On Sunday’s Last Week Tonight, John Oliver examined Joe Biden’s record on immigration, particularly with migrants seeking asylum at the southern border, which saw migrant encounters reach an all-time high last year.
As a presidential candidate, Biden promised to undo the damage of the Trump presidency, such as family separation and persecution of so-called Dreamers brought to the US as children by undocumented parents. “To me, it’s all about family, beginning, middle and end,” he said in one interview.
“It is worth remembering that even if Biden wasn’t your favorite candidate, even if he was your least favorite candidate, after four years of Trump, that was pretty refreshing,” said Oliver. “It’s like wandering through the Sahara desert for four years and all of a sudden seeing a Panera. I mean, it’s not necessarily paradise in its own right, but compared with what you just went through, you would kill for an asiago turkey sandwich and a lemonade, no question.”
But “when it comes to the southern border, Biden has disappointed in a lot of ways”, said Oliver, though not because he’s opened the country to an “invasion”, as Republicans have repeatedly alleged. “It’s actually, in many ways, the opposite,” he continued. “Many migrants, including asylum seekers, are finding it impossible to access this country through our ports of entry, and the conditions that they’re facing are dire.”
There is a massive logjam at the border, with shelters and detention centers in border cities at capacity. Last month, at least 40 people died when a migrant center in Mexico caught fire. “Frustratingly, a lot of this has been exacerbated by US policies that are well within Biden’s powers to remedy,” said Oliver. “And yet, he hasn’t.”
To Biden’s credit, he created a taskforce to reunite migrant families separated by Trump, added protections to Daca, and suspended the Remain in Mexico policy, “and yet, there remain huge numbers of people stuck just south of the border in camps that look an awful lot like the ones that were there during Trump”, said Oliver.
This is primarily due to an action called title 42, an arcane public health measure which, when invoked, allows the US to expel migrants for any reason, including those seeking legal asylum, as a threat to public health.
The Trump administration invoked title 42, long championed by the anti-immigrant Trump aide Stephen Miller, during the pandemic, even though the CDC said there was “no evidence” that the action would slow the coronavirus.
“You would hope that upon taking office, Biden would move as fast as possible to get rid of it,” said Oliver. “But instead, his administration has been all over the place,” with the secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas, citing title 42 as a “public health imperative” a few months into his presidency.
“Except it wasn’t a public health imperative, and everyone knew it,” said Oliver.
The administration kept title 42 in place for several months, even defending it in court. Then they attempted to end it, but a federal judge blocked those efforts. The administration has issued humanitarian exemptions to title 42 to a fraction of migrants seeking asylum at the border, but has faced criticism for favoring white migrants fleeing war in Ukraine over those from countries such as Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.
As a result, people are stuck at the border under increasingly dire condition – more than 890 migrants died along the border in 2022, the most dangerous year since tracking began.
Title 42 may be about to expire with the end of the national Covid public health emergency on 11 May, but migrants now face a new obstacle thanks to a Biden administration policy requiring asylum appointments to be made via a new government app.
At present, about 740 people reserve appointments per day, but because far more people need them, a day’s appointments can run out within minutes, leading many to brand the app “asylum Ticketmaster”.
To make matters worse, many asylum seekers have outdated cellphones which don’t support the app, if they have them at all, and the app’s facial recognition technology struggles to perceive darker skin tones. “Given the history of everything that has happened in this country ever, it is hard to think of anything more on brand than a US Immigration app that scans and your face and says ‘not white enough’,” Oliver noted.
“If and when title 42 expires next month, it seems we’re not going back to the way that things were before Trump,” said Oliver, noting a proposed rule which would require migrants who crossed through another country to seek asylum there first, which is a modified Trump policy. “We’re just entering a different phase of an immigration dystopia, particularly for asylum seekers.”
Oliver proposed restoring the right to asylum from title 42, as well as scaling up capacity of the entire US immigration system, from courts (which have a backlog of 2m cases) to shelters. “We badly need actual immigration reform, which means congressional action,” he said. “Until it does, our immigration system will remain fundamentally broken. But that is no excuse for making things even worse with bad policy and shitty apps.”
“The fact is, migrants are going to keep seeking asylum in this country, as they have every legal right to do,” he concluded. “And we need to make a choice in whether we are comfortable to continue leaving so many of them in squalor and danger at the border, or whether we’re willing to finally fulfill our nation’s promise of offering them a safer, more hopeful life in a free country.”
