Joe Biden is running scared on border issues. He's trailing Donald Trump badly on the issue (50-36 in the latest Siena Poll) and can't get any traction with his attacks trying to blame Republicans for his border mess.
Biden has been signaling for weeks his plan to use executive actions to make cosmetic changes to border security. But now comes word that Biden may want to try to "out-Trump" Trump and virtually shut the border down.
The problem is that he needs Mexico's cooperation to do that. And Mexico is smack dab in the middle of a presidential election. Claudia Sheinbaum, a far-left candidate, is leading in the polls before the June 2 election.
Biden spoke with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in April, and he discussed his plans for executive actions and what Mexico could do to facilitate them.
The flurry of diplomatic activity that followed has included a back-and-forth about Mexico’s role. The groundwork is being laid so Sheinbaum can work with the Biden administration to help implement the forthcoming executive actions, including the possible shutdown of the southern U.S. border, said two officials with knowledge of the negotiations.
There's presidential authority in the U.S. Code known as Section 212 (f) that would allow the president to “suspend the entry” of some illegal immigrants whenever the number of attempted border crossings achieves a certain threshold.
That number will probably reflect the highest number of entries or larger, meaning it will be a very high bar to reach.
Besides invoking 212 (f), officials said, the White House is weighing a series of other steps that could be rolled out over several weeks, including at least one action that would further limit who can seek asylum at the border.
The close coordination with Mexico underlines how essential it has become in any conversations about dealing with illegal immigration across the southern U.S. border. NBC News has reported that Mexico has nearly tripled the number of migrants it has stopped at its own southern border or inside its borders in the past year, which has driven down the number of migrants who then try to cross into the U.S.
If Biden (or Trump) is going to shut down the border for any reason, Mexico is going to have to agree to take back a certain number of illegals. And with Mexico's efforts to control the flow of illegal aliens, it would put a genuine strain on Mexico's limited resources.
“I expect that if the president were to take executive action, and whatever that executive action that might entail, it will be challenged in the court,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told reporters Monday.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) calls all this maneuvering by the Biden White House "an election-year political stunt designed to give our Democratic colleagues the appearance of doing something about the problem without doing anything at all."
Blackburn claims the White House is trying to “nuance this situation so that they can say, ‘We are shutting down the border.’ What we know is that they have no intention of doing that.”
It's a "half-measure," she added.
Since a court challenge by half a dozen radical open-borders groups is a certainty, it's not likely that Biden will have to close the border at all.
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