Biden’s Immigration Legacy: Unprecedented Border Pressures Overshadowed Modernization Efforts

WASHINGTON, DC — The Biden administration has advanced 605 immigration-related executive actions during its nearly four years in office, according to a Migration Policy Institute analysis out today, well outpacing the 472 actions undertaken during the first Trump administration, which had been deemed the most activist yet on immigration.

While the Biden team entered office with plans to legalize most of the estimated 11.3 million unauthorized immigrants and rebuild legal immigration and refugee resettlement systems that had atrophied during the COVID-19 pandemic and Trump cuts, the administration spent most of its term challenged by record levels of unauthorized arrivals of asylum seekers and other migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. The border crisis became a political lightning rod, with immigration a key factor in the 2024 election campaigns.

As the administration enters its final weeks, MPI analysts assess the administration’s legacy in an article published today in MPI’s online magazine, the Migration Information Source. Over its four years in office, the administration:

• Paroled in or otherwise allowed 5.8 million asylum seekers and other migrants who did not have authorization to enter the United States to do so to pursue an asylum or other immigration case, according to MPI analysis of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data.
• Granted U.S. citizenship to nearly 3.5 million immigrants, the most naturalizations of any presidential term.
• Extended or renewed temporary “twilight” legal statuses such as Temporary Protected Status (TPS)—which provide protection from deportation and access to a work permit but not a pathway to legal status—to nearly 3.4 million beneficiaries, some of whom were recent border arrivals and others were long-term U.S. residents, such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients.
• In fiscal year (FY) 2024, welcomed the most refugees in a single year since the mid-1990s, with more than 100,000 refugees resettled. This marked the rebuilding of a U.S. refugee resettlement system that had hit its lowest resettlement numbers, at 11,411 in FY 2021, the last year of the Trump administration’s first term.
• Recorded 8.6 million migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border, including record annual numbers in FYs 2022 and 2023. Many of these were repeat encounters, particularly while the pandemic-related Title 42 expulsions order was in place.

In part because of continued congressional inaction on immigration, the administration had few new tools to respond to the record border pressures and increasingly complex challenges as immigration became more hemispheric in nature and the profile of arriving migrants changed. The administration was sharply criticized on all sides for its actions at the border. “For immigrant advocates, the administration represented a new low for its limits on humanitarian protection; for immigration hardliners, it was greenlighting an open border. The administration tried to appease both camps but ultimately failed to satisfy either one,” write Muzaffar Chishti, Kathleen Bush-Joseph, Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh and Madeleine Greene.

The Biden administration also faced rising state-level opposition, including novel state and local policies to bus arriving migrants to interior cities such as New York, Washington, and Denver, where services quickly became strained.

Read the article here: www.migrationpolicy.org/article/biden-immigration-legacy.

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Scroll through the Migration Information Source, which publishes feature articles on migration issues around the globe, data snapshots of individual U.S. immigrant populations and interesting country profiles. All from leading global thinkers and emerging scholars, published in accessible style: www.migrationinformation.org.