Did Biden lie about immigration?
Hi, I'm Jim Hacking, immigration lawyer practicing law throughout the United States at our offices in St. Louis, Missouri, San Diego, California, and our nation's capital, Washington, D.C.
Stop me if you've heard this before, but politicians sometimes lie. Politicians sometimes make promises on the campaign trail and then they try to backtrack on those promises once they get elected into office. Now, everybody knows that Joe Biden is better for immigrants than Donald Trump. And so that does factor into what we should be thinking about when it comes to whether we made a bad decision back in November of 2020 about who to elect as president. Obviously immigrants and those who care about immigrants are much better off under Joe Biden than under Donald Trump. But that doesn't mean that we can't hold a harsh light, a harsh magnifying glass, to watch what the Biden administration is doing when it comes to immigration.
You know, nobody criticized President Obama more on immigration than me. He was the deporter in chief, and he had tried some things with immigration, but he really didn't make it a priority. He decided to go after the Health Care Act, instead of putting political capital behind immigration. This is something that Democrats have cynically done, I think, for many years. We can't forget that in 1996, it was Bill Clinton who signed the harshest immigration bill in decades that made it much easier for ICE and the federal government to deport people. So the Democrats don't have the higher ground when it comes to immigration. We've seen this lately in the way that the Biden administration has really put immigration on the back-burner.
Now there's no doubt that Donald Trump has gutted USCIS and that the State Department has been also gutted. And that there aren't enough people at the State Department and that the embassies are way, way behind. There's no doubt that Donald Trump did that. But, the Biden administration made a promise. And one of those promises, when it comes to immigration, was that he was going to vastly increase the number of refugees. Recently, his team announced that they were going to stick with Donald Trump's low, low, historically low, number of refugees for this fiscal year, of 15,000. All in one day, they made that announcement and there was such a hue and outcry from those who care about immigrants, from those who voted for Joe Biden, that they've now walked that back and they said they were going to increase the number.
Now this is like the worst politics you can do. Number one, you're pissing off everybody who wants to increase the number, and you're pissing off all the people now who don't want you to increase the number. So I don't know who these people are that are running his immigration policy, but so far they've been caught flat-footed and haven't done squat. I understand that the agency is gutted, but you've got to make good decisions. And most importantly, you've got to sell the values of immigration to the American public.
They're doing a terrible job of getting their agenda set on immigration. These people come in and out of the government and when a Republican gets into office, they go to these think tanks, and then they come back. They need to clear out these think tank people. They need to get practical people who deal with immigration on a daily basis into the power structure and advancing the cause of immigrants. They're scared about the surge at the border, of which there is no surge. They're scared to do anything that would upset this fragile political coalition that they have in Congress. They got to forget all that. They've got to lead boldly. It's ridiculous. So here they say, "We're going to..."
I mean, everyone was critical of Trump, and rightly so, that he had cut down the numbers of refugees. It was an easy political thing that many, many people understood and agreed with. And instead of leading on that, they folded and they said, "Oh, we're just going to do what Trump did this year, because it's too much work. It's too hard." Fuck that. Sorry for my language. But it's just ridiculous that this guy gets elected as a Democrat, saying that he's going to be better on immigration than Trump, and then he, at least on this particular issue, does exactly what Trump was doing. So I'm getting tired of it.
I'm getting ready to start pounding on Biden. I mean, obviously we've been suing his administration throughout these last few months. We'll continue to do that. But it's just ridiculous and it's really cynical, and it's really disheartening. The people who are working for Biden inside the immigration realm of things should really be ashamed of themselves. They really need to step up, get out of their ivory towers, and do some damn work. Quit bitching, quit talking about how hard it was, and do your job.
That's all I have to say about that. Sorry for getting worked up. Sorry for cussing. You know how it is.
314-961-8200, that's our phone number. [email protected], that's our email address. Immigrant Home, that's our Facebook group where we share out immigrant information every single day. We also have that YouTube channel. We'd love it if you subscribed to our YouTube channel. Tell your friends about it, spread the word. And then don't forget, Tuesdays, Thursdays, usually at noon Central Time, you'll find me live in our Facebook group, answering as many immigration law-related questions as possible.
Thanks a lot and have a great day.
