Biden's Border Politics Won't Fix Our Immigration System - ACLU - At Liberty Podcast

NAUREEN SHAH: I know from my own experiences how much immigrants can bring to this country, their love of this country, and their desire to raise family here, and do the work. I think when we step out from the polarized politics of the moment, we all recognize that, in our own stories and the stories of our neighbors and our co-workers. And those are the people that we have to keep at the center of the debate: the people themselves who are immigrants, because once you start to hear those stories

, it is undeniable that immigrants are good for our country. KENDALL CIESEMIER: From the ACLU, this is At Liberty. I'm Kendall Ciesemier, your host. At the end of 2023, migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border hit a record high of 250,000, with a surge of individuals and families entering cities like Chicago, Denver, New York, Houston, and Los Angeles. Despite this, politicians and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle continue to struggle to meet demands and refuse to compromise on border po

licies, leaving the well-being of asylum seekers in jeopardy. In early February, a sweeping supplemental funding package for national security failed in the Senate. This package would have eviscerated protections for people seeking asylum in exchange for unrelated foreign aid by imposing shutdowns to the U.S.-Mexico border and an unprecedented increase in funding for punitive immigration policies through taxpayer dollars, among other harsh measures. We know that cruel immigration policies do not

stop migration. Instead, they simply put more people in danger. As the conversation about border control and immigration becomes steeped in election-year politics, it's imperative for us to mobilize lawmakers and political leaders to pass humane and effective immigration policies that meet the dire needs of the current moment. Here to update us on the state of immigration policy today and its significance as an issue for the election year is Naureen Shah, Deputy Director of Governmental Affairs

for the ACLU's Equality Division. Naureen, welcome to At Liberty and thank you so much for joining me. NAUREEN SHAH: Thanks for having me, Kendall. KENDALL: So, Naureen, I want to start with addressing the current moment that we're sitting in, and I mentioned this in the introduction. The U.S. Border Patrol had nearly 250,000 encounters with migrants crossing into the United States from Mexico in December of 2023. This is according to government statistics. That was the highest monthly total on

record, easily eclipsing the previous peak of about 224,000 encounters in May of 2022. Can you explain where we are in border migration and what the potential cause of this influx is, was this to be expected? NAUREEN: Yeah, we're really talking about a worldwide phenomenon. More people are leaving their homes. More people are on the move than ever before in world history. It's one in 74 people are on the move. KENDALL: Wow. NAUREEN: And for the United States, when people are coming here, it's a

ctually a really small fraction of that one in 74 people. But when they come to the United States they're being met with an antiquated system, a system that hasn't kept pace with the kind of migration patterns that we're seeing today. And unfortunately, they're also being met with razor wire, with buoys with saw blades attached, with hostility. And so what it means at the end of the day is that people who've made a desperate journey, and it's a desperate journey because they felt like it was, it

was more dangerous for them to stay at home than to rest drowning in a river. They're just being met with the idea that, okay, we're going to shut the door in your face. And that's a really hard moment for all of us to see for this nation. And that's a real betrayal of what this country has tried to be in the past. KENDALL: You're right. It is a real betrayal of our values, which in some ways isn't surprising when we think about what we've seen in immigration policy over the last, I don't know,

three years. In specific, I'm talking about Title 42. We saw an end to Title 42 recently. This is the policy that was put in place during the Trump era, during COVID, and didn't end until pretty late into Biden's term. Can you remind us what Title 42 was, why it started, and its impact on border migration as we are experiencing it today? NAUREEN: Yeah, I mean, I've heard people talk about Title 42 is basically dropping a nuclear bomb on our system of asylum protections. It was something that, a

lthough grounded in public health and invoked because of the COVID-19 pandemic, in truth, it was about making it impossible for people to seek asylum here. And strangely, even though the idea was to shut down the border, what we saw was more and more people coming. In fact, 15 out of the 20 months of the highest migration patterns happened when Title 42 was in effect. So it didn't work. And, you know, that's not surprising to somebody like me, who's really living and steeped in the data. It's su

rprising to people who think, well, if you shut down the border people will stop coming. But what we've seen in the United States for decades, what we've seen around the world is that when you try to shut down borders, when you try to punish people for coming to a country, it actually sometimes can result in a blip where numbers drop for a short period, but then more and more people come. And what we've also seen is the only way to bring those numbers down, is to provide people an alternative. P

eople don't want to make that dangerous journey to the southern border. People would rather apply from home. Unfortunately, our antiquated immigration system doesn't give them enough avenues to be able to do that. KENDALL: Thank you for explaining that because I think that you're right that people would assume just at baseline that shutting down ports of entry would prevent people from showing up to the border. And it's, I appreciate the explanation that it's actually offering alternatives that

