Biden Didn't Cause the Border Crisis

Biden increased enforcement, but America's hot labor market beat the crackdown

Below is a guest post written by my colleague David J. Bier, the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute. This is the first guest post written by David (or anybody else for that matter) for this Substack, but expect more in the future.

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During President Biden’s term, Border Patrol arrested an unprecedented number of immigrants who crossed illegally into the United States. Many people believe President Biden caused this increase in migration by reducing border enforcement. However, data obtained by the Cato Institute through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests challenges this narrative. In fact, the border crisis began before Biden took office and ended before he left.

From his administration’s first day, Biden actually increased border enforcement: arrests, detentions, and removals of border crossers all increased. It failed to deter crossers, and they overwhelmed the Border Patrol anyway. The prevailing narrative that blames Biden overlooks the real causes of the crisis: America’s robust labor market and bad immigration policies that incentivized illegal entries. However, Trump, not Biden, mostly started those bad policies. Biden eventually phased out most of them; he increased legal migration, and as the labor market cooled, the problem dissipated.

Summary

The main takeaways are:

• Illegal immigration had already increased to a 21-year high by December 2020 before Biden came into office.

• Biden immediately started increasing expulsions from his first day in office.

• Biden tripled interior detention and increased border detention 12-fold.

• Biden increased air removal flights by 55 percent over 2020 levels.

• Biden negotiated broader expulsion deals with foreign countries than Trump.

• Biden got many foreign countries to carry out crackdowns on illegal and legal migration.

• Biden removed or expelled 3.3 million border crossers—3 times as many as Trump.

• Biden even managed to remove a similar percentage of crossers as Trump’s 4 years.

Despite Biden’s historic crackdown:

• Expulsions did not deter migrants, even among demographics universally expelled.

• Evasions of Border Patrol increased as rapidly as Border Patrol arrests, implying that releases did not cause the crisis and that many people did not want Border Patrol to catch them but were undeterred by the threat.

• Releases occurred not because Biden cut removals but because migration grew faster than the administration could increase them.

• As a result, releases only occurred among specific demographic groups and in specific areas where removals were logistically complicated.

• Biden could not easily remove groups to Mexico, like families, children, and immigrants from distant countries who were arrested in record numbers.

The actual causes of the increases in illegal immigration were:

• Unprecedented labor demand, which incentivized and funded migration from around the world: From February 2021 to August 2024, there were more open jobs each month than in any month before Biden’s term began. During this time, economies worldwide were recovering far less quickly than the United States. As labor demand subsided in 2024, immigration fell.

• Unprecedented access to information about migration through the Internet and social media: Internet access rose rapidly from 2018 to 2021, nearly doubling in Central America and reaching unprecedented highs in South America. Social media platforms gave people step-by-step instructions on migrating and connected them directly with smugglers. This opened migration from around the world—which contributed to the number of releases.

• Novel and perverse enforcement policies: The Title 42 expulsion policy incentivized repeat crossings by returning people to Mexico, where they could immediately attempt to re-enter the United States. Title 42 also cut off access to asylum, incentivizing more Border Patrol evasions.

• Novel and perverse legal migration policies: Title 42 and related pandemic restrictions not only banned asylum for people who crossed illegally but also prohibited legal entries by asylum seekers, including demographic groups that had traditionally always entered legally, like Haitians, Cubans, and Mexican families. Biden eventually increased legal entries by these groups and others, limiting the crisis's extent and ultimately contributing to its end.

The border crisis did not end because Biden signed an executive order in June 2024. If he had signed his border executive order in 2021, it would have merely duplicated what Title 42 was already doing: ban asylum. Moreover, the border executive order did not significantly change the downward trend in arrivals in 2024, which had already fallen in half during the 5 months before he signed it. Finally, the order did not increase removals at all. Rather, the crisis primarily ended because labor demand subsided significantly and because Biden expanded legal migration.

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Biden Did Not Cut Enforcement

The FOIA data give a precise picture of migration and Biden’s actions when he first arrived in office. The central argument of those who blame Biden for the surge in migration is that Biden cut enforcement, which then caused a later rise in arrests. Biden did cancel some of Trump’s policies, but he just accomplished more removals using different authorities. As Biden said in December 2020—before he came into office—he did not want to rescind Trump’s Title 42 expulsion policy because “the last thing we need is … 2 million at the border.”

