of America,” the governor told the gathering, according to Gothamist.

Late last year, Abbott signed a law making undocumented immigration into Texas a state crime and allowing state law enforcement officials to arrest undocumented immigrants anywhere inside its boundaries. The issue is wrapped up in litigation, with Biden’s Department of Justice arguing that the law violates the Constitution, which “assigns the federal government the authority to regulate immigration and manage our international borders.”

The reason behind Abbott’s rhetoric isn’t hard to pin down: Draconian anti-immigration policies—including separating children from their parents—have become a cornerstone of today’s GOP, who don’t actually seem interested in funding border security, given that Republican lawmakers recently blocked a bipartisan bill to do just that. 

While Abbott’s threat to keep busing immigrants north could further burnish his anti-immigrant credentials, it pales when compared to another he made earlier this year. As I reported in January, he told a right-wing radio host that “the only thing that we are not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border—because, of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”

That’s what we’d call using immigrants as political pawns. 

By the end of the summer hundreds of migrants, mostly from Venezuela, were coming to Denver every day. Johnston, a former school principal and state senator said he soon realized, “we had a really significant crisis.” To date, Denver, with a population of about 700,000, has received almost 40,000 migrants—the most per capita of any city in the country.

It has forced Johnston to make pragmatic but severe decisions. He reinstated limits on how long migrants can stay in shelters and announced cuts to the city’s services to balance the budget. But he has also refused to buy into Abbott’s plot to turn public opinion against migrants. “I want it to be clear to Denverites who is not responsible for this crisis that we’re in,” he said during a press conference last month. “The folks who have walked 3,000 miles to get to this city.”

Overall, Johnston has tried to welcome migrants. And on the federal level, he has pushed for changes to make that easier. He asked the Biden administration to extend Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to thousands of Venezuelan migrants, so they could be eligible for work. The Biden administration did just that last September.

Johnston spoke with Mother Jones about Denver’s approach to migrant arrivals, the bipartisan border deal blocked by Republicans, and why this is a “solvable” crisis: 

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s political stunt of sending migrants to blue cities across the country had the effect of “interiorizing” the border, leading to responses like New York Gov. Eric Adams’ statement that the “migrant crisis” was going to destroy the city. What do you make of that?

That’s not our belief. We think this is a deeply solvable problem and we think the problem is not attributable to the people who are walking 3,000 miles to try to seek asylum from a country that’s persecuting them and making it impossible to survive.  

We think Denver can not just survive but thrive with these newcomers arriving.

We just need a couple of key components. That’s what we pushed the federal government for. We need more work authorization. The biggest problem we have is folks who arrive in the city and tell me, “Mr. Mayor, I don’t want any help, I just want to work.” At the same time, CEOs will call me and say that they have open jobs every day that they can’t fill, and they want to be able to hire the migrants that are here. The only problem is we have the federal government standing in the way of hard-working employees who want to work and employers who want to hire them, and the government’s refusing to let them do that. We need federal resources to help us support people.

And we think there should be a coordinated plan for entry. We don’t think that the governor of Texas gets to decide where every person in America ends up. Whenever we’ve had other waves of asylum seekers, we’ve created a distribution plan that allows them to find cities that have resources. We looked at the examples from Ukrainian refugees or Afghanistan refugees and a coordinated federal response that provided work authorization and resources and connected to cities based on their capacity. We were trying to get at least one of those three things in place. Unfortunately, the bipartisan Senate bill that would have helped do that, President [Donald] Trump and the House Speaker came in to kill, which was an injustice for both our newcomers and for our cities. But we’ve found a path forward despite that and we think there’s still a way to help serve newcomers well and prevent the financial crisis in our city. We’re well on our way to resolving that now.

You recently announced the decision to close four migrant shelters—one a week over the course of a month—as a way to cut costs. What impact does that have on the city’s budget and on the ability to house people?

When the federal legislation failed because of House Republican opposition it left an about $180 million hole in our budget that would have been covered by the relief. We did two things. We looked at how we can reallocate the city budget to help provide services to migrants that were arriving, and ways that we could save money on the migrant program. We have cut about $60 million out of our migrant program, which dropped the total budget gap we have from $180 million to about $120 million. We’re optimistic we have a path to even reduce those costs more significantly. Our belief is this will be a shared sacrifice. It’ll be a balance of how to both support newcomers and provide city services. But we think we’re a city that shares both values. We want this to be a city where we’re not going to let women and children sleep on the streets in 10-degree weather in t-shirts and sandals. We also want to be a city where we can guarantee the public services that every resident deserves. We think we can do both.

