"A mixed bag": Joe Biden rebuilt the refugee program while ramping up deportations

As the nation prepares for a second term under President-elect Donald Trump, his proposed policies on immigration have taken center stage. He has repeatedly stated plans to deport undocumented immigrants en masse and nominated immigration hardliners — including an instrumental player of his first-term crackdown — to his cabinet and staff, both probable signs of how extreme he hopes to be. 

But the Biden administration's approach to immigration, marked by a record rise in irregular immigration at the southern border, has also garnered pushback. During his time in office, President Joe Biden issued a record number of executive actions on immigration policy, facilitating an increase in legal immigration and an overhaul of the refugee resettlement program while presiding over a steep, last-ditch uptick in deportations. 

While the growth in immigration and pathways to legal status was welcomed by advocates, the Biden administration's rightward shift in border policy — limiting the number of people who can apply for asylum and dragging its feet on ending a COVID-era expulsion program — overshadows those gains, argued Nayna Gupta, the policy director of the American Immigration Council, a nonprofit advocacy group seeking a fair and just immigration system.  

"The Biden administration has been a mixed bag," she told Salon in a phone interview. "While there have been positive actions overall in an obviously challenging political moment on immigration, we did see the Biden administration acquiesce to a rightward shift in immigration law and policy that's more right-leaning — particularly on policies related to migration and the border — than we've seen from the Democratic Party in a long time."

Upon entering office, Biden worked to deliver on campaign promises to end Trump-era immigration policies, including the Migrant Protection Protocols, which forced asylum seekers to stay in Mexico as their cases in the U.S. progressed. The Biden administration succeeded in ending that policy in August 2022.

The administration also rolled out new options to encourage legal migration and discourage irregular crossings in the fall of 2022, launching that October an option for Venezuelans to apply for humanitarian parole if they have a U.S.-based sponsor and could pay for their own plane ticket. The parole program later expanded in January 2023 to include Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans, three demographics with rising arrivals stemming from economic and political turmoil in their home countries.

As of October 2024, nearly 532,000 individuals had migrated to the U.S. through the parole process, according to an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.

The Biden administration continued to bolster other pathways for legal status in the U.S, expediting work permit determinations to allow immigrants to lawfully find employment and expanding temporary protected status, a legal status provided to immigrants who can't be deported to their home countries due to unsafe conditions. Those efforts included extending eligibility to 1.7 million unauthorized immigrants. 

Over Biden's four years in office, the administration is also estimated to have naturalized nearly 3.5 million people, which is the most in any presidential term, according to the Migration Policy Institute. From fiscal years 2021 to 2024, preliminary estimates show 4.3 million noncitizens became permanent residents, and in 2024 the Department of State issued 11.5 million visas.

Notably, the Biden administration fulfilled a campaign promise in rebuilding the refugee resettlement program, which had reached a historic low at just over 11,400 resettled refugees in fiscal year 2021 under the Trump administration. In 2024, that number skyrocketed to more than 100,000 — the highest value in 30 years.

One of the greatest facilitators of these changes in legal migration and status was the administration's technological upgrades to the immigration process, drawing on advancements put in place to ease processing during the pandemic and retaining what it could after COVID restrictions lifted, said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst at MPI and co-author of the think tank's report. 

"U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Executive Office for Immigration Review increasing online filing and online adjudication where possible, really made a big difference," she told Salon in a phone interview, noting that parts of the court system and the administrative service still operate on paper. "These were differences that impacted immigrants' lives concretely. Being able to file an application online might mean that you hear back within days, as opposed to months. When we're talking about work permits, which people need to feed themselves and try to have a roof over their heads, these are life-changing measures."

But the administration's handling of the uptick in people attempting to enter the country through the southern border soon came to shroud the president's immigration achievements. The expansion of pathways to legal status also came alongside an increase in border enforcement that restricted access to asylum as pressure from both sides of the political aisle mounted.

"We saw the administration really embrace restrictionist border and asylum policies, much like the Trump administration, and increase the use of immigration detention as a tool of immigration enforcement," Gupta said.

U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement detained just under 37,700 people by the end of fiscal year 2024, according to the agency's annual report. While that represents only a marginal increase from fiscal year 2023 — just 2.2% — it's nearly double the number of people detained when Biden took office (19,068 people were detained in 2020, during the pandemic, compared to nearly 51,000 in 2019).