Biden did not end Title 42, which allowed for the expulsions of immigrants even if they were requesting asylum. Daily expulsions at the border grew from inauguration day onward, eventually doubling even before the end of April 2021. Biden did terminate the “Remain in Mexico” policy, which had returned some migrants to Mexico to await their asylum hearings in the US. However, that is a change in enforcement procedure, not enforcement outcome. By April 2021, Biden was already returning over 140 times as many immigrants per day to Mexico under Title 42 as were being returned to Mexico under Remain in Mexico in early January 2021. Precisely zero Central Americans were returned under Remain in Mexico in January 2021, and their arrests grew the fastest in 2021.

Taking a broader perspective, the level of border enforcement achieved under Biden was unmatched by any month under Trump—including 2019, when Remain in Mexico was in effect. At no point was Remain in Mexico a majority of forced departures from the border. It was a relatively small program compared to Title 42. The whole purpose of the immigration enforcement apparatus is removals, and whatever else he did, Biden significantly increased the number of recent border crossers forced out.

Regardless, Biden later reinstated Remain in Mexico—at a level four times higher than the January 2021 level and negotiated the acceptance of more nationalities than Trump did—and illegal immigration did not fall during this period. Biden’s administration ultimately canceled Remain in Mexico again because, as the Washington Post reported, “Remain in Mexico was cumbersome and inefficient, requiring additional layers of paperwork and complex logistics.” Moreover, canceling Remain in Mexico cannot explain the rise in migration among groups that were never even subject to it: most prominently, Mexicans, unaccompanied children, Haitians, and all other non-Spanish-speaking nationalities.

Biden also ended another dormant Trump policy: the Asylum Cooperative Agreements with El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. This policy, which allowed for the removal of asylum seekers from one country to a “safe third country,” had not been used since March 2020. The Salvadoran and Honduran agreements never took effect, and during two months the Guatemalan policy was in effect, only 945 people were sent there: not even morning’s worth of arrivals in 2021. Regardless, there was no reason to use the policy since Title 42 had suspended asylum, and it was not less expensive or logistically difficult to expel someone to Guatemala than to El Salvador or Honduras. It was even easier to send them to Mexico, which is what was done.

Biden’s other enforcement changes—such as reducing interior enforcement—were for the express purpose of increasing border enforcement. For instance, the so-called “deportation moratorium” memorandum was explicitly justified by the need to “surge resources to the border,” and it only limited deportations from the interior (and a court never allowed it to go into effect anyway). Limiting formal “deportations” wouldn’t have mattered for the border anyway since Border Patrol could expel people under Title 42.

Border Releases Were a Consequence, Not the Cause, of the Crisis

Biden not only used Title 42, but he further justified and codified its use in regulations, and he defended those regulations in court, appealing repeated court decisions that its use was illegal. However, expulsions did not deter migration. Border Patrol arrests grew faster than the number of expulsions, so the percentage of crossers that Border Patrol expelled fell. This meant some crossers were released into the United States.

Biden’s critics claim that migration grew because Biden cut enforcement. If true, the percentage of border crossers removed should have initially declined because removals fell. But this never happened. Instead, we see that Biden increased removals but this did not deter crossings, which grew even faster than enforcement. In other words, higher migration caused releases, not fewer removals.

We can clearly see that higher illegal migration was not caused by releases or too few expulsions when tracking the migration of those Biden was able to expel: single adults (adults not traveling with children) from Mexico and northern Central America. They were virtually never released, yet their numbers continued to rise. As the figure shows, arrests in this demographic had already tripled from December 2019 to December 2020—before Biden came into office—ultimately increasing fivefold over that 2019 level. It is impossible to claim that failure to expel people caused increased migration when the Border Patrol saw fivefold increases in arrests among demographic groups who were universally expelled.

Releases cannot explain why evasions of Border Patrol (“gotaways”) also spiked. Evasions prove that Title 42 expulsions did deter some crossers from just turning themselves in, but they did not deter them from coming.