In October 2023, you led a coalition of mayors asking for more assistance and funding from the federal government to address the migrant arrivals. What have you gotten and what have you yet to get?

I feel like the White House has been very responsive and helpful. They understand exactly what we need. They’re fighting hard to get those things for us. Obviously, a lot of what we need are more resources. For us to get more work authorization, they need to be able to process asylum claims faster at the border so they can get people approved. The bipartisan Senate bill would have done that.

We need resources for internal cities. The administration pushed for that to get done in the supplemental. The challenge has been a faction of House Republicans who wanted this proposal to die, not because they thought it wouldn’t solve the problem, but because they knew it would solve the problem. Tragically, they were more committed to a chance at electoral success than a chance at serving the American people by delivering results on important issues. That’s what was so frustrating to us. But in Denver we believe our problems are solvable and we believe we’re the ones to solve them. We are not about to be dissuaded by their refusal to help. We have just dug in deeper with our local community and nonprofit partners to find a way forward even without federal help.

The number of migrants currently in city shelters seems to have gone down significantly after a peak in January. What other changes do you expect you will have to make in the near future if the numbers go back up again?

We’ve built a deliberate plan to help decrease that population. We did four things. We reactivated a length of stay policy that requires our newcomers to exit after 14 days if you’re an individual or 42 days if you’re a family. Second, is we increased dramatically our case navigation and support for families helping connect them to housing and jobs. We were able to exit more than 3,000 people over the last five weeks without any significant increase in our homeless population. We also dramatically accelerated workforce authorization; a historic push to provide legal clinics that gave work authorization to people that had CBP One status and could get work authorization immediately. We’re looking at ways to continue to decrease those costs without negatively impacting the newcomers or the city.

There have been reports about the city of Denver reaching out to landlords to rent out properties to migrants. Is that one of the creative solutions you have found to help migrants discharged from shelters find temporary housing and stay out of the streets?

What we’re trying to do is connect them more efficiently and even looking at places where we can use housing to replace our shelter system. It’s much less expensive to pay a month rent for someone in an apartment than it is to have them staying in a hotel every night for 30 nights. We’re looking at ways to get all members of the community involved in helping so that’s landlords, nonprofit partners, community leaders. 

You have been a big champion of expediting work permits for eligible migrants. You have also talked about the positive economic impact of migration for cities that have embraced it in comparison to those that historically “bet on being anti-immigrant in their economic strategies.” How can Denver benefit from the migrant arrivals?

We think every great and successful American city has bet on being a city that’s welcoming to migrants. That is literally how those cities have built themselves. We know that, for many estimates, migrants account for up to a third of our economic growth each year. That brings energy and talent to the city. We know that if we want cranes in the air, buildings to be built, restaurants to be staffed, buses to have drivers, us to have officers and service and retail workers—those are all critical roles for Denver’s growth and those are often driven by newcomers to the city who want to be able to make a living for themselves and their family.

There are people around the world that want to move to Denver; we think that’s a great thing. 

Other cities in the state have all but closed their doors on migrants and are passing ordinances reaffirming they’re not sanctuary cities. Is it important to you that Denver takes a different stance on this issue? 

I do think it’s important for multiple reasons. We are the country that said send us “your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” We know that there are multiple generations of entrepreneurs and innovators who have built this country, who arrived here as migrants and brought their talents and passion and helped contribute to the splendor of this country. It’s smart not to turn our back on that history in this moment, and not to create and stoke racial or ethnic hatred in a way that is unproductive for the country or the world. We don’t think there’s any benefit to that. The history of cities who have bet on being anti-migrant are cities that have bet against their own economic growth—and that has tanked those cities. The cities that have been able to grow and succeed are ones that have kept their doors open. And we plan to follow in that trajectory.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

During the section on immigration, Biden fumbled when mentioning the death of 22-year-old Laken Riley. A nursing student at the University of Georgia, Riley was killed in February. A man from Venezuela who US officials say entered the United States unlawfully was, soon after, charged with kidnapping and murder. Since then, Republicans have elevated the tragedy to accuse the Biden administration of allowing an “invasion” at the border.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), wearing a MAGA hat, interrupted Biden during the speech and shouted at him to say Riley’s name. In response, Biden held up a pin that Greene had handed him earlier and said: “Laken Riley, an innocent woman who was killed by an ‘illegal.’”

