Five years ago, at the outset of his presidency, Joe Biden had a decision to make: How should he navigate the treacherous politics of immigration?
His answer to that question set the stage for President Trump’s aggressive efforts to overhaul the nation’s border enforcement and ramp up deportations, carrying out what Trump describes as a mandate from the American public.
It was an issue that Trump campaigned on. But it’s also an issue that Biden exacerbated, in part by rejecting recommendations that might have eased the border crisis that helped return Trump to the White House.
A few months ago, I set out to re-examine Biden’s approach to immigration and understand how it shaped the conditions playing out today. My colleagues covered the failures of Biden’s border policies extensively while he was still in office. But his former advisers feel more freedom to talk now that they are out of government, letting me pull together an even fuller picture of what went wrong.
My account, which you can read here, is based on interviews with more than 30 former Biden administration officials who worked on immigration and the border. It offers the most detailed account to date of these Biden-era decisions, from the start of the administration to the end.
Tonight, I’ll explain why the key to understanding the present moment, when it comes to immigration, requires a look at the recent past.
Getting the politics wrong
Echoing a widespread conspiracy theory on the right, Republicans have argued that Biden deliberately sought to let more migrants enter the country in order to increase the eventual number of Democratic voters.
My interviews with former Biden officials turned up no evidence that they were motivated by that goal.
I found something different: Biden and his aides believed that tougher border measures would alienate Hispanic voters, and rejected advice to pursue such policies.
“The president and others made a decision that he wasn’t going to lose that community,” Roberta Jacobson, the border czar for the first three months of the administration, told me.
But many Hispanic voters, especially those in border communities, were alarmed by the chaos that emerged as border crossings surged. Many of those voters cared more about issues like the economy than about immigration. Many Hispanic voters, of course, wound up voting for Trump in 2024.
Biden administration officials similarly miscalculated how much other voters would care about the border — but in this case, they underestimated the level of concern. For the first two years of Biden’s term, former administration officials told me, the president and his top aides believed the immigration crisis was a priority mainly for people in border states.
Only once Texas began busing large numbers of migrants to cities like New York and Chicago, those former officials told me, did that view shift.
Slow to correct course
That misreading of the politics shaped the Biden administration’s approach to immigration, especially during the crucial first year.
As border crossings eclipsed the records set during the first Trump presidency, border experts across the administration urged the White House to respond — by deterring migrants, or at least helping manage the flow of people across the country. But Biden and his team were slow to act, hoping the problem would go away on its own.
Only at the halfway mark of his presidency did the White House begin experimenting with broad policy changes. When those failed to stem the tide, Biden reluctantly endorsed a Senate effort to change the law, making it easier to turn back asylum seekers at the border.
When that effort failed, Biden acted unilaterally, using his authority to effectively stop asylum claims. But by that point — three and a half years into his presidency, facing a stream of Republican attacks just five months before Election Day — the narrative had been set in the minds of many voters: Democrats were the party of open borders.
A dilemma for Democrats
Biden’s approach to immigration helped return Trump to the White House. But the consequences go further, according to the former Biden officials I spoke with, creating space for Trump to pursue an even more aggressive agenda than he did during his first administration.
The legacy of Biden’s decisions on immigration will also be measured in what lessons Democrats take away from the experience.
As the 2028 presidential campaign takes shape, contenders will eventually need to articulate positions on the border. They will face a version of the same dilemma that bedeviled Biden in 2020: Should Democrats heed the demands of many of the party’s liberal voters and stand up for more welcoming immigration policies? Or should they seek a middle ground to help avert the old “open borders” accusations?
More than anything, the former Biden officials I spoke with said they were worried that their party had still failed to decide on a coherent set of views and policies on immigration.
Miami gives Democrats another jolt of energy
A Democratic victory on Tuesday in Florida was the country’s latest striking election result. Patricia Mazzei, our Miami bureau chief, explains:
The biggest talk in Miami political circles on Wednesday, the day after voters elected Eileen Higgins to be the city’s first Democratic mayor in almost 30 years, was her victory margin of 19 percentage points.
Even a narrow win would have delighted Democrats, who have had little to celebrate as Florida has become more Republican, though it would have done little to inform broader national politics.
But a 19-point rout? That had political strategists abuzz with the possibility that at least one Miami congressional race could be more competitive next year.
Christian Ulvert, Ms. Higgins’s campaign manager, said the trend in Democrats’ favor in Florida began this year in a special congressional election in the deep-red Panhandle. The House seat stayed in Republican hands, but Democrats won Escambia County, which includes Pensacola.
Ms. Higgins’s victory over a Trump-endorsed Republican crystallized Democrats’ gains, Mr. Ulvert said, laying out his reasoning:
First, Democrats are more enthusiastic going into 2026, while some Republicans are staying home. Second, independents are punishing Republicans by breaking decisively for Democrats. And third, some disenchanted Republicans appear willing to cross party lines to vote for the right Democrat.
“Democrats can win over Republicans in a hyperpartisan environment,” he said.
Ms. Higgins, 61, said she had won the race, which was officially nonpartisan, because she focused on what a more efficient government with fewer ethics concerns could do for residents.
Yet she also argued that the federal government’s “cruel” approach had made people afraid in a city full of immigrants.
Voters, she said in an interview on Tuesday night, “selected a mayor that they hope says respectful things about them, rather than demeaning things.”
David C. Adams contributed reporting.
Quote of the Day
“We’ve just got a lot of RINOs in Indiana.”
That was John Jacob, a former Republican state lawmaker from Indiana, using an insult that has become common in the Trump era to refer to Republicans in Name Only.
Members of his party are butting heads over Trump’s redistricting push in the state, my colleague Mitch Smith writes. The future of that effort remains up in the air, with a key State Senate vote expected for tomorrow.
NUMBER OF THE DAY
21 percent
That’s the share of Americans who support the U.S. removing the leader of Venezuela through military means. Ruth Igielnik, The Times’s polling editor, explains.
As the Trump administration ramps up its threats against President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, most Americans are not interested in the use of U.S. military force to remove him, according to a recent Ipsos/Reuters poll.
Still, even as the Trump administration faces scrutiny of the Sept. 2 attack on a boat in the Caribbean Sea, Americans are generally supportive of the idea of the U.S. military attacking boats that are suspected of smuggling drugs. Fifty percent of Americans support this, compared with 39 percent who are opposed, according to an Economist/YouGov poll.
More coverage of American boat strikes:
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Pentagon lawyers asked whether two survivors of a boat strike in October could be taken to a notorious prison in El Salvador. Read my colleagues’ deep look at the scramble to deal with survivors.
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Democratic lawmakers said that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in a classified briefing, declined to commit to showing the full Congress unedited video of the Sept. 2 attack.
Patricia Mazzei, Ruth Igielnik, Taylor Robinson and Ama Sarpomaa contributed reporting.
Christopher Flavelle is a Times reporter covering how President Trump is transforming the federal government.
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