Biden clearly was not opposed to removing people. He was removing hundreds of thousands, so why did higher migration mean more releases? What were the logistical obstacles to Biden increasing removals as much as arrivals? There were essentially three factors:

1. Mexico’s willingness and capacity to accept returns.

2. The administration’s capacity to detain and remove people.

3. The willingness of other countries to accept removals.

In early 2021, when some migrants were being released, Mexico’s willingness and capacity to accept expulsions was the main factor. As President Biden stated in March 2021, “they should all be going back, all be going back.” Why weren’t they? Biden explained: “Mexico is refusing to take [some families] back.”

If the Biden administration had changed policy, it would have affected the entire border. Instead, families were released in a single sector: the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. Here’s why: in November 2020, Mexico passed a new law effective January 11, 2021, that required Mexican state governments to provide housing and care for child migrants they encounter. Mexican immigration service officials decided how to implement the law on January 22, 2021, and within two days, all the shelters in the Mexican state across from the Rio Grande Valley sector (Tamaulipas) were filled up.

Biden did not sit on his hands about this situation. By February 9, he had opened a new tent detention facility to hold families longer. In April, he opened three more. He increased Border Patrol detention by 12-fold from January to July 2021. ICE began to fly families on “lateral removal flights” to California and Arizona to expel them to Mexican states with the capacity to receive them. These actions started to increase the expulsion rate for families by mid-February. By early March, Biden negotiated a deal with Mexico to accept more families in exchange for vaccine access. However, new arrivals quickly eclipsed Mexico’s higher threshold and the Border Patrol’s increased detention capacity.

Beyond more detention, Biden:

• sent 1,500 National Guard troops to the border;

• reassigned ICE agents to the border;

• hired processing coordinators to free up Border Patrol agents to carry out expulsions;

• sent asylum officers to conduct fear screenings with individuals in border detention; and

• created a special family docket for expedited immigration court hearings.

Biden had a much more significant complication for his goal of closed borders than Central American families—namely, immigrants from outside of Mexico and northern Central America (Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador). The deal that Trump struck with Mexico on Title 42 did not allow for the expulsion of immigrants other than these four nationalities to Mexico. The only way that they could be expelled is by air to their home countries.

More problematically still, several countries, including Venezuela and Cuba, were refusing to accept deportation flights from the United States, making it impossible to remove them. Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz explained this situation to Congress, but they blamed the Biden administration’s “policy of release” anyway.

Biden tried to detain as many crossers as he could in long-term Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities away from the border pending removal. At no point was Biden detaining fewer people than when Trump left office. Biden reversed the COVID-19 person limits on ICE detention that Trump imposed, allowing ICE to further increase detention in 2022, and he ultimately increased ICE detention to a level nearly three times what he inherited from Trump. However, the detention capacity of just 25,000 to 40,000 was never close to sufficient to detain the 4 million border crossers who entered illegally and were not removed under the Biden administration.

Biden did cancel long-term family ICE detention, but 1) he increased detention of families at the border, and 2) had he reinstated family detention, he would have had to release twice as many single adults as the number of families he detained because family detention is twice as expensive. This would have effectively reduced detention. In any case, since there were only about 3,000 beds available, most families were released even under Trump in 2019.

Why is it necessary to detain people before removal? Why couldn’t Border Patrol just put these people on planes and fly them immediately to their home countries? For one thing, Border Patrol has no removal planes, so they must transfer people to ICE for air removals, and it is not as if there are planes just sitting around waiting for people to enter them. Moreover, ICE has planes to conduct about 130 flights per month, with an average of about 120 deportees on board each flight, implying a limit of 190,000 air removals per year. In fact, Border Patrol arrested 1.5 million non-Mexicans in 2022 and 2023—with another 1 million in 2024. Even taking out the northern Central Americans who could be at least sometimes expelled to Mexico, the totals were 1 million in 2022 and 2023—with 700,000 in 2024.

Biden increased US removal flights by 55 percent during his term. He extended unprecedented contracts with airplane charter companies when the prior contract lapsed. However, it was impossible for ICE to remove as many people as were arriving with its current resources by air.

Biden also did everything he could to stop immigrants from ever crossing the border. Among his more than 120 actions:

• He convinced Mexico to ban visa-free legal entries into Mexico for Ecuadorians, Brazilians, and Venezuelans.