Biden’s slip seemed Freudian in light of the president’s significant shift on immigration and departure from his “moral leadership” agenda. Three years ago, his administration ordered immigration officials to stop employing the term “illegal aliens” in official communications and press releases. Now, he is pushing border proposals that some advocates call “unconscionable.” Biden is moving right on immigration. And now, even if by accident, his language is matching it.

As my colleague Daniel King wrote, “‘Alien’ was baked into this country’s founding vocabulary to strip British of personhood and legal rights.” Biden’s impromptu flub echoed the direction of his policies—making immigrants, as a collective, seem lesser, somehow stripped of peoplehood.

“The rhetoric President Biden used tonight was dangerously close to language from Donald Trump that puts a target on the backs of Latinos everywhere,” Democratic Rep. Joaquin Castro of Texas said on social media. “Democrats shouldn’t be taking our cues from MAGA extremism.” The National Immigrant Justice Center’s X account posted that “blaming an entire group of people for the alleged acts of one person is xenophobia which must not be tolerated in part of the US government.”

Naturally, Biden’s “an illegal” moment played right into Greene’s hands. The congresswoman took credit for making Biden “go off script” and telling the “truth” by admitting “Laken Riley was murdered by an ILLEGAL!!!” 

They are melting down because I forced Biden to go off script and he finally told the truth and admitted Laken Riley was murdered by an ILLEGAL!!!

Yes that’s right Joe.

ILLEGAL ALIEN!!!! https://t.co/auwxadMcD1 pic.twitter.com/TNH9aHcHJr

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (@RepMTG) March 8, 2024

After the ruckus, Biden went back to the prepared remarks. He declared he wouldn’t “demonize immigrants saying they ‘poison the blood of our country,'” referring to a Trump quote. He promised not to separate families or “ban people from America because of their faith.” He gave a nod to his Irish ancestry and talked about migrations who fled persecution to pursue the American Dream. “That’s America,” Biden said, “where we all come from somewhere, but we are all Americans.” 

Immigration and the border have been front and center this campaign cycle. Biden also took the opportunity to rail against Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers for tanking a bipartisan senate border deal so restrictive it would have previously been unthinkable for Democrats to stand behind it. Biden touted the bill as the “toughest set of border security reforms we’ve ever seen,” saying it would save lives and restore order at the border. (Republican Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), who led the border deal negotiations, seemed to approve.)

“If my predecessor is watching instead of playing politics and pressuring members of Congress to block this bill, join me in telling Congress to pass it!” the president said. “We can do it together.”   

For me, a non-American who came from somewhere, a question lingered. Which Biden from the State of the Union represents his true thoughts: The scripted version, who lauds immigration as a strength worth being celebrated? Or the extemporaneous one—who uses language that enables openly anti-immigrant policies?

By the summer, KIND had sent lawyers to the US-Mexico border, including Turner-Herbas, who was tasked with leading the organization’s response to family separation. She began to meet with parents who had been sent to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention. And to meet the children, who had been transferred to the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services. “They were traumatized, distraught,” she says.

Looking back at that time, Turner-Herbas, now KIND’s senior director of special programs, recalls how difficult it was to leave her newborn at home while still breastfeeding, sometimes having to pump milk at an ICE facility. But unlike many of the parents she was visiting who had no idea where their sons or daughters were, Turner-Herbas took comfort in thinking, “this is a temporary time being away from my baby.” For those families, she realized even then, “it was going to take years and years to undo the damage that was done in just a few months.”

Indeed, almost six years later, the ordeal for families separated at the border under Trump’s “zero tolerance” regime is far from over—and their ability to stay in the United States is in limbo. Last year, the US government reached a settlement in a class action lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on behalf of separated families. The final agreement didn’t include monetary damages, but awarded class members the right to apply for temporary legal status and work authorization, as well as access to certain behavioral health and housing services. The settlement also provided families with a renewed opportunity to seek asylum. (In several cases, migrants had been denied the right to ask for protection and instead tricked into unknowingly signing documents agreeing to their own deportations.)

“This is the worst thing I have seen in my 30 years doing this work,” Lee Gelernt from the ACLU and the lead attorney in the case said of family separation at a court hearing to approve the settlement. “And I hope that the history books accurately reflect just how bad a period this was, and we never see it again.” The settlement, US District Judge Dana Sabraw said at the time, was “the closest what we can possibly do under the circumstances to restore justice.” 