actually honor the asylum process that could actually fix this situation. I want to talk about the pressure that has been put on Congress to make changes to our immigration system. Last October, the Biden administration submitted an emergency supplemental funding request to Congress to address, in quotes, key national security priorities for fiscal year 2024. With that, they requested over 100 billion in budget for executive departments and agencies to support Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, humani

tarian assistance overall, the submarine, industrial base, and border control. In the time that followed, closed-door bipartisan negotiations took place until the Supplemental Funding Package was announced just on February 4th, so pretty recently. This long-awaited bill proposed the most significant changes to immigration policy in 30 years. And I'm wondering if you can explain to us what these changes were, why it was so monumental, and whether or not we at the ACLU were in support of any of wh

at the bill would have sought to do at the border specifically? NAUREEN: Absolutely. You know, and I lived this recent history. I'm based in Washington, D.C. I was literally pounding the pavement and getting my steps in all across Capitol Hill, going to congressional offices, talking to people about what we feared was in the bill and what should have been in the bill. And here's the thing. We do need to modernize our immigration system. We do need a big immigration reform bill. And when it comes

to the border, there are real solutions that the ACLU is pointing to that would make asylum processing more quick and more fair. We need more immigration judges here in the United States and we do need it to be the case that when you come to the border and you seek asylum it doesn't mean that you're waiting years to get a resolution to your case. That's not fair to anyone. Instead, a lot of what the bill was based on was this theory of deterrence that if we can punish people when they come to t

he United States fewer people will follow. One of the most concerning parts of the bill was an increase in money for immigration detention. Immigration detention, as many of us know who visited immigration detention sites around the country, puts people, ordinary people like you and me, into sometimes extremely dangerous conditions where they are exposed to assault and physical abuse, harassment, arbitrary and in solitary confinement. So now we come to the place where, why would Congress even do

this? Why would the president, President Biden, who campaigned on a fairer and more humane immigration system, why would he ask Congress to pass a bill like that? And why is it connected to Ukraine and Taiwan and all the other national security funding that you mentioned? And that's when it comes down to politics. The idea from the Democratic Party was that if they combined immigration with these other pieces of foreign military assistance that they wanted to get done, the Republicans would bit

e, and the Republicans made a lot of gestures in that direction. But at the end of the day, what happened was this quickly fell apart because former President Trump signaled that he'd rather have immigration and the border as a campaign slogan than as something that was really resolved by Congress and putting political interests first. So unfortunately, where that leaves us is that the Biden administration is considering executive action that would do some of what that border bill, that immigrat

ion deal would have done. And on the other hand, we continue to see former President Trump threatening immigrant communities and people who would seek asylum. KENDALL: Yeah. I mean, it's devolved in such a awful, distasteful way. The Senate, I know, had two days to vote, a.k.a. very little time to read the bill's actual text. I think the fact that it all kind of fell apart in this way really shows that, honestly, almost from both sides, that there was a lot of politicking going on, and just I th

ink this is the attitude that we've seen towards asylum seekers or migrants over the last few years, perhaps even longer than that, extending farther back in our history, to use the border, folks who come to the border, as political pawns. Why do you think that the border is this opportunity for politicians to enact perhaps their worst selves, and to show us their worst selves? And why does it seem that this, despite everyone agreeing that there is a problem here, it seems that it is the most di

fficult thing to actually make any kind of meaningful progress on? NAUREEN: Kendall, I also want to remind everybody that while we do have this horrific recent tradition of villainizing immigrants and asylum seekers, we have a longer tradition as a nation of welcoming those people and really that's a tradition that goes all the way back. I think about the 1980s when I was too young to know this was going on, but I'm from Texas and in Texas communities people were welcoming families that had fled

El Salvador, Guatemala. These are places where there were horrific dictatorships and people were literally running for their lives and churches opened their doors and provided sanctuary to these individuals who were political dissidents and who were just ordinary doctors and lawyers and teachers who had to run away from those regimes. And that's one of the reasons why we talk about sanctuary cities now is because we had a proud tradition of sanctuary. It was grounded in faith and shared values

that Americans had. And unfortunately, we've seen those values turned upside down on their heads by right-wing politicians who, instead of preaching charity and shared humanity and human dignity, really preach the opposite of that. They preach fear and hatred of the stranger. Why is it happening? I think it's all too easy and we've seen this throughout history. It's all too easy to villainize those we don't know. And when people are hurting, they are more likely to want to blame their pain on ot