• He convinced Belize and Costa Rica to ban Venezuelans as well, cutting off alternative flights.

• He convinced Colombia to accept deportation flights of Venezuelans (Jan. 2022).

• He negotiated the reopening of Cuba (Nov. 2022) and China (July 2024) to US deportation flights.

• He even briefly obtained consent from the Maduro regime for deportations directly to Venezuela (Oct. 2023), though Maduro then canceled the deal after the US protested his fraudulent reelection.

• He convinced Ecuador to cancel visa-free entries for Chinese.

• He convinced Panama and Colombia to crack down on crossings between their countries (Apr. 2023).

• He convinced Haiti to ban (previously legal) charter flights off its island to Central America (Oct. 2023).

• He banned charter flight operators carrying out legal flights out of Cuba and Haiti from entering the United States (Nov. 2023).

• He convinced Mexico to accept permanent deportations of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans.

• He funded the largest-ever immigration enforcement operation in Mexico—almost four times higher than the highest month under Trump.

Not only was there no aspect of border enforcement that decreased under Biden. Enforcement universally increased, not only in the United States but worldwide.

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Would Trump Have Stopped the Crisis?

Biden’s inability to remove everyone Border Patrol arrested was the result of logistical obstacles to removals, not a policy against removals. The logistical obstacles related primarily to non-Mexican families and children (who Mexico would not accept unless they had shelter space for them) and immigrants from outside Mexico and northern Central America.

Trump might say that he would have handled the logistical problems with families, children, and immigrants from distant countries better than Biden. Still, no administration has removed a majority of families and children for an entire fiscal year for as far back as we have records. As of December 2021, the government had still failed to remove most of the families and children who arrived in 2013 and every year after. It is not that they were not removed in that year. They were never removed. In 2021, Biden was still removing a much higher percentage of families and children than Trump in 2019, yet the border crisis continued anyway.

Again, the difficulties with removals of non-Mexicans and non-Central Americans were not unique to Biden. Every administration struggled to promptly remove a majority of non-Mexican, non-northern Central American border crossers, even when the flows were much lower than under Biden.

Biden wasn’t just dealing with the highest Border Patrol arrests ever. He was dealing with the most geographically diverse flows ever. Obviously, Border Patrol could not prepare for this situation as it had never occurred before. There were more of these immigrants arrested each year in 2021, 2022, and 2023 than were ever arrested in Border Patrol’s history. Nonetheless, Biden was still removing a higher number than in 2019. He was even removing a higher percentage of these crossers in 2021 when the crisis began than in 2019. Recall Trump was the one who struck the Title 42 deal that excluded anyone but four nationalities. Biden was the one who expanded it.

Biden’s various actions (increased detention and his May 2023 presumptive asylum ban) reduced the time it took to process an asylum seeker for removal through the fear screening process by more than 85 percent, leading to the most removal orders ever in immigration courts. Biden also substantially increased the United States’ removal capacity. His administration ended up removing nearly 3.3 million people arrested by Border Patrol compared with 1.2 million for Trump.

More remarkably, Biden removed a nearly identical percentage as Trump in 2021—at the start of the crisis—despite nearly as many people arriving in that year as all of Trump’s four years combined. Even looking at all four years of Biden, the share of individuals removed was not radically different from Trump’s. The slightly lower removal rate did not cause more people to come. Instead, more people coming caused the removal rate to fall.

Biden’s Election Did Not Cause the Crisis

Illegal immigration ultimately more than tripled under Biden from the 2020 level, but contrary to the myth, illegal immigration was already increasing under Trump, not dissipating as many people erroneously believe. Biden’s election and election statements are often blamed for the border crisis. Some commentators pin even the border situation at the end of 2020 on Biden’s election, theorizing that immigrants were anticipating more favorable conditions under Biden. However, the FOIA data help refute this narrative. Biden’s election did not cause any deviation in the trend.

Biden did not cause the border crisis. The border crisis started before Biden came into office or was even elected and ended before he left office. The graph below shows the number of Border Patrol arrests for each December back to 1999. Trump left office with the most arrests in 21 years. Arrests under Trump’s watch had already increased 64 percent over the level in December 2016. The crisis was coming whether Trump was reelected or not.