What the settlement didn’t account for, however, was full legal representation—virtually a prerequisite for submitting successful asylum applications. Instead, it included the provision of legal advice and a program, albeit not guaranteed, to refer cases to pro bono attorneys. That has left those held up as the main example of the horrors wrought by the Trump administration without secure legal help. Lawyers and immigrant rights advocates say that stacks the odds against the families.

“It’s wonderful that they will have a new opportunity to seek asylum,” says Kelly Albinak Kribs, a lawyer with the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights who served as a federally appointed child advocate for separated children in 2018. “But how meaningful is that opportunity if they don’t have legal counsel to help them navigate that process?” 

The “zero tolerance” policy, which Trump moved to end with an executive order in June 2018, resulted in the separation of more than 5,000 children, about 1,000 of whom, as of November 2023, had yet to be returned to their parents or legal guardians despite a court order mandating reunifications. During that time, the US government deported hundreds of parents—children either stayed with relatives in the United States, in foster care, or were repatriated to their home countries (as part of efforts led by nonprofits and lawyers to reconnect families).

With the end of the policy, it didn’t take long for it to become clear that the Trump administration had no plan in place to reunite the separated families. “It was unmitigated chaos,” Kribs says. “There was virtually no record keeping.” At one point, a federal judge scolded the government for having better systems to track the personal property of detainees than to account for migrant children.

The work of locating deported parents fell onto a steering committee formed by the ACLU and other organizations. KIND was entering names, immigration registration numbers, and children’s dates of birth on a spreadsheet to create matches. In some instances, the information provided by the government was insufficient and cases would get referred to the migrant rights group Justice in Motion, which activated a network of so-called “defenders” to find parents labeled “the unreachables” in Mexico and Central America. They knocked on doors, spoke with neighbors, searched churches, health clinics, and community centers. 

“It was very time consuming and complicated,” says Nan Schivone, the legal director of Justice in Motion. “Defenders had to work very cautiously in person in rural, isolated communities where the families are from. And because most of the families were seeking protection [in the United States] because they were fleeing from harm, they weren’t necessarily returning to the dangerous communities they had fled.” 

In 2021, President Joe Biden took office, formally rescinded “zero tolerance,” and installed a reunification task force under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Since then, a number of impacted parents and families separated between 2017 and January 20, 2021 have been temporarily allowed to return to the United States for three years through a discretionary program known as parole. But the months and, in some cases, years of separation have taken a toll. “A lot of children who were separated felt abandoned by their parents and so there was resentment when they reunited,” Schivone says. “We worked on cases where children didn’t recognize their parents when they were returned to them.”

Many lawyers and advocates who work with families have similar stories. Kribs of the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights remembers a woman who was getting out of detention after not seeing her toddler for six months and swept him up in her arms only for the child to barely react. Kribs wondered how much the child still remembered his mother. “That was a really horrible possibility for me to sit with,” she says.

In some instances, the children were so young when the separation happened that they now blame their returning parents for the trauma. “The harm they experienced continues to reverberate to this day, even for families who are back together,” Kribs adds. “The time lost and the bond damaged are things that kids and parents alike continue to grapple with.” 

KIND estimates they ultimately assisted 2,000 individuals impacted by family separation. The group is now representing about 550 children and parents in their immigration cases in the United States. For families who have applied for asylum already, their cases likely remained on hold as lawyers waited for the terms of the settlement to be finalized. While it offered a slightly streamlined review process for these asylum applications—whereby they can affirmatively make their case to asylum officers instead of in immigration courts—families will still have to meet a high bar to qualify. “There are going to be a number of families that do not get granted asylum,” Turner-Herbas of KIND says, “and we don’t know what will be next for those families.” 

Paige Chan, the executive director of Together & Free, which provides case management and help with emergency housing and other services to 1,200 families, says they have seen cases where people were deported and killed. Just last week, someone shot at the house of a person the group is trying to return to the United States via the task force. For those currently in the country without a clear path to legal status, the risk of deportation remains a looming threat. “They feel like it’s a ticking time bomb on them,” she says. “What’s the point of the task force for reunification if we’re just going to leave them with the threat of re-separation? The actual physical reunification—it’s just one of a long process of healing and rebuilding.” 

