Biden: Snip Snap
- Oct 28, 2025
- 8 min read
Welcome to my six-part series on immigration in the United States! I hope it will be a helpful tool for you as you navigate the confusing and contradictory messages we hear about this topic. I recommend reading the articles in the order listed, but you can do what you want. I'm not the boss of you.
Biden: Snip Snap (this article)
Going into the 2020 presidential election, immigration was not the largest issue for most voters. The pandemic and its effects were the leading story, with Donald Trump representing the “It’s not COVID-19 that’s the real problem, it’s all these silly precautions” message. Joe Biden took the opposite approach, assuring voters he would get the pandemic under control. By a margin of 74 electoral college votes and four percent of the popular vote (over seven million votes), Biden won the election.
Although Biden didn’t win because of immigration, voters hadn’t forgotten the first few years of the Trump administration. On the left, people were still aggrieved by the way Trump spoke about immigrants, criminals, and Latin Americans—groups that often seemed synonymous to him. Even moderate voters didn’t love Trump’s attempts to get rid of protections for Dreamers, and the “kids in cages” thing had really stuck with people.
So Biden kicked off his immigration policies in a very reactionary way. The name of the game was, “Undo everything Trump did.” Within the first two months of his presidency, Biden had ended the emergency declaration at the southern border, halted construction of the border wall, lifted the Muslim ban, restarted and beefed up refugee resettlement, started a task force to reunify separated families, instructed agencies to make it easier for people to naturalize (become citizens), and ended the Migrant Protection Protocol (“Remain in Mexico”) policy.
Once again, the devil was in the details. What does “make it easier for people to naturalize” mean? Well, as one small example, the Trump administration had tried to increase the fee for form N-400 (the form you fill out to apply for citizenship) from $640 to $1,170, arguing that USCIS needed more revenue in order to function (USCIS relies almost entirely on user fees for its operation). This proposed increase had been temporarily blocked by the courts.
Biden’s executive order “Restoring Faith in Our Legal Immigration Systems and Strengthening Integration and Inclusion Efforts for New Americans” asked agencies to find a way to keep application fees low. Ironically, the fee increased in 2024 under the Biden administration, but only to $760, not $1,170.
Although they failed to reduce the general fee, the administration expanded eligibility for qualifying for the reduced fee ($380). Previously, people with an income between 150 percent and 200 percent of the Federal Poverty Guidelines (FPG) could get the reduced fee; the Biden administration changed that to 400 percent of the FPG. They also made it possible to request the reduced fee right on form N-400 rather than having to file a separate form, I-942.
You are falling asleep. This is so boring. But this is immigration policy. Imagine all the sweeping changes we’ve discussed during the first Trump administration and the Biden administration—banning entry by people from majority Muslim countries, then undoing that ban, for example—and the trickle-down effects: applications, fees, processing times, hiring of administrative staff, determining who is eligible for certain categories, and so on. That’s where immigration policy is being lived out in the real world.
It makes sense. It would be a crime against efficiency to ask Congress to make all those detailed decisions. Remember the ski resort? No large company in its right mind would ask its board of directors to shop around for the best price on printer ink, for example. We’ve rightly given certain federal agencies the responsibility to carry out high-level immigration policy as they see fit.
But when the guiding ethos of that high-level policy swings wildly from one end of the spectrum to the other depending on who is president, the result is chaos. I picture the scene in The Office where Michael is complaining to Jan about how, in trying to accommodate her ever-changing feelings about having a child, he got a vasectomy, then a vasectomy reversal, then another vasectomy. “Snip snap, snip snap, snip snap!” he yells in Jan’s face.
Surely that is how immigration enforcement officers, judges, administrative staff, attorneys, and employers have felt for the last eight years, not to mention immigrants themselves. Snip snap, snip snap, snip snap. Whiplash. Chaos.
Still, the snip snap is not the whole story. There was more continuity between Trump 1.0 and Biden immigration policies than either would care to admit.
Although Biden started his administration with a very pro-immigration agenda in many respects, he nonetheless kept Title 42 in place for over two years. Nearly 3 million people were turned away at the border under Title 42 between January 2021 and May 2023. Although he raised the refugee cap to 62,500, the actual number of refugees admitted in 2021 reached an all-time low of 11,411.
So why did the Biden administration get the reputation for having an open border?
Probably because encounters at the southwestern border reached an all-time high of 2.5 million in 2023 (although many of these were repeat crossers due to Title 42). Of those encounters, 149,000 were unaccompanied minors (UACs)—another all-time high. Yikes. Of course, many of these people were turned away and did not enter the country. But the flow of people attempting to cross the border was very high in 2022 and 2023.
Early in his term, Biden had established a task force, led by Vice President Harris, to comprehensively address the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. However, the results of this effort were mixed, at best. While numbers of migrants from those countries did decline during the Biden administration, overall numbers of people attempting to enter the U.S. increased through 2023.
Biden expanded the humanitarian parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans, as well as special programs for Ukrainian and Afghan allies of the U.S. By 2024, more than 821,000 people had come to the U.S. under this “twilight status.” These people were here legally, and protected from deportation, but there was no long-term plan for them. Many communities didn’t have the resources to absorb them.
