President Biden was inaugurated Jan. 20, 2021.
Weeks later, Feb. 2, he issued the executive order that began the unraveling at the border in earnest.
The border crisis isn't something that happened to Biden.
Mind you, there had already been significant action to loosen up on the border, including on his first day in office.
It put on the chopping block numerous Trump policies that had helped establish order at the border, from Trump's expansion of expedited removal, to his termination of a parole program for Central American minors, to his memorandum urging the relevant departments to work toward ending "Catch and release." Most important, it targeted two of the pillars of Trump's success at the border: the Migrant Protection Protocols, better known as Remain in Mexico, and the safe-third-country agreements with the Northern Triangle countries that allowed us to divert asylum-seekers to Central American countries other than their own to make asylum claims.
Although he's now attempting to portray himself to sympathetic journalists as an innocent bystander to Biden's border policy, he killed the policy knowing exactly what he was doing.
During the transition, Trump officials warned of a catastrophe if Biden followed through on his promises, and in April 2021, The Washington Post ran a piece headlined "At the border, a widely predicted crisis that caught Biden off guard." Now the Feb. 2 memo feels almost like an artifact from another era, as the open-borders orthodoxy begins to show cracks.
The White House sent Biden to visit the border and is considering measures to curtail illegal immigration and calling on sanctuary cities to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, while Mayor Eric Adams criticizes aspects of his city's sanctuary regime.
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