To make up for where the settlement has fallen short, KIND, Justice in Motion, and other immigrant rights organizations have formed a coalition to raise $3 million to provide free legal representation to families. The hope is to hire more attorneys to do direct legal representation, but also to fund recruiting and mentoring of pro bono lawyers. They see it as the final push to right the wrongs of family separation. 

“I would have liked to have seen the federal government automatically provide these families with permanent immigration status,” Kribs says. “From the perspective of the advocate community, that’s what would have been the most appropriate response to the harm that our government intentionally inflicted upon children and their parents—to grant them that immigration status and therefore that stability and security.”

But that has not happened. And that does not mean worse could not come. As a 2024 presidential candidate, Trump hasn’t ruled out separating families in a potential second term.

It’s one of the many hardline provisions in HR 2, a sweeping border security plan that GOP leaders say is necessary to clamp down on the number of migrants arriving in the country. That bill, which passed in the House last year, is waiting in the wings as lawmakers fight over the possibility of new immigration crackdowns. The GOP legislation contains a laundry list of rules that would expand deportations, make it harder to claim asylum, and whittle down the government’s power to grant humanitarian parole. But immigration advocates are also sounding the alarm over a lesser-known provision, which instructs the Department of Health and Human Services—an agency tasked with placing migrant kids with trusted sponsors in the US—to hand over those sponsors’ names to immigration enforcement officials.

According to lawyers and activists who previously saw this collaboration take place under President Donald Trump, the past iteration of the program left devastating impacts on family members who were arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after trying to reunite with their children. The risk of deportation, they say, terrified potential sponsors and discouraged them from coming forward, prolonging the time that kids needed to stay in detention centers.

The policy was “using children as bait in order to go after undocumented families,” says Azadeh Erfani, a senior policy analyst with the legal nonprofit National Immigrant Justice Center. It’d be “a huge setback” if Congress now codified into law “a provision that would treat children with such cruelty.”

When Border Patrol encounters an unaccompanied child or teen, the agency is supposed to move them into the custody of HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, which was specifically tapped to care for minors arriving in the country alone. The office places the child in a temporary shelter before releasing them to a trusted adult in the US, usually a family member, with whom they can wait out their immigration cases in a safe environment. Most people who come forward to sponsor a child—a dad, a grandma, a family friend—are undocumented. But HHS, which is not a law enforcement agency, regularly places kids with sponsors who lack legal immigration status. “Their job is not immigration enforcement,” says Jennifer Podkul, vice president of policy and advocacy with the nonprofit Kids In Need of Defense. “Their job is child protection.”

Those lines were blurred in 2018, when, under Trump’s infamous “zero tolerance” strategy, the Department of Homeland Security inked a new information-sharing agreement with HHS. Suddenly, HHS was required to give immigration authorities the names, addresses, and fingerprints of anyone who came forward to take in an unaccompanied child. Within a year, said then-ICE Acting Director Matthew Albence in a congressional hearing, immigration enforcement agents had used this intel to round up over 300 potential sponsors. Most of them had no criminal records and were arrested solely because they were suspected of being in the country illegally.

Two months after Biden took office, his administration rolled back the policy. The setup had “undermined the interests of children” and “had a chilling effect on potential sponsors,” DHS and HHS announced in March 2021 in a joint statement.

Now, many say that the Republicans’ border bill could bring back the program—and exacerbate its harms. “HR 2 goes one step farther,” says Melissa Adamson, an immigration attorney with the National Center for Youth Law. Unlike the Trump-era agreement, HR 2 explicitly tells HHS to report a sponsor’s immigration status to Homeland Security. If they’re undocumented, the authorities would have 30 days to begin the process of deporting them.

If HR 2 were implemented, “family members would not come forward” and “children’s length of time in detention would likely skyrocket,” Adamson says. “It would be a wholly preventable crisis.”

For many immigration advocates, this potential crisis is reminiscent of what they saw the first time around. They recall how relatives were often scared that engaging with HHS would result in ICE, which is part of DHS, showing up at their doorstep, leaving kids without other options. At that point, “you’re looking at a situation where there just may not be someone to sponsor the child,” says Mary Miller Flowers, the policy and legislative affairs director for the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights. “You may take that child’s whole network away from them.”

As a result, once the Trump policy took effect, kids had to wait for much longer stretches of time as case managers scrambled to track down a more distant relative or family friend. “It became more difficult to identify sponsors willing to accept children,” explained the HHS Office of Inspector General. In the months after the agencies’ cooperation started, the average time children spent in HHS custody ballooned—from 58 days to about three months. 

