The first step in responding to a crisis is to acknowledge it exists. The surge in illegal crossings at our southern border during the first three years of Joe Biden’s presidency was, by any reasonable definition, a crisis. The failure to acknowledge this reality and take timely action to try to resolve it cost Democrats a great deal of trust with American voters and contributed to President Trump’s return to the White House.
I had a front row view of all this in my role as the assistant secretary for border and immigration policy at the Department of Homeland Security. I learned that the border crisis is, to a large extent, an asylum crisis: Our broken immigration laws have increasingly incentivized economic migrants to claim that they fear persecution in order to start a lengthy administrative process that allows them to remain in the United States and work. The political left typically refers to these immigrants as asylum seekers, because our laws allow them to make those claims. Many on the political right refer to them as criminals, because, they often say, crossing the border without documentation is a crime.
The fact that both views have at least some merit shows the dysfunction in our immigration laws. Only Congress can fix those laws, and until its members — from both parties — take action, the challenges at our border will continue.
Illegal entries at our southern border started increasing in the summer and fall of 2020 — when Mr. Trump was still in office. It turned into a tidal wave in 2021, even as Mr. Biden swung the pendulum too far to the left early in his term, including by announcing a 100-day pause on most deportations. I was in Del Rio, Texas, in September 2021 and saw the chaos that resulted when as many as 15,000 people amassed under the International Bridge.
Among the issues that contributed to the surge were the global economic devastation caused by Covid-19, adverse court decisions that delayed the end of a pandemic-era health rule, a lack of resources to adequately secure the border and the inability to deport people to countries like Venezuela. Deliberations that delayed important policy choices didn’t help, either. I pushed for several reforms, including some that eventually made it into executive orders or draft legislation, but there were and are no easy solutions.
By the time Mr. Biden and congressional Democrats began working in earnest with Republicans in late 2023 and 2024 on revamping our immigration laws, the politics were hopelessly interwoven with the presidential election, which is why a tough, bipartisan bill ultimately foundered.
In June 2024, Mr. Biden issued an executive order that put common-sense restrictions on claiming asylum at the southern border. Combined with a prior executive action that significantly expanded access to safe, orderly and lawful pathways for migrants to come to the United States, illegal entries fell that summer to their lowest levels since the fall of 2020. These actions allowed the Department of Homeland Security to deport more than 685,000 individuals in 2024 — more than any prior fiscal year since 2010. Border Patrol encounters were actually lower when Mr. Biden left office in 2025 than when Mr. Trump did in 2021. Despite this, it was too late to change the political narrative.
Crises at the southern border are not unique to Democrats. We’ve seen regular surges in migration under presidents of both parties going back decades. On his watch in 2018, Mr. Trump responded to a crisis by separating thousands of children from their parents, in pursuit of a zero-tolerance immigration policy. In 2014, Barack Obama’s administration faced a crisis caused by unprecedented encounters of unaccompanied children. In fiscal year 2001, overlapping with the first year of George W. Bush’s presidency, the Border Patrol tallied more than 1.2 million encounters at the southern border.
Right now, the border is relatively quiet. But we’ve traded a border crisis for a border-fueled crisis in governance. This includes the Trump administration’s twisting the Alien Enemies Act to deny due process and send people that the administration asserts (without proof, in some cases) are gang members indefinitely to foreign prisons; applying a foreign-policy-interests exception, meant to be used rarely, to revoke visas of people who say things the administration doesn’t like; and attempting to end birthright citizenship. It also includes deploying the Marines and the National Guard in response to largely peaceful demonstrations in Los Angeles, without the consent of state and local leaders. The relative quiet on our border has come at the significant cost of eroding our constitutional order.
The short answer to the question of how we got here is that Congress has cynically allowed immigration to remain a toxic political issue. Our immigration laws last underwent major updates decades ago when, by far, most migrants encountered at the southern border were seasonal workers from Mexico and few claimed asylum. We wound up with a complicated system of legal options to come here to work temporarily, and it included yearly caps on the number of many types of visas — which haven’t changed significantly in decades and are woefully incapable of meeting today’s labor demand. This helps fuel a gray market for labor in which unscrupulous employers exploit undocumented workers.
The tension between this demand for labor and Mr. Trump’s desire to ramp up deportations appears to have led Immigration and Customs Enforcement to issue internal guidance directing agents to hold off on targeting hotels, restaurants and farms and then to rescind that guidance.
In the absence of enough labor visas, many economic migrants have turned to our asylum system instead. This is because our asylum system is set up as a funnel: At the top, a very permissive standard is applied during a screening interview at the border — which before Covid allowed more than 80 percent of people to pass. But at the bottom, immigration judges apply a much stricter standard, which granted protection to fewer than 25 percent of asylum claimants before the pandemic began.
It can take years to conclude asylum cases, and migrants are eligible for work authorization six months after filing claims. Even when people lose their cases, deporting them is challenging. It involves pulling people out of communities in ways that can quickly generate public backlash, as we are seeing all over the country today. As a result, our enforcement efforts have historically focused on removing undocumented immigrants who commit crimes, because it is much easier to take them into custody directly from jails and lockups — something the current administration is relearning as it struggles to meet its arbitrary removal quotas.
We have ended up with a system that is generous to those who cross the border and claim asylum and is frequently stingy with those who try to use appropriate legal pathways to come here to work.
Democratic and Republican presidents have tried to manage migration by fiat, leading to court injunctions that arbitrarily tie the government’s hands. Mr. Trump has railed against judges who have issued injunctions in cases challenging his executive actions, but he and his team cheered on the judges who issued injunctions against Mr. Biden. In June the Supreme Court gave Mr. Trump a significant win by limiting the power of lower federal courts to issue nationwide injunctions.
But the long-term solution here isn’t more muscular executive actions; it is for Congress to do its job. The bipartisan bill unveiled last year by Senators James Lankford, Chris Murphy and Kyrsten Sinema would have been a good start. It would have streamlined the asylum process at the border, provided an emergency authority to shut the border down during surges and added thousands of personnel, including administrative judges. Knowing that passage of the bill would have been perceived as an election-year win for Democrats, Mr. Trump successfully pressured congressional Republicans to kill it.
What we’ve been left with is a political crisis. Some immigrant advocates argue that the United States has an open-ended obligation to protect people fleeing dangerous countries and that even reasonable enforcement measures — such as expedited removal — are cruel and ineffective. At the other end of the political spectrum, some argue that migrants are replacing Americans and that draconian actions are needed to stop an invasion at our southern border.
These competing moralistic frames are not just disingenuous; they make compromise nearly impossible. Yes, we have an obligation to provide asylum to those who qualify, but most asylum claimants don’t meet the criteria. And even though our borders must be safeguarded, immigration is an economic imperative: Immigrant labor has made us all better off.
We cannot solve this crisis without bipartisan reform. Congress should create an immigration system that is most generous to those who are willing to wait and use significantly expanded pathways to come here and work and that is least generous to those who cross illegally.
In other words, we need a system that recognizes that we are not only a nation of immigrants but also a nation of laws and that we need to respect both. Until that happens, the next border crisis will always be just around the corner.
Blas Nuñez-Neto was an assistant secretary for border and immigration policy at the Department of Homeland Security and later a deputy assistant to the president and White House senior adviser for migration and southwest border coordination during the Biden administration.
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