Joe Biden will this week sign an executive order to temporarily close the southern US border to asylum seekers in a sharp political U-turn aimed at winning support on a key voter concern in a presidential election year.
The US president is expected to sign the order as early as Tuesday to seal the border with Mexico to migrants when numbers of asylum claimants rise above a daily threshold of 2,500.
Mayors of several US border cities are expected to be present in the White House for Bidenās announcement.
Bidenās move echoes a similar approach adopted by Donald Trump in 2018 when he was president and reverses his one-time philosophical opposition to his predecessorās hostility to migrants. When he was a presidential candidate, Biden denounced Trumpās policy, saying it upended decades of US asylum law.
He has been forced to change course as the number of asylum seekers coming through the US-Mexico border has surged during his presidency, with opinion polls consistently showing immigration to be at or near the top of votersā concerns, ahead of inflation and the economy.
An attempt by the White House to cobble together legislation tightening border restrictions by tying it to aid to Ukraine and Israel failed earlier this year after Republican lawmakers withdrew support, apparently at the urging of Trump, who did not want Biden to claim credit for resolving an issue he has attempted to make his own.
According to CBS, which broke the story, Bidenās executive order will enable US immigration officials to quickly deport migrants who enter the country illegally without processing their asylum claims.
Controversially, it will rely on a presidential authority known as 212 (f) which became infamous during Trumpās presidency because of its use to enforce certain immigration restrictions, including travel bans from Muslim countries.
Like Trumpās restrictions, Bidenās order is likely to face legal challenges.
Migration at the southern border surged to record numbers at the end of last year. But the order comes at a moment when the number of migrants crossing from Mexico is down in the past six months, a trend attributed to stronger enforcement on the part of the Mexican authorities but which is not expected to sustain itself.
An estimated 179,000 āborder encountersā were recorded in April, according to US Customs and Border Protection figures, compared with a record high of 302,000 last December. More than 3,500 migrants were said to have crossed various points along the 2,000-mile border illegally on Sunday alone.
Biden initially rolled back Trumpās restrictive border policies after taking office in January 2021, issuing orders to freeze his predecessorās border wall construction and reissuing protections set up under the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) scheme originally adopted by the Barack Obama White House.
Biden suspended Trumpās Remain in Mexico policy ā whereby asylum seekers were forced to wait in Mexico while their US immigration claims were being considered ā on the first day of his administration before the homeland security department formally cancelled it months later. The US supreme court subsequently upheld Bidenās approach following a lower court ruling against it.
When Trumpās policy was in operation, Biden denounced it, saying: āThis is the first president in the history of the United States of America [under whom] anybody seeking asylum has to do it in another country. Thatās never happened before.ā
A recent Associated Press poll showed about two-thirds of voters, including 40% of Democrats, disapproved of Bidenās handling of the southern border.
Single issue voters donāt really exist.
No one cares about a single thing in their own country and nothing else.
But what often happens with large protests, specific about civil/human rights, is when a lot of people unite under one cause, others try to divide them.
Because when people unify around one thing, they tend to work together on the next thing.
If youāre not careful, before you know it progress is happeningā¦
And a lot of very rich people donāt like progress
They absolutely do exist. The GOP built their base on cobbling those voters together into one force. As long as they make empty gestures to their variety of issues, their SIVs keep in line no matter what other horrid shit they do. Itās taken a much more sinister bent, lately, but the core is still there.
Dems have the reverse issue - voters declaring they wonāt support them if they donāt address one issue, with the biggest and latest being the invasion of Palestine. There are absolutely voters out there that will ignore the rest of the good things done by their candidate, or worse, ignore how things will just get worse without them, all because of one little grievance. Dems have always had a bit of a purity test problem, but itās multiplied into a much bigger problem this cycle.
And all this said, Iām not dismissing your point that division is a serious issue, but not working together because of these singular issues is a big part of the problem.