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As controversial as President Donald Trump’s mass deportations are, voters still trust the Republican Party far more on immigration than they trust the Democratic Party. According to some polling, the gap is almost 20 points.
Former New York Times columnist Josh Barro has correctly identified the Democratic Party’s lingering problem with the issue. Under the wry headline that nods to meme culture, “Why Aren’t We All Trying to Find the Guy Who Did This,” Barro argues that “to win back voters’ trust, the party must acknowledge that the Biden administration’s policy of laxity was a failure, and commit credibly to better enforcement.”
“Accountability for the prior administration’s policy failures is also very important,” Barro continues, “and Democrats should be clamoring for that now.”
“Who decided Biden should issue those day-one executive orders that sent a message to migrants that they should run for our border while they had the chance?” Barro asks. “And how do we make sure that the next Democratic White House is staffed with people who won’t be inclined to make the same mistakes?”
These are good questions. And Barro notes that “the next time a Democratic White House is staffing up … the Dreaded Groups will still be there, trying to build a White House that prioritizes their pet goals over building a sustainable political movement.”
“So I’d like my allies not to be flying blind,” Barro writes, “we should know more about who authored the biggest political blunders in the Biden White House so we can try to make sure those people never work in this town again.”
The problem for centrist Democrats such as Barro is that the worldview that created the Biden border crisis is not confined to a few fringe decision-makers. It is the worldview of the entire Democratic Party immigration policy apparatus. White House immigration staffers don’t just appear out of thin air. They come from groups such as America’s Voice, the American Immigration Council, the Center for American Progress, the Migration Policy Institute, the National Immigration Law Center, and even the Rand Corporation.
And the overwhelming consensus among these groups was that, to the extent there was a problem at the border, it was caused by “push factors” abroad, not “pull factors” created by the Biden administration. The policy response advocated by these groups was also the same: find creative ways to let migrants in as fast as possible, not turn them away at the border.
The Biden immigration policies were not the product of a few rogue staffers. They were a synthesis of the overwhelming consensus of Democratic Party thought on the immigration issue. Naming individuals won’t solve anything. The institutions themselves must be named, shamed, and held accountable. Then, if the Democratic Party is really serious about rebuilding its brand on immigration, entirely new institutions will be needed.
To be clear, the information in this article does not come from any inside sources within the Biden administration. All that has been done is to look at the key Biden staffers in charge of immigration policy and then see where they worked before they came to the Biden administration.
Nothing written here is intended to claim that any one particular staffer was responsible for former President Joe Biden’s decision to end the “Remain in Mexico” policy, or suspend all internal deportations for 100 days, or grant temporary protected status to over 1 million migrants. But what is intended to be shown is that these ideas held sway at the institutions where Biden staffers worked before they came to the Biden administration. If Democrats such as Barro want to avoid a repeat of the Biden border crisis, they should probably avoid hiring any immigration staffers from these institutions ever again.
Before Biden was even elected, his campaign formed the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force on Immigration, headed by Marielena Hincapie of the National Immigration Law Center. The NILC has long been a proponent of lax immigration enforcement, criticizing the Obama administration’s detention of “asylum-seekers” caught illegally crossing the southern border and its deportation of Haitians.
Under Hincapie’s guidance, the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force on Immigration recommended an end to Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, the cancellation of Trump’s agreement with Central American countries to force migrants to apply for asylum there, a 100-day moratorium on all deportations, and an end to the prosecution of migrants who illegally cross the southern border. The Biden administration adopted all of these policies within its first 100 days. They formed the foundation of Biden’s catch-and-release policies at the southern border.
But these campaign recommendations had to be turned into functioning policy. Enter the American Immigration Council’s Angela Kelley, who served as senior counselor on immigration to former Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. According to her own LinkedIn profile, Kelley “managed a team of legal and policy experts in developing, writing and preparing for implementation of the administration’s executive orders” at the Department of Homeland Security.
The effect of the open borders policies implemented by Biden administration staff, such as Kelley, was immediate. Southwest land border encounters more than doubled between December 2020 and March 2021, and they kept rising. In response, the American Immigration Council blamed the “periodic cycles of migration,” “hurricanes,” “drought,” and “escalating political instability.” Absolutely anything but Biden’s catch-and-release border policies.
In fact, instead of doing the hard work of expelling migrants who illegally cross the southern border and finding countries that will take them in, the Biden administration did the opposite, exploiting established programs and inventing highly questionable new ones to bring as many migrants into the country as possible. Enter Ur Jaddou, Biden’s director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Under Jaddou’s leadership, USCIS extended temporary protected status to over 1 million migrants from countries such as Cameroon, El Salvador, Myanmar, and Nepal. TPS was first created by Congress in 1990 and has been used by every administration since, just not on the same scope as Biden did. The same can not be said of Jaddou’s Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan parole program, which admitted another half million migrants into the country and has no basis in statute.
Jaddou’s USCIS was also the government entity responsible for handing out work permits to illegal immigrants granted parole at the southern border. All those California commercially licensed illegal immigrant truck drivers killing people on America’s highways? They all got their work permits thanks to Jaddou.
Before directing USCIS, Jaddou was the director of the DHS Watch project for the left-wing open borders group America’s Voice, which is a leader in the Abolish ICE movement. When you appoint a director of a group that supports abolishing the agency in charge of domestic immigration law enforcement to oversee the provision of immigration services, you should probably not be surprised when that director abuses her authority to undermine U.S. immigration law.
There are many more individuals, such as White House Domestic Policy Council Deputy Director Esther Olavarria and Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Border and Immigration Policy Blas Nunez-Neto, who could be profiled in this piece along with the organizations they belonged to before coming to the Biden administration — the Center for American Progress for Olavarria and the RAND Corporation for Nunez-Neto — but details of what they did are ultimately unimportant.
What does matter for the future of the Democratic Party, and indeed the nation, because Democrats will eventually regain the White House someday, is that there is no immigration-hawk pipeline of talent on the Left. All of these groups want to increase legal immigration as much as possible, and to the extent illegal immigration is a problem, it is a problem that can be solved by making illegal immigration legal — this is what Biden’s TPS designations and his CHNV parole programs essentially did.
Until there is an identifiable set of interest groups on the Left that recognizes a downside to immigration, there will be no immigration-hawk wing of the Democratic Party. For generations, unions served as a restriction bulwark in the Democratic Party, but as the American labor movement shifted from manufacturing and industry to government and services, that changed. Now unions, except for the Teamsters, have all become part of the Democratic Party’s open borders blob.
The Biden administration’s border crisis was not an accident or a failure of implementation. It was the logical product of an intellectual consensus that dominates the Democratic Party’s immigration world. From Hincapie’s task-force recommendations to Kelley’s drafting of Day One executive orders and Jaddou’s mass expansion of parole and TPS, every step reflected the same premise: that enforcement itself is the problem. The result is an immigration system designed to process, not prevent, illegal entry.
THE MORAL HAZARD OF MONETIZED JUSTICE
Democrats such as Barro are right to demand accountability, but naming individual aides misses the point. The real culprit is the network of institutions — the American Immigration Council, the National Immigration Law Center, America’s Voice, the Center for American Progress, RAND, and others — that supply the personnel and worldview for every Democratic administration. These groups see borders as humanitarian bottlenecks to be managed, not sovereign lines to be defended.
Until Democrats build a counternetwork — think tanks, advocacy groups, and staffers who believe enforcement is a moral duty of government — the party will never regain credibility on immigration. The voters’ verdict is already clear. There is no immigration-hawk wing of the Democratic Party, and until one exists, Democrats will continue to lose both the argument and the country’s trust.