WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden was livid.
He had been in office only two months at the time, and there was already a crisis at the southwest border. Thousands of migrant children were jammed into unsanitary Border Patrol stations. Republicans were accusing Biden of flinging open the borders. And his aides were blaming one another.
Biden came into office promising to dismantle what he described as the inhumane immigration policies of former President Donald Trump. But for much of Biden’s presidency so far, the White House has been divided by furious debates over how — and whether — to proceed in the face of a surge of migrants crossing the southwest border.
Senior aides have been battling one another over how quickly to roll back the most restrictive policies and what kind of system would best replace them.
Now Biden finds himself the target of attacks from all sides: Immigration activists accuse him of failing to prioritize the human rights of millions of immigrants. Conservatives have pointed to surges of migrants at the border as evidence that the president is weak and ineffective. And some moderate Democrats now fear that lifting Trump-era border restrictions could hurt them politically.
This account of the Biden administration’s handling of the border over the past 15 months is based on interviews with 20 current and former officials, lawmakers and activists, most of whom requested anonymity to discuss private deliberations.
Biden came into office with high hopes, saying he wanted a system that would allow the United States to determine, in a more compassionate way, which migrants should be allowed to stay in the country. He recruited a team of immigration advocates and others eager to put in place the humane system they had envisioned for years. But the slow pace of change has left some of Biden’s longtime allies doubting his commitment and wondering whether he is more interested in keeping the highly charged issue from dominating his presidency.
Virtually all of the aides who came on board early in the administration have left the White House, frustrated by what they describe as repeated fights with some of the president’s most senior advisers over whether to lift Trump-era policies. Even some of Biden’s more enforcement-minded aides have departed.
Ron Klain issued a warning to his staff last summer.
Klain, the White House chief of staff, gathered senior aides, including Susan Rice, the president’s domestic policy adviser; Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, the homeland security adviser; and Amy Pope, the top migration adviser. Klain told them they needed to make sure the administration was not pandering to people who wanted an immediate end to Trump-era border restrictions.
If they did not find a way to deter soaring illegal crossings at the southwest border, he said, accusations about border chaos would grow worse, anger moderate voters and potentially sink the party during the 2022 midterms.
As border crossings increased, disagreements erupted over how quickly to dismantle Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and what to replace them with.
Record numbers of migrants, including people driven out of their homes in Central America by the economic effects of the pandemic, gangs and natural disasters, surged to the border last summer, in part enticed by Biden’s promise of a less harsh approach to immigration than that of his predecessor. About 214,000 migrants were taken into custody in July 2021 — the first time that many people had been apprehended in a single month in more than two decades.
Biden has taken a series of actions to reverse his predecessor’s policies. He halted construction of the border wall, created a task force to reunite families separated at the border and reversed Trump’s ban on considering domestic violence or gang violence as a basis for asylum. He also proposed sweeping legislation to overhaul the nation’s immigration system, though it has stalled in Congress.
Despite those actions, the infighting among the president’s aides continued.