Biden opposed lifting Trump immigration bans but caved to left’s demands

WASHINGTON – President Biden was ready to renege on his 2020 campaign promises to open the US southern border to thousands more migrants during furious meltdowns just two months into his administration, a new book says.

From the start of his presidency, Biden’s “angry moods made for uncomfortable meetings” about the border crisis, according to Franklin Foer’s explosive new tome, “The Last Politician.”

On the campaign trail, Biden had promised “to commit himself to a wholesale reversal of Trump immigration policy” to win the election, the book says. But privately, he “hated to see how his campaign proposals were being translated into policy,” Foer writes.

For example, Trump set a historic cap to allow just 15,000 refugees into the country per year, and Biden – despite his campaign claims – was hesitant to change it, the writer says.

“Biden hadn’t realized that reforms would go so far,” Foer writes. “When he learned that ICE might stop targeting fentanyl dealers, sex offenders and other felons, he exploded in anger.”

Since taking office, Biden has suffered dismal approval ratings for his handling of the immigration crisis.

By March 2021, Customs and Border Patrol agents were seeing double the amount of migrants illegally crossing the border since that January when he took office, according to CBP data.

The new presidential administration was already scrambling at the time to deal with the thousands of child migrants piling into overcrowded CBP facilities, “sleeping on gym mats covered by foil sheets, deprived of showers” for weeks on end. But the liberal left, which had rallied around calls to “Abolish ICE,” demanded Biden open US borders further, according to the book.

“The issue happened to be the place where he was most out of step with his evolving party’s leftward trajectory,” Foer says. “With the surge of children, Biden was no longer sure that he wanted to follow through on other immigration promises.”

On Feb. 12, his administration told Congress that Biden would not cancel Trump’s cap and instead raise it from 15,000 to 62,500 refugees – a move Foer calls “an important symbolic reversal.” Now, all Biden had to do was approve the funding for it, “but in his cantankerous mood, he doubted whether he should.

“They want me to increase the number of people in the country, but that’s kind of crazy,” he told Secretary of State Antony Blinken, according to the book.

Blinken, “a passionate proponent of raising the cap,” objected to Biden’s waffling on the matter, enraging the president so much that “his obstinacy [to raising immigration caps] deterred aides who might have otherwise challenged him, for fear of wasting precious capital on a hopeless fight,” Foer writes.

“[Biden] said that voters would never appreciate the difference between refugees fleeing tyranny and economic migrants from Central American. Since he was already getting pulverized on immigration, boosting the cap would just make things worse,” the book says.

On April 16, 2021, the White House announced that Biden would keep Trump’s refugee cap through the remainder of the fiscal year, which would end on Sept. 30, but “the cries of betrayal were instantaneous” from the left, Foer said.

Deterred by the president’s stubbornness, then-Biden’s chief domestic policy adviser, Susan Rice, avoided scheduling any meetings to address the cap, but Biden kept “raising the subject himself … usually with an edge of aggression,” the book says.

“He moaned, ‘Can you believe that they want me to go back to those high numbers?’ ” Foer writes. “At a moment like that, Susan Rice would shoot a glance across the room, which told aides, ‘Don’t take the bait.’ “

Later, when longtime Biden staffer Amy Pope told the president there was enough money to cover the costs of resettling dramatically more refugees, he replied skeptically, “How can you tell me that the same guys that can’t manage children coming are going to manage 125,000 refugees.”

Prompting Biden’s fury again, Pope argued there was “symbolic value in keeping this number [of refugees] high,” which would be “important for [his] legacy.”

“‘I don’t care about my legacy,’ Biden shot back,” Foer writes.

After months of wrestling with his progressive advisers, Biden ultimately agreed to fund the annual resettlement of up to125,000 migrants in the US – with Pope’s promise “that we’re doing right by these people.”

Later, his administration would target another Trump immigration policy – Title 42, which allowed border patrol agents to remove migrants who illegally crossed the border on health grounds related to the onset of the pandemic.

While Biden had flirted with keeping it in place, his administration ended up bashing the policy. It ultimately expired in May after a judge ultimately ruled that the policy should end alongside what the government considered the official end of the pandemic.

Illegal immigration is now up roughly 300% since the final year of the Trump administration. As of July 31, Border Patrol agents had reported 2.55 million encounters with migrants attempting to enter the country illegally in fiscal year 2023 – an increase from just 646,822 in 2020.