hers. We all know that immigration is actually really good for this country. It's good for the economy. And there's, it's no surprise that America's businesses lobby for immigration. They would like our immigration system to be modernized. But the reason why we're so far away from that is because these politicians want to pit us against each other. If you look at what most Americans support, the polling shows that most Americans, like, more than 50 percent of the time, sometimes 70%, 80%, most A

mericans want immigration reform that puts more workers into this country on a legal basis, brings people out from the shadows, and ensures that our immigration system actually keeps pace with this century. That would be a nice thing, but we keep- that keeps falling apart and it's falling apart again and again since the 1990s and George W. Bush and the Obama administration now here again under the Biden administration. KENDALL: I feel like we discussed this back in around the 2020 election, Pres

ident Biden's campaign, then campaign promises and that there was this kind of openness or willingness to, like, make progress on the border. Why do you think that's all fallen apart for under the Biden administration in actuality? NAUREEN: Yeah, it's become this major political liability for the Biden administration. And we know that voters list immigration as one of the top issues for them. Fox News does a lot of stories on immigration, and the statistics show that they are doing more stories

on immigration than the MSNBCs of the world. And so that means that the story of immigration that's being told over and over again is one of chaos and resentment rather than one of communities coming together to help those who are arriving. And in my part of the country, in the Washington D.C. area, I see people all the time on my community listserv saying, “Hey, does anybody have a spare queen-size mattress? I've got a refugee family here that could use one.” These are the stories that I think

exemplify the spirit of charity in this country. And they aren't the stories that are being told over and over again on, on the news. And that is why our coverage is skewed. And at the same time, we also have to acknowledge that there are people in American cities who are bearing a lot of the pain of the economy and of a lack of a social safety net. You know, you look at families in New York City, in Los Angeles that are experiencing homelessness, families where the fentanyl crisis has torn them

apart and heartbreaking numbers of Americans dying. And when those people, those families and communities experience that pain, they're looking for solutions and they're not seeing them from our government. And they're being told that the government's problem is that it's helping immigrants instead of helping their neighbors or their family members. And so again, that is why immigration looks like a liability. Take a closer look though, and you see that people like former President Trump, inste

ad of actually offering solutions to those families suffering so much pain would actually leave them, you know, out to dry. KENDALL: Right. NAUREEN: They're peddling hate. They're not actually peddling anything, any assistance for these people. KENDALL: Well, it's always easier to actually not come up with a solution- meaningful solution because, you know, it takes a lot of willpower, takes a lot of determination, and it seems like we just lack a lot of, like, moral willpower in politics these d

ays. I also appreciate you just, like, showcasing our better angels the ways that we as a country or communities throughout this country, both now and throughout history, have been welcoming and encouraging and supportive of immigration and immigrants themselves. I think it's always good to remind folks that's actually what our value system is, because we seem to have lost the plot. The other thing I wanted to kind of pick up on is something that you mentioned, but I want to kind of dig in a lit

tle bit closer. A concerning trend that I'm experiencing, even in conversations with quite liberal friends, to be honest, is their support for Biden closing the border on migrants and asylum seekers after local news stories, as you mentioned, this isn't actually just happening on Fox News, show local politicians taking over community centers, i.e. in Chicago, in already high-need neighborhoods to house the influx of migrants to their cities. The narrative that is being painted by these stories,

and honestly, by what local politicians are doing or not doing, is pitting already marginalized folks against each other to fight for a limited amount of resources. Is this limited resources thing actually a fallacy? And how do these actions feed into creating this overwhelming narrative that there is actually no room available for this influx of folks coming to, our borders? Do these claims have any merit? NAUREEN: You know, part of the problem is that people aren't getting to the places where

there are communities that welcome–would welcome them. There are parts of this country where there just aren't enough workers. And those parts of the country, those mayors have said, “Hey, actually, we are ready to receive migrants. We need these people to come in and they're going to make our economy stronger. They're going to help us revitalize our towns.” And unfortunately, that's not where people are getting to because we have a lack of federal coordination. One thing we've asked the White H

ouse to do is step in and do a better job of getting people to the places where there are communities that want them, where they have family. The other piece of it I keep mentioning is the work permits, you know, when people come to this country, we ought to give them authorization to work. And, you know, when I think about people saying we don't have space, I also think about the ways in which our economy is struggling with the lack of sufficient workers. The labor shortages that this country i

s experiencing are not insurmountable. We know that immigrants can get to work on those jobs and ultimately make our entire workforce stronger and that when they get to work out in the open, when they're legally working, it means that all of us have better access to strong labor protections and strong wages. I also want to go back to something to Kendall, what you said about, you know, some optimism about American values and say so many of us who work at the ACLU are the children of immigrants o