Many people believe that the border crisis only started subsiding when Biden signed his asylum ban executive order in June 2024 and that this proves Biden’s inaction on immigration before this point caused the crisis. But Biden’s border order only accelerated a preexisting decline, and signing it earlier would have made no difference:

1. From December 2023 to May 2024—before Biden’s order—Border Patrol arrests had already fallen 53 percent (see Figure). Over the following five months, from May to September 2024, arrests fell another 54 percent. The border crisis was already dissipating when Biden signed his executive order.

2. Biden already tried to enforce an absolute asylum ban under Title 42 from 2021 to May 2023. It didn’t work because arrivals overwhelmed his capacity to enforce the ban. Biden wouldn’t have obtained any different results had he signed this executive order in 2021; it would have just duplicated what already existed.

3. Finally, the executive order did not radically change enforcement conditions at the southwest border. The purpose of the order was to enable Border Patrol to increase its removal capacity and deport more people. This did not happen. Total arrivals fell, but not thanks to any increase in the government’s ability to remove people. The graph below shows that border removal capacity has been effectively fixed at around 30,000 since the end of Title 42. This means the marginal border crosser is still being released, but migration is falling for other reasons.

Even looking at the percentage of border crossers removed, Border Patrol removed a higher percentage of crossers in 2021, 2022, and parts of 2023 than it has since Biden’s executive order. Biden’s executive order achieved a less successful result, with many fewer crossers in 2024, and did not end the crisis.

Taking a step back, Biden never had asylum rules as unrestricted as during Trump’s presidency before 2020. If asylum had been the most important factor, illegal immigration should have been lower throughout Biden’s term than during Trump’s.

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What Caused the Crisis

Four factors primarily caused the border crisis:

1. the unprecedented difference in labor demand between the US and the developing world;

2. the unparalleled access to information about how to travel illegally to the US;

3. enforcement policies—namely Title 42—that created perverse incentives to repeatedly cross illegally; and

4. perverse legal migration policies that caused people to cross illegally rather than legally.

Explanation 1: Supply and demand are undefeated

The number of job openings reached nearly 2 per unemployed person in the United States. In absolute terms, there were 12 million open jobs in 2022. Both numbers were the highest recorded by the government since the job openings survey began in 2001. There were more open jobs each month from February 2021 to August 2024 than in any month before February 2021. As I’ve pointed out before, the relationship is much more pronounced for migration from Central America than from Mexico in large part because so many Mexicans can cross legally.

The rise and fall of the high labor demand economy tracks the rise and eventual fall in Border Patrol arrests. US jobs fund migration, even by asylum seekers, because immigrants can borrow against their future earnings to pay for smuggling fees and other costs. But more than the unprecedented increase in jobs inside the United States, the relative difference between immigrants’ home countries and the United States mattered more. Latin American countries were still down 26 million jobs at the start of 2021. While other countries lagged behind, the US labor market took off in 2021. As one Mexican border crosser told the Wall Street Journal in 2021, “The economy is going to [react] very quickly in the United States. They are already reopening.”

Explanation 2: Internet access to migration information

The second critical component of the Biden border crisis was how quickly information on how to migrate illegally was communicated. Jobs provided the funding for people to immigrate, but the Internet and social media provided a detailed how-to guide. From 2018 to 2021, the share of northern Central Americans with Internet access more than doubled. For Nicaraguans, the increase was even more considerable. Colombia and Ecuador both saw very significant increases in Internet access. No reliable data are available for Venezuela and several other countries.

Social media, in particular, connected immigrants with smugglers and other information. In 2021, Mexican officials found that smugglers were “communicating via social media such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and YouTube,” and that they use these sites to “update migrants on impending checkpoints, when freight trains they can jump on pass, where to stay and how to navigate immigration laws.” By 2022, 70 percent of immigrants in Mexico were getting information about where to go from social media. TikTok and other apps also allowed immigrants to explain how to migrate without smugglers, freeing more immigrants to take advantage of US labor market opportunities.