In May 2023, the Biden administration enacted the Circumvention of Lawful Pathways rule in May 2023, making ineligible for asylum any immigrants who do not use the U.S. Customs and Border Protection's CBP One scheduling app and arrive at the southern border, with limited exceptions.

In June 2024, the administration tightened asylum access further by enacting the Securing the Border rule. Under that rule, the government withholds asylum at ports of entry where there has been a seven-day average of at least 1,500 border encounters over the 28 days prior. This intervention worked, in part, to slow irregular border arrivals, with Border Patrol recording fewer than 200,000 nationwide encounters each month after the Securing the Border rule took effect, compared to the upwards of 240,000 nationwide encounters seen in each prior month of fiscal year 2024. 

Amid the efforts to manage the swell of immigrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border, the Biden administration leaned on another tool: removals. It hinged enforcement and removal operations on immigrants who were considered threats to national security, public safety and border security, or were recent border crossers, according to the 2024 ICE annual report from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 

Gupta said that the figures on removals conducted by the Biden administration largely focused on people newly arriving to the country, "many of whom are fleeing danger, persecution, violence and have a right to seek asylum," and demonstrated a pivot to the "use of Trump-like immigration policy."

"That's different than what we're hearing as a threat from the Trump administration, which is an aggressive increase in enforcement of immigration laws in the interior of the U.S. against undocumented people with decades of life here," Gupta said.

Biden had made it a goal to end Title 42 — a COVID-era, Trump policy that allowed the country to expel immigrants without an asylum screening — but didn't deliver on that campaign promise until May 2023.

Over the nearly three years that the provision was in effect, the Department of Homeland Security expelled migrants at the U.S. border with Mexico more than 2.9 million times — 86% of the expulsions coming during Biden's term, the Migration Policy Institute analysis found.

By the end of the 2024 fiscal year, the Biden administration had matched the pace of deportations, including removals and enforcement returns, of the Trump administration, Bush-Joseph said. By October 2024, approximately 1.5 million had been carried out between fiscal years 2021 and 2024, with most originating at the border, according to the MPI report. 

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which Gupta said largely focuses on the interior, reported that its officials removed more undocumented immigrants during the 2024 fiscal year than in any other fiscal year since 2015. The agency's 2024 annual report also showed that fiscal year 2024 saw a greater number of ICE deportations than each year of Trump's first term.

Enforcement and Removal Operations removed significantly more noncitizens in fiscal year 2024 than in both fiscal years 2023 and 2022, deporting just under 271,500 immigrants to 192 countries, the annual report found. That sum is up 90.4% over fiscal year 2023 and 276.1% over fiscal year 2022.

The majority of those removals — 223,752 — were carried out by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

Data from the Department of Homeland Security, which Bush-Joseph said includes people removed from the interior of the country and those returned at the U.S.-Mexico border, reflects a similar dynamic, though data for fiscal year 2024 is only available through August. 

Of the 315,480 removals DHS recorded by that time, 275,470 of them were conducted by CBP compared to the just 40,010 ICE had executed. 

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The stark difference between removals from the interior and returns from the border, Bush-Joseph explained, showed that the Biden administration was not "indiscriminately deporting people" but actually "evaluating who had ties in the United States," such as those with U.S.-born children.

Bush-Joseph noted that one of the Biden administration's challenges in immigration policy was navigating a system that is "extremely overwhelmed, outdated, under-resourced" and "for the most part, is stuck in the 90s," relying on laws and quotas governing the border, asylum processes and employment visas that were last updated 30 to 40 years ago. 

While the Trump administration has announced grand yet uncertain plans for immigration, including conducting mass deportations and ending temporary protections, Bush-Joseph said she believes the incoming president will be frustrated by the immigration system's defects as Biden was.

"It's going to take congressional action for the Trump administration to be able to attempt the scale that they are talking about," she said, calling for congressional authorization of updates to the system, such as sending notices to immigrants electronically. "Having Republican control of the House and the Senate could mean that there are increases in your resources, but it's not clear yet whether there will be a fundamental overhaul of the system to really update it."

Gupta added that the incoming Trump administration is threatening "unprecedented change" to immigration law and policy that "will impose harm on thousands of undocumented people who have decades of life in this country, who contribute richly to our economy, to our labor market and to our tax base," marking a stark departure from Biden's policy.

"Those changes will not just impact those immigrant communities but will absolutely impact local economies and American communities more generally," she said, "and that is a threat of aggressive interior enforcement of immigration laws that is far different than what we saw from the Biden administration."