On Tuesday, when Joe Biden announced an executive order to “shut down” the border to asylum seekers, the news was predictable and yet surprising. The new policy had been under discussion since February, after a bipartisan bill to restrict asylum failed in the Senate. But, as the Biden Administration began working out the details of what the President might do unilaterally, the dynamic at the border shifted: the number of people arriving started to drop, and has continued to do so for the past three months. Border arrests in May of this year were lower than they had been in May of 2019, when Donald Trump was President. Yet Biden was reluctant to claim credit for the fact that the numbers were falling. Inside the White House, the subject of immigration, and especially the border, is seen as politically risky; there’s a refrain among advisers that a good day for the President is one without immigration in the news. Why, then, did Biden decide to issue a proclamation reasserting that there was a crisis when he’d actually been managing to keep it at bay?
Last December, while top-ranking officials at the White House and the Department of Homeland Security were meeting with a small group of senators to negotiate the asylum bill, I sat down with the Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas. “We’re at a threshold moment,” he told me. At the time, record numbers of migrants were arriving at the southern border; the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, was busing tens of thousands of them to Democratic cities; and Congress had recently rejected a thirteen-billion-dollar budget request from Biden for more resources to manage the situation. Democrats at the local, state, and national levels who were overwhelmed by the fallout were no longer just criticizing the President in private. The Senate deal, as Mayorkas described it, marked an inflection point. Biden, along with Democratic leadership in the Senate, was acknowledging that something had to be done. Republicans refused to fund the D.H.S. budget unless Biden acted to curtail asylum, and now, apparently, the moment of reckoning had arrived.
Senator James Lankford, of Oklahoma, the lead Republican negotiator, had the tacit approval of Mitch McConnell, the Minority Leader, to move forward with the talks if he could extract Democratic concessions. Lankford and the Democrats reached a deal, but, before he could make a case for it, Trump attacked it on Truth Social. “The politics on this have changed,” McConnell then told his members, who lined up against the bill. In purely political terms, the Republican position gave Biden a lifeline. “Republicans were asking for this exact bill to deal with the border,” he said. “And now it’s here, and they’re saying, ‘Never mind. Never mind.’ ”
By then, the idea of an executive order had already come up inside the Administration. The initial hitch was timing. To reinforce the urgency of the Senate bill, Biden had spent months stre