Explanation 3: Perverse enforcement policies:

Following the advice of his critics, Biden used Title 42 to restrict asylum during his first year and a half. He then discovered that it was not working. In fact, it created more crossings as people repeatedly tried to enter illegally. Biden then tried to end Title 42 in May 2022, but Republican states sued and prevented Biden from doing so for another year. As the graph shows, not only did Title 42 fail to deter crossers, but it also resulted in more arrests of repeat crossers as people tried over and over to evade Border Patrol. About half of all the people arrested under Title 42 were previously arrested under Title 42. This compared to a 7 percent recidivism rate in 2019. Single adults from Mexico and the north Central America were the vast majority of those expelled under Title 42, and their arrests increased rapidly during the Title 42 regime.

For some crossers, being returned quickly to Mexico was an incentive to come rather than a drawback. Before the Title 42 regime, there was a high probability of criminal prosecution and lengthy detention—between one-third and a half of Mexican and northern Central American single adults were prosecuted. After Title 42, that threat disappeared. Instead, they were returned to the other side of the border where they could immediately try again, leading to repeated arrests of the same individuals. The fact that evasions spiked so high further proves that releases were not the primary cause of the crisis. People were determined to come regardless. Once Biden ended Title 42, evasions fell by over 70 percent. In other words, doing the opposite of what Biden’s critics wanted helped secure the border (as I predicted).

Besides Title 42, Biden made another enforcement mistake. The biggest problem for deportations came from Venezuelans and other immigrants who could not be expelled to Mexico and who were logistically difficult or impossible to deport to their home countries. In response, Biden convinced Mexico to ban visa-free legal entries into Mexico for Venezuelans in January 2022, which had previously allowed Venezuelans who could afford to buy plane tickets to Mexico to travel to the US-Mexico border. Biden also convinced Belize and Costa Rica to ban Venezuelans as well, cutting off alternative flights for them.

This “closed border” policy initially reduced arrivals, but the Venezuelan ban backfired. As I predicted would happen, tens of thousands of Venezuelans who previously would have bought plane tickets instead paid smugglers to bring them through the Darien Gap, the jungle land bridge connecting Colombia and Panama. Ultimately, more Venezuelans started arriving every month—including destitute people who otherwise would not have been able to travel by plane.

As a result of the “wealthy” Venezuelan investments in the Darien Gap, travel time through the jungle fell from more than a week to about three days. More importantly, the infusion of resources dramatically lowered the cost of crossing from South to North America for everyone, including destitute people from other countries, which caused total migration from outside North America to reach an even higher level than before. The Venezuelans paved the way for many other nationalities to enter the Darien Gap.

Explanation 4: Perverse legal migration policies

Many immigrants in Mexico believed that President Biden would reopen asylum processing at legal crossing points with Mexico in 2021. President Biden had said that “Remain in Mexico” would be phased out. Hence, immigrants in Mexico believed they would be allowed to enter legally as many were allowed to enter before the pandemic and “Remain in Mexico.” This meant they did not cross illegally as soon as Biden was inaugurated.

Instead, the inflection point occurred one month into his presidency when Customs and Border Protection announced that the only people who would be allowed to enter legally were those who had already crossed into the United States and were officially enrolled in the formal “Remain in Mexico” program known as Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP)—not the people who had been waiting to enter legally or people returned under Title 42. On February 19, the Biden administration allowed the first group to enter, and that day, crowds of people showed up hoping to be let in legally.

“The news said they were going to reopen,” one Salvadoran mother who had waited for nearly two years with her family told the Wall Street Journal on February 19. But US officials made absolutely clear for the first time that no one new was getting in legally. “Physical presence at the U.S. border has not and will not be a means for gaining access to [lawful entry],” a DHS statement read. “The border remains closed.” This set off panic among those waiting in Mexico. “We can’t be here anymore,” one Honduran mother who was blocked from entering told the Los Angeles Times on February 19.

These scenes happened all across the border from California to Texas. The New York Times followed one family between ports of entry in Texas as they requested to enter legally. Then they asked Mexican authorities about being placed on a list to enter, but were again turned away. One Honduran woman told the Washington Post that she thought every day about jumping into the Rio Grande River to cross and be with her children again, saying she did not even care if she died. A Honduran father said, “I don’t want my children to be here in the cold, for people to treat them like trash, but we didn’t have a choice.” With no way to enter legally, most families ultimately gave up and crossed illegally.