In January 2023, Biden held a press conference, acknowledging that the situation was untenable. He explained, “Instead of [a] safe and orderly process at the border, we have a patchwork system that simply doesn’t work as it should. We don’t have enough asylum officers or personnel to determine whether people qualify for asylum…we don’t have enough… immigration judges to adjudicate the claims of immigrants.”
In this press conference, Biden announced the launch of the CBP One app, which allowed people to make their appointment online and wait in their home country or Mexico rather than presenting themselves at the border to request asylum. CBP One was effective in motivating people to enter legally rather than between ports of entry, especially Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans, and Mexicans. However, people from more distant countries continued to attempt illegal border crossings, likely because the app wasn’t available in their language or they didn’t know that attempting to cross illegally harmed their chances of being granted asylum.
One of Biden’s goals was to make legal immigration easier, and he accomplished that. Between 2021 and 2024, nearly 3.5 million immigrants became U.S. citizens (a record high) and 4.3 million people became lawful permanent residents (got their green card). USCIS processing times were cut by half from the beginning of his administration to the end.
Nonetheless, demand for residency and citizenship dramatically outpaced supply. Between 2017 and 2024, the backlog in the EOIR immigration courts (cases where the person attempted to enter illegally or otherwise violated the legal process) increased from 656,000 cases to 3.6 million cases. It was a similar story with USCIS applications (people following the legal process), going from 290,000 applications in 2017 to 9.2 million in 2024, a 32-fold increase.
In the name of making legal immigration easier and illegal immigration harder, the Biden administration ultimately allowed in 5.8 million migrants pursuing asylum or some other status. Rather than detain people while their cases were processed, the administration released many of them into the country. Like Obama, Biden focused interior enforcement on removing violent criminals rather than removing anyone and everyone who didn’t have legal status.
The result was high numbers of “in process” immigrants or visitors within the country. In theory, these people are supposed to check in with their immigration officer at assigned times (this is called Alternative to Detention, or ATD). While most people (around 98%) show up for their check-ins, some don’t. Some have ankle monitors or other tracking devices, but others are effectively unmonitored.
In 2024, in a second attempt to pass meaningful immigration legislation (he had tried at the beginning of his term as well), Biden worked with Congress to develop a bipartisan bill that would address border enforcement and interior processing, among many other things. This bill (H.R. 815) included over $6 billion for CBP operations and support, $7.6 billion for ICE operations and support, and $4 billion for USCIS operations and support. It included provisions for border wall construction and improvements, enhanced DNA tracking, prisoner detention, and counter-fentanyl activity.
The bill also included over $6 billion for refugee processing and humanitarian programs. And it was part of a larger package that included substantial appropriations for Israel and Ukraine. Although Democrat and Republican lawmakers had worked for four months on the bill, Donald Trump didn’t like it, so it died.
In June of 2024, to the dismay of many immigration rights activists, the Biden administration began severely restricting asylum requests. They also expedited removal processing. Deportations reached a ten-year high in 2024, higher than at any point during the first Trump administration.
State and local governments actively opposed the Biden administration’s actions. It was the inverse of the Trump years. During Trump’s first administration, local police in some California cities had refused to help ICE locate and arrest undocumented immigrants. During the Biden administration, Texas Governor Greg Abbot launched Operation Lone Star, deploying the Texas National Guard and the Texas Department of Public Safety to monitor the Texas-Mexico border themselves. The state spent $11.2 billion in three years, without successfully slowing migration, but very successfully violating lots of human and civil rights.
Again similarly to the first Trump administration, almost all of Biden’s executive actions on immigration were challenged in court. Many of these challenges came from Republican states or officials, arguing that he was overstepping his authority in some of his immigration-friendly orders. Other lawsuits came from immigration and civil rights activists, arguing that he was violating immigrants’ rights in some of his restrictive orders. It was a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation.
But Biden had campaigned on righting what many viewed as the moral wrongs of the Trump administration, especially regarding refugees, and he intended to follow through on that promise. Through streamlined vetting processes and large investments in refugee resettlement organizations, the administration eventually increased the number of refugees resettled to 100,034 by 2024—the highest number in 30 years. This was timely, as there were 31.6 million people displaced worldwide in 2023, desperate for a safe place to live.
(That means, at our high point, we took in 0.3 percent of the world’s refugees. For reference, we have about 4.5 percent of the world’s population and consume about 24 percent of its resources.)
In 2023, the administration launched the Welcome Corps, a public-private cooperative that encouraged regular U.S. citizens, in groups of five or more, to sponsor a refugee or refugee family. The sponsors were responsible to raise at least $2,425 per refugee to cover costs of housing and basic needs for their first 90 days in the country. Sponsors would also provide the refugee with connection, social support, and practical help. Anyone could be a sponsor. I downloaded the information packet and had started brainstorming who I could ask to co-sponsor with me.
Then Trump won the election.
Trump 2.0: The Worst of the Worst (next article)
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