r the grandchildren of immigrants. And my parents immigrated to the United States and didn't realize that they were gonna stay, didn't realize that they were gonna build their lives here. But whether it was in New Jersey or Arkansas or Texas, they met people who welcomed them. And they met people who were quite hostile to them and the color of their skin. But the reason why I am here today is because there were more people who were welcoming than people who were hateful, and I know from my own e

xperiences how much immigrants can bring to this country, their love of this country, and their desire to raise families here and do the work. I think when we step out from the polarized politics of the moment, we all recognize that in our own stories and the stories of our neighbors and our co-workers, and those are the people that we have to keep at the center of the debate, the people themselves who are immigrants, because once you start to hear those stories, it is undeniable that immigrants

are good for our country. It is not just reprehensible; it is  simply untrue when Donald Trump says that immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country. They are part of what makes our country strong. KENDALL: Yeah, I really appreciate you saying that and I think it's really true. And it's always a good reminder, as you mentioned earlier, President Biden is considering taking unilateral action on the border without Congress because Congress couldn't get it done to lower the number of migrant

s crossing the southern border. Among the ideas under discussion are heightening asylum criteria and using a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act to lower the southern border to bar migrants from seeking asylum in between U.S. ports of entry and tying that directive to a trigger, meaning that after a certain number of illegal crossings took place, the border could be shut down. These reports come from anonymous U.S. officials with knowledge of the deliberations. As we speak, both forme

r President Trump and current President Biden are actually at the border today, February 29th. How likely is it that President Biden exerts executive authority on this and what are the implications of such a decision? NAUREEN: I don't know how likely it is, that President Biden actually takes the executive actions that have been reported on asylum, but what I can tell you is that they're not going to help him politically, that the people who want to see him take those actions are people who won'

t be satisfied by anything that's done under the name President Biden, rather than the name President Trump. Because if you're a person who believes that we should be shutting down the border and denying people who are running for their lives the chance to seek asylum here, then your understanding of the situation has really been distorted by, I think, the politics of hate that are so overwhelming in our country. And what will happen is that the supporters of former President Trump will distort

whatever Biden says that he's doing and simply say it's not enough, and that will be the new story. And we will continue to see large numbers of people seeking entry to the United States, and that will again contribute to the story of crisis, the narrative of chaos that always adheres to the benefit of Trump and never to Biden. And another way of putting it is that no matter what Biden does on the border, former President Trump's allies will always characterize it as open borders. The facts don'

t really matter for that narrative. So we think it's a political trap for the president. We hope he doesn't take that bait. We know that there are real solutions that he could be asking Congress to enact and that he also could be doing himself. And those real solutions are ones that we think would actually help, help manage the border. They include more resources for processing people who are coming and making asylum applications. More resources for adjudication of applications for once people a

re here inside the United States and better coordination to get people who are entering the United States to the parts of the country where they have networks to support them and where they have family to support them. KENDALL: I was just about to ask you, Naureen, what do we recommend that President Biden do, but you went ahead and gave that to us. So, thank you for that. I think you make a really interesting point that— and also a very smart political point that if Biden were to kind of go ahe

ad with these executive actions that Trump- still because we are in a political time, because there we are in an election year, because former President Trump has a really robust history of using the border for his political gain. It could still backfire. It still couldn't work. So that kind of leaves us where we're at now, which is that we're kind of waiting to see what happens. We are also looking forward, are in this election year, how do you think that this issue of immigration will continue

to drive this year's presidential race? NAUREEN: What we've seen so far is former President Trump making a series of threats about what he would do to our immigrant neighbors and loved ones and communities in this country, and they include mass raids, enormous detention sites and camps across our country vetting people who enter the country basically so that there's an ideological test for whether or not you can come into this country. And what I often tell my friends and family who say, you kn

ow, what's the real difference between these two parties at this point on anything, including on immigration, is that former President Trump and his supporters, they're coming for us. They're coming for people who look like me. They resent our existence here in the United States. They resent the prosperity of immigrants who have settled here. They will do everything they can in the four years if former President Trump is reelected. Everything they can to not only make it extremely dangerous to b

e an immigrant but extremely dangerous to have been an immigrant and to have family who are immigrants. That's their vision, their very disturbing vision for this country. So I expect to see former President Trump continue touting that vision. Unfortunately, that appeals to his base and he doesn't seem to have the sense to alter that much for when he's talking to people who aren't part of his base. I hope that people really keep that in their line of sight that he's promising the largest domesti