But each day, unaccompanied kids continued to arrive at the border. This created a huge backlog in HHS shelters, which were quickly running out of bed space. Newer arrivals couldn’t move out of Border Patrol detention centers—austere facilities meant for the short-term holding of adults. Federal law generally requires that minors without a parent or guardian be transferred out of those centers within 72 hours, but many were staying for weeks. Unlike HHS shelters, which are designed to house children, Border Patrol jails often lacked basic supplies like toothbrushes or soap and were so freezing that people called them “iceboxes.” These facilities are “dramatically ill-equipped to care for human beings, let alone children, in a long-term way,” says Erfani. Even after Biden ended the Trump-era policy, she notes, an 8-year-old girl died in Border Patrol custody last summer after agents ignored her parents’ pleas for medical care. 

The Trump administration argued that it was looking out for the safety of child migrants. It said that Homeland Security officials needed to vet sponsors to make sure kids weren’t being released to harmful settings. “No one who values child welfare and safety,” then-White House spokesman Hogan Gidley told the Washington Post in 2019, “would argue smuggled, exploited and unaccompanied children at the southern border should be handed over to illegal alien ‘sponsors’ without reliable identity confirmation and background checks.” 

But many advocates say that ICE’s renewed involvement would have nothing to do with child welfare. “It’s purely punitive,” says Melanie Nezer, vice president of advocacy with the Women’s Refugee Commission. HHS’s refugee office was specifically asked to care for unaccompanied kids, she pointed out, so that their wellbeing would be overseen by an agency without a law enforcement mandate. In recent months, HHS has come under fire for not properly vetting sponsors and often releasing children to exploitative labor settings. But adding immigration authorities to the mix, Nezer argues, would only make things worse. A desperate parent might try to find someone—anyone—who has legal status to sponsor a child, even if that’s a distant relative or a stranger.

As lawmakers strain to compromise on new immigration limits, HR 2 is in the spotlight again. Earlier this month, after a botched attempt to reach an agreement on border security in the Senate, House GOP leaders Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), Steve Scalise (R-La.), and Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) issued a statement once again pressing the Senate to vote on HR 2. That’s unlikely to happen anytime soon in the Democratic-controlled upper chamber. But things could change if Republicans win control of the Senate in November.

Republicans “are socializing these ideas through HR 2,” says Flowers of the Young Center. Just putting it on the table “makes it look like these kinds of extremist things” are “somehow part of our mainstream conversation about how to manage immigration in this country.”

The measures, which NBC News first reported on Wednesday, would mimic some of the provisions included in the now-dead Senate bipartisan border deal, including raising the standards for the initial asylum screening known as a “credible fear” interview. Biden’s plans would also instruct US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers to prioritize the removal of new migrants in what officials familiar with the discussions described to NBC News as a “last in, first out” policy. 

It’s unclear whether or how the White House would move forward with these changes. But the fact that they’re under consideration underscores the president’s shift towards stricter border enforcement at the expense of the asylum system, as I’ve written about before. In 2020, Biden pledged a humane immigration policy as a change from Trump. Now, he is promising to “shut down the border.”

The Biden administration has already imposed limitations on asylum, including by making it harder for migrants to qualify if they hadn’t first sought and been denied humanitarian relief in other countries on the way to the United States. Now, the White House is floating around the idea of using an authority under section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act that allows presidents to suspend the entry of certain foreigners into the country if they find that it “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.”

Former President Donald Trump infamously weaponized this authority against travelers from Muslim-majority countries. He also invoked it in 2018 to crackdown on asylum for migrants crossing outside ports of entry, but a federal judge ultimately blocked the policy, writing that “whatever the scope of the president’s authority, he may not rewrite the immigration laws to impose a condition that Congress has expressly forbidden.” Current laws dictate that asylum seekers have the right to seek protection regardless of how they come into the country. 

CNN reported that the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel is analyzing the proposal to see if it would survive the inevitable challenges in court. “The courts were emphatic that the Trump administration could not deny asylum based simply on how one entered the country,” Lee Gelernt, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told the New York Times. “Hopefully the Biden administration is not considering recycling this patently unlawful and unworkable policy.”

In response to reports highlighting the White House latest deliberations, House Speaker Mike Johnson, who promptly shot down the Senate bipartisan border deal that would have catered to GOP priorities, said Biden has “misled the public when he claimed he had done everything in his power to secure the border.”