Haitians and Cubans: The story is even more dramatic for various groups that historically always entered legally—most notably, Haitians and Cubans. Cubans started this trend because they were released under the “wet foot, dry foot” policy. Haitians followed the same smuggling path from the Caribbean and were released under an Obama-era policy that prohibited deportations to Haiti after the 2010 Earthquake. President Obama eliminated wet foot, dry foot in January 2017, but most Cubans still sought to enter legally and, although forced to wait and subject to detention, nearly all continued to enter legally until Remain in Mexico effectively ended that option. During the pandemic, Title 42 ended any option but illegal entry.

The result of this closed borders policy was that when the migration surge started in 2021, Cubans and Haitians entered illegally rather than legally as they had in the past. The most infamous immigration moment during Biden’s presidency occurred in September 2021 when thousands of Haitians crossed illegally around a closed port of entry in Del Rio, Texas. After initially trying and failing to expel them all on flights to Haiti, CBP reversed course and started letting Haitians enter legally through ports of entry in the summer of 2021. This effectively ended Haitian illegal immigration.

Here’s another critical factor that was outside of Biden’s control: Nicaragua opened visa-free travel with Cuba in November 2021. Very quickly, Cuban migration to the United States surged, as Cubans were freed to travel to the North American mainland for the first time in decades and seized the opportunity. Biden sanctioned Nicaraguan officials to no avail. But in January 2023, Biden announcedthat asylum seekers could use a cell phone app called CBP One to apply to enter legally. Simultaneously, it created a humanitarian parole sponsorship program for legal entries directly from Cuba and three other countries, which granted Cubans two-year temporary statuses. These moves effectively eliminated illegal immigration by Cubans again—despite much larger flows than before.

Mexican families also traditionally always entered legally until the Trump administration banned them. Under Biden, the share of Mexican families entering legally has partially recovered but has fluctuated wildly based on how easy it was for them to access ports of entry. Overall, Biden has increased the share entering legally since he came into office but has not fully restored the pre-Trump procedures, leading many families to enter illegally.

Biden has also expanded legal options for other nationalities. In April 2022, Biden created a parole sponsorship process for Ukrainians. In October 2022, Biden created one for Venezuelans, and in January 2023, this program was expanded to Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans. In combination with the CBP One interview appointment app, the overall share of immigrants who entered illegally began to fall in 2023 and plummeted down in 2024. Biden’s partial reopening of legal migration has been successful. Still, the fact that he limited sponsorships to just four countries and established caps of 30,000 per month on parole sponsorship and 1,450 per day on CBP One appointments at the southwest ports of entry meant that illegal immigration has continued but at a lower level than otherwise.

Conclusion

The combination of fewer job openings and more legal opportunities to come has ended the border crisis. Immigration policy outside of the United States also mattered, but less so. For instance, Ecuador’s rescission of visa-free entry for Chinese certainly contributed to the decline in Chinese migration because they could no longer easily drive in the Americas. Mexico has managed to create serious bottlenecks for people crossing through its territory trying to reach the United States, but it is not possible to attribute most of the decline to Mexican enforcement since almost all of the increase in Mexican enforcement occurred before the decline in arrivals to the US border.

Some claim that the legal entry programs have only relabeled illegal crossings rather than substantively changed them. That is not true. Nearly all of the border crisis’s problems occurred because people crossed illegally. Legal entry allows people to plan their travel, employment, and housing in advance. It opens the opportunity to work legally and permits them to apply for permanent legal statuses—through asylum, family, or employer sponsorship. It allows for more careful and thorough vetting and frees Border Patrol agents to focus on stopping criminals. Legal entry prevents injuries during crossings that kill and maim people, easing strains on border hospitals. It prevents people from being involved in car chases and other encounters with law enforcement. Ultimately, it saves taxpayers’ money.

However, temporary parole statuses are discretionary and can be revoked by the next president. They do not provide a permanent fix to the problem. The best solution to address illegal immigration is through legal immigration pathways that provide individuals with the opportunity to live and work permanently. Biden has made a few important reforms but has not ended illegal immigration. The problem persists because he failed to act more boldly to create other legal pathways and because Congress has refused to reform the legal immigration system, keeping an archaic system crafted 100 years ago. America can do better. We can achieve both legality and order at the border. The Biden administration showed proof of concept. Now’s the time to finish the job.