As of 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, the U.S.-Mexico border was closed to nearly all migrants seeking asylum in the United States.
The drastic action, the result of an executive order signed by President Biden, was designed to keep the border closed until at least Election Day and defuse one of the president’s biggest vulnerabilities in his campaign against former President Donald J. Trump.
The question is how it will be enforced generally, especially along a 2,000-mile border that has nowhere near the capacity to handle the number of people who want to enter the United States.
From Wednesday morning until Thursday the ordinance seemed to be working, even if it was still too early to make a concrete assessment. Migrants in the border cities of Mexicali and Ciudad Juárez were being turned away, and word was spreading.
In Mexicali, Guadalupe Olmos, a 33-year-old mother, said that when she learned of the new policy, she cried and said there was no point in trying to enter the United States anymore. Last year, she said, gunmen shot at her car, killing her husband. She and her three children survived and tried to leave Mexico.
“It won’t happen again,” Ms. Olmos said. “Yesterday they told us it’s over.”
Before the new restrictions went into effect, migrants reportedly sought out border agents and surrendered, knowing that anyone who set foot on American soil could seek asylum. They were often released into the United States to wait, sometimes for years, for their cases to be heard.
Biden’s new order prevents that. But there are many ways people can enter the country along the border — from California to Texas — especially without new resources to secure the border.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection releases the number of crossings every month, so it will be weeks before the effects of Biden’s directive begin to become clear.
But the main problem for the White House is that Republicans have blocked billions in funding that would have helped enforce the order, raising questions about how transformative it will be at a time of massive migration around the world.
“None of this solves the long-term problems,” said John Sandweg, who was a senior Department of Homeland Security official during the Obama administration. “Until Congress acts, we will still have major problems at the border.”
Biden, under enormous political pressure to address illegal immigration, took executive action this week after congressional Republicans torpedoed a bipartisan bill in February that would also have closed the border.
The key difference between that legislation and Biden’s executive order is money. Biden cannot use his executive authority to send billions of dollars in resources to the border; he needs Congress to do it.
But Trump, who has made a tough stance on immigration a hallmark of his policies, had called on Republicans to eliminate the legislation, even though it included some of the most restrictive measures Congress had contemplated in recent years.
On Tuesday, Biden blamed Republicans for forcing his hand, but said the “simple truth” was that he needed to secure the border.
He will have to do so without the money that was in the bill, including more than $7 billion earmarked for Immigration and Customs Enforcement for deportation flights and other expenses; $4 billion to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for asylum officers; and more than $6 billion for U.S. Customs and Border Protection for more border agents and other resources.
The legislation would also fund as more immigration judges try to resolve a backlog of two million asylum cases.
The new restrictions will only be lifted when the number of illegal crossings drops to fewer than 1,500 for seven consecutive days and remains so for two weeks. The numbers haven’t been this low in years; In December, approximately 10,000 illegal crossings occurred per day.
More recently, the figures are around 3,000 crossings per day.
If the numbers fall below the threshold, they will rise again once the seven-day average for daily illegal crossings reaches 2,500, a now regular occurrence.
Assuming the executive order survives legal challenges, as expected, it could remain in place for months or longer.
“The threshold they set is incredibly, unrealistically low for a moment of historic migration globally,” said Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights organization. “It is not a mathematical coincidence: it is low enough to guarantee that the right to asylum between ports of entry will not return any time soon.”
The new policy changed the plans of Ibeth María del Villar San Juan, who arrived in Ciudad Juárez from Venezuela on Monday with her husband and 8-year-old daughter.
The family had planned to cross the Rio Grande and turn themselves in to U.S. border agents. But after learning that if they crossed illegally they could lose their chance to receive asylum, they decided to stay in Mexico to plan their next move.
“It goes against the expectation of receiving asylum,” he said, “but if we can lose the opportunity now, it is better to wait.”
Reporting contribution was provided by Aline Corpus in Mexicali, Mexico, and Rocio Gallegos in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.
