President Joe Biden’s announcement on Tuesday of an executive action that would allow him to temporarily shut down the US-Mexico border to asylum seekers appears intended to shore up voters ahead of this November’s election, as increasing numbers of Americans view immigration as their top issue.
But it placed the president once again at odds with the progessive wing of his party, a new point of contention after many vehemently disgreed with him on his support for Israel amid its war against Hamas in Gaza, which has led to almost 35,000 Palestinian deaths, many of them women and children.
The new action would allow for Biden to halt the processing of new asylum claims if more than 2,500 people cross the southern border in one day and would be dropped if crossings fell below 1,500 a day.
Biden’s order is essentially the shards of a bipartisan immigration deal which died in Congress earlier this year after Donald Trump put pressure on Republicans to back out of it. Even then, progressives had a difficult time swallowing that measure, with New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez telling The Independent that “we are, in a lot of ways, contributing to an even worsening border crisis with this bill.”
There was little reassurance before Tuesday’s announcement.
“I’ll have to read the text of it, but I'm certainly concerned about any enforcement, executive orders,” Ocasio-Cortez told The Independent on Monday.
In recent months, Ocasio-Cortez has had to balance supporting Biden while he has occasionally taken steps that have frustrated progressives. As the co-author of the Green New Deal, she appeared with him for an Earth Day celebration touting his record on the environment even after he approved the Willow Project, a major oil drilling site in Alaska.
Progressives now have to come to grips with the fact that Biden is planning to severely restrict immigration, which polling shows Americans consider a major problem.
But progressives, particularly Hispanic Democrats, fear that focusing solely on enforcement moves the pendulum too far - and plays into the hands of Republicans. That’s a far cry from a decade ago when Democrats and Republicans talked about tying border security to a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
“Now we're at a place where instead of having Republicans have to come to the table and compromise on immigrant rights, we're basically giving the right wing some of the things that they want without delivering for our communities,” Texas Representative Greg Casar, the whip of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told The Independent.
Similarly, Senator Alex Padilla of California, a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, expressed concern that provisions in Biden’s action was becoming the Democratic default line on immigration.
“This should not be the starting point in the next round of negotiations,” he told The Independent on Monday.
For the past two years, Biden has offered numerous olive branches to progressive Democrats after they chose both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in the 2020 primary over him. To show that he was serious about having them in his coalition, Biden enacted massive student loan forgiveness, even after the Supreme Court blocked his efforts; passed the most important climate legislation in US history; and expanded the Child Tax Credit to slash child poverty.
But progressives may find themselves taking more hits as the campaign season goes on. Traditionally, candidates of both parties tend to move more toward the center as a means of appealing to moderate and swing voters - though Trump seems to be in no mood to appeal to anyone other than his most faithful supporters.
And despite the fact that public opinion has turned on Israel, Biden has shown little willingness to shift course in his ardent support.
When Sanders lost the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, progressives realized the majority of the party remained moderate. Now, they are coming to grips with the fact much of the country has moved away from them on immigration, which makes it more difficult for them to influence Biden on the border.
