President Joe Biden had big ambitions for remaking America’s immigration system.

He said he would secure the border. He promised to make the asylum system work. He vowed to protect Dreamers. On the first day of his presidency, he proposed legislation to create a path to citizenship for millions of immigrants in the country without legal permission.

Most importantly, he said he would bridge the partisan divide that has long prevented any overhaul of an archaic immigration system that his aides often describe as a “decades-old jalopy” in desperate need of upgrades.

But for four years, most of those goals were stymied by the need to confront a worldwide surge of displaced people fleeing their homes and a determined Republican opposition that seized on scenes of a chaotic border to block action and damage the president politically.

The president’s early efforts to reverse some of his predecessor’s harsh policies won praise from liberals but soon left him open to attacks by conservatives who said he had all but invited migrants to flock to the border. As the issue flared, and even Democrats complained, Biden embraced tougher measures and was sharply criticized by immigration advocates.

In the end, Biden’s legacy on immigration was largely limited to his eventual success in reducing illegal border crossings to their lowest levels in more than four years. At the peak of the surge at the end of 2023, a quarter-million migrants crossed into the United States in a single month. As voters elect the next president, that number has dropped to around 50,000 — lower than during parts of his predecessor’s tenure.

But the immigration system Biden pledged to fix remains fundamentally broken, and some of his actions at the border moved the problem deeper into the country.

The issue is at the center of one of the closest modern presidential elections. As he seeks a return to office, former President Donald Trump has ignored the lower border numbers and used anger about migrants as a political cudgel. Vice President Kamala Harris has sought to keep her distance from Biden’s policies while rejecting Trump’s xenophobic language.

Now, some of the administration’s harshest critics say the lack of progress during Biden’s term means the fate of millions of immigrants in the United States will be in the hands of whoever wins next year. And the visions could not be more different.

Harris has pledged to continue what Biden’s aides have called a “balanced” approach that combines tough enforcement and welcoming empathy. Trump has vowed mass deportations and a renewed effort to seal off the border to almost anyone trying to enter.

“For too long, our nation’s leaders have treated immigration as a political football instead of tackling long-term solutions,” said Heidi Altman, the director of federal advocacy at the National Immigration Law Center, an advocacy group representing immigrant needs.

Focus on the Border

The border was not supposed to be the center of Biden’s attention when he came into office.

But by early 2021, it became clear that something was different. The coronavirus pandemic had increased social instability and famine around the world, forcing people to flee their homes. By the spring, tens of thousands of desperate children were crossing alone into the United States, seeking refuge. That fall, thousands of Haitians trying to escape gang violence crowded under bridges on the U.S. side of the border with Mexico.

To deal with the sheer numbers of people, Biden did two things. First, he embraced Trump-era measures to keep migrants from crossing illegally. He kept in place Trump’s pandemic-era ban on border crossings. And when that ban was finally lifted, he imposed his own restrictions similar to those employed by the former president.

At the same time, Biden sought to relieve pressure on the border by creating new ways for about 1.3 million immigrants to enter the United States without wading across the Rio Grande or sneaking through the desert. One program allowed migrants with financial sponsors to migrate from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Others focused on Ukraine and Afghanistan. A new phone app allows migrants to make appointments to cross the border at an official port of entry.

Officials argued that people from those countries were coming to the United States one way or the other. Better to let them come in an orderly process and with some limited ability to work legally in the United States while immigration authorities considered whether and how long they could stay.

Both efforts by Biden helped reduce the number of illegal crossings, along with help from the Mexican government, which stepped up enforcement on its side of the border. But what the administration called a “balanced” approach resulted in the entry of many migrants now living in cities throughout the country whose legal status is uncertain.

When Biden was elected, more than 3 million migrants tracked by Immigration and Customs Enforcement had been released into cities across the United States while their cases were considered by a backed-up court system. Four years later, officials say that number has more than doubled to 7.6 million people.

Seizing on those kinds of numbers, Trump has made immigration a centerpiece of his campaign to retake the White House, accusing Biden and Harris of leaving the borders wide open with a litany of false and misleading claims.

“She has violated her oath, eradicated our sovereign border and unleashed an army of migrant gangs who are waging a campaign of violence and terror against our citizens,” Trump said during a rally at Madison Square Garden last month. “Kamala has imported criminal migrants from prisons and jails, insane asylums and mental institutions.”

Immigration experts say those accusations are wildly exaggerated, but Trump’s campaign advisers believe the attacks will motivate his supporters, who are eager to blame someone for their economic and security anxieties.

The president and his top advisers say they are proud of what they have accomplished at the border even as they acknowledge disappointment that they were not able to make more progress. They blame fierce Republican opposition, driven by loyalty to Trump, for preventing the president’s efforts to pass a new U.S. Citizenship Act. Earlier this year, even a smaller, bipartisan proposal to increase border security failed after Trump urged Republican lawmakers not to support it.

Angelo Fernández Hernández, a White House spokesperson, called the president’s efforts at the border an “effective and balanced approach in order to secure our border and make our immigration system more fair and just.”

But others said Biden had played into the hands of those who believe that the country’s immigration system can be fixed merely by becoming tougher about how many people are allowed to cross from Mexico into the United States.

“The total fixation on the ‘border’ and not a holistic focus on a functioning immigration process has created false beliefs” about the solutions, said Jason Houser, who was a senior ICE official during the Biden administration. “Americans now believe mass deportation is the answer to migratory surges at the border. That’s absurd.”

He added, “You have to take drastic measures to get the immigration system functioning.”

The Rest of the Problem

As migrants arrived in the United States during Biden’s term, many found their way north, hundreds or thousands of miles from the border communities near Mexico.

Some were bused to New York or Denver or Chicago by Republican governors in Florida and Texas, who were determined to show Democratic mayors and governors what it was like to deal with them. Others were settled by the Biden administration in small communities eager for anyone who could help solve the worker shortages that were hampering their economic growth.

Together, the migrants added to the yearslong total of millions of people who were settling into life in America without permanent legal status.

Some cities where migrants were sent have struggled to pay for housing and other services, prompting even the president’s fellow Democrats to begin demanding tougher enforcement. Denver, which has absorbed more than 40,000 migrants in the past two years, recently shut down its last emergency shelter as the flow of people from the border slowed.

But millions of immigrants living in the country illegally remain in the shadows, with no way to earn citizenship. And cultural clashes between newcomers and longtime residents have become more common in places like Springfield, Ohio, where an influx of 15,000 legal Haitian migrants sparked tensions. Trump and his allies used the city as a political argument, falsely accusing the migrants of eating cats.

The legislation Biden proposed on his first day in office was aimed at resolving many of those issues once and for all. But in the face of Republican opposition, he made smaller, incremental changes.

He stopped Trump’s policy of deporting some veterans and issued rules that protected migrants in schools, health care facilities and some other protected areas from deportation. The president issued some regulations extending some projections to Dreamers, whose parents brought them to America illegally as small children. And he created the Welcome Corps, a pilot program to allow Americans to sponsor migrants in their communities.

But when it came to a complete overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws, Biden did what his predecessors have done for decades. Faced with implacable opposition, he will leave the issue to the next president. And neither candidate has laid out a plan to bridge the deep political divides over the issue.

“The U.S. immigration system needs bold, civil-rights-oriented solutions, and they have been slow in coming,” Altman said. “So here we are with the election days away, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.”

The New York Times News Service