c deportation operation in our country's history. He's promising to militarize deportations. He wants to use our nation's soldiers to round up and go after people in our immigrant communities. You know, I think it's around one in 15 families in this country are mixed status, meaning that somebody has a grandmother or a husband or a cousin who's living with them who is undocumented and they are all in the crosshairs of a future Trump administration. And that is one of the things that I'm going to

keep focused on as we continue to fight for immigrant justice through this election season. KENDALL: All extremely salient points, Naureen. It's very helpful to hear the ways in which you communicate with your loved ones, because I think that can be a guide for folks who are listening who might be having those same kinds of conversations. It's a guide for me in addressing people's concerns when I have folks texting me, you know, about these very issues. With that, I want to turn to what we can

all do in this moment right now. You know, oftentimes we feel very powerless. That is on purpose, folks want to make us feel powerless so that we are complacent and don't do anything. With this supplemental funding package that has kind of fallen apart and the potential unilateral action from the president hanging now in the balance, migrants are continuing to face harsh realities daily in Texas, for example, they've spent over 148 million busing migrants to other parts of the country. And Gover

nor Greg Abbott says he will continue to do so, which is just, I think, really cruel. In the absence of federal improvements, what can be done to support migrants in states all across the country right now? NAUREEN: Well, one thing I do want to say is that it's really important for people to reach out to their member of Congress to weigh in, even though the supplemental funding bill is not one that we think could pass now. We know that members of Congress, when it comes to the issue of immigrati

on, overwhelmingly hear from the anti-immigrant crowd and not from people who believe that immigrants are an asset to our country. Immigrants are their family and their coworkers. So asking your member of Congress for a meeting and saying, “Hey, I want to sit down with you and share my views on immigration and immigrants.” And in fact, I recently did this myself in my personal capacity. I asked my member of Congress to have dinner with me and talk about issues. And you'll be surprised that they

say yes, I got together a group of people, a group of neighbors, and they said, let's get eight people together and just ask for a meeting. And it took us two months to get a meeting, but we got a meeting and we sat down over, you know, grape leaves and hummus at a local restaurant and just talked and really got our member of Congress to be candid with us. And your member of Congress needs to feel accountable to you as a constituent, whether it's your senator or your house member. At the end of

the day, they need to have relationships with people who care about what's going on so that they are grounded in that reality of, here's what real people say. Not a New York Times columnist, not a pundit on it on MSNBC, but your actual constituent. Yours is the voice that they care about. Frankly, and I tell people this all the time, they care a lot more about your voice then they care about my voice as a lobbyist for the ACLU. They care about constituents. You have a lot of power. And so the mo

st important thing that you can do as a constituent is to get in touch with your member of Congress and make them talk to you. And whether it's making a phone call or requesting a meeting, do it as many times as you feel like you have the time to do because that's what's going to make the difference. And if you can't talk to the member of Congress, talk to their staff. Help change somebody's mind. The other things that we can be doing on this issue is volunteering and providing goods and service

s to people who are refugees and asylum seekers. And there are ways to do this through Facebook moms groups and definitely local faith organizations. There are enclaves around the country of recently arrived asylum seekers and immigrants from countries like Venezuela, from Afghanistan. And these people need basic things like bicycles and mattresses and toasters. And so when you look on Facebook, you'll see that, you know, lots of people are organizing to get them those things. And it feels reall

y good to donate to those kinds of families that just need to get up on their feet. And that's one really tangible way we can help. KENDALL: Naureen, you're so cool. So cool for like having dinner with your congressperson and donating a mattress or a toaster, a bike, like these are amazing ideas. I think you're exactly right that oftentimes we feel very disconnected from our representatives but and we often forget that we do give them their job so they are accountable to us and I think, you know

, breaking that down and saying, actually, I did it myself. You can do it too. So very cool and really appreciate just like the personal context there. I think you've given us a lot to think about. You've certainly helped kind of explain the struggle and the forces at play and the politics of it all and the ways that we can kind of clear all of that from our consciousness and remember our values when it comes to immigration and our own personal histories as well. So really appreciate your time t

oday Naureen. This was lovely. NAUREEN: You're welcome. It's good to be on. KENDALL: Thanks so much for listening. If you appreciated this episode, please subscribe to At Liberty wherever you get your podcasts and rate and review the show. We really appreciate your feedback. Until next week, stay strong. At Liberty is a production of the ACLU, produced by me, Kendall Ciesemier, and Vanessa Handy. This episode was edited by the folks at Ultraviolet Audio. Genesis Magpayo is our intern.