“Civil rights advocates & Members of Congress are outraged by these insurance policies as a result of they flout refugee legislation & will unleash extra struggling on the border, w/ disparate hurt to Black, Brown & Indigenous asylum seekers,” Heidi Altman, the coverage director on the Nationwide Immigrant Justice Heart, a liberal human rights group, said on Twitter. “The admin ought to cease deflecting, *hear* & reverse course.”
The criticism from the identical teams that fiercely opposed Mr. Trump’s insurance policies has infuriated Mr. Biden and his aides, who say the comparability is unfair and improper.
“Effectively, clearly, we take a unique view,” mentioned John F. Kirby, a prime spokesman for the Nationwide Safety Council, noting the demand to steadiness the necessity for “authorized pathways to entry” and guaranteeing that “unlawful migration is curbed.”
Mr. Kirby and different White Home officers identified that a number of mayors who’ve struggled with the inflow of migrants into their cities, together with the leaders of San Antonio, Chicago, Washington and New York, praised the president’s proposals final week.
However because the president’s aides struggled to deflect criticism from Democrats and human rights teams, they braced for renewed assaults from Republicans who’ve spent months accusing the administration of being too weak on the border. In an opinion article published before the president’s trip, Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia, chided Mr. Biden for ready nearly two years to go to the border.
“The president neglecting to go to the southern border — throughout a time when we face report unlawful crossings and there’s a clear disaster — can be the equal of our commander in chief not visiting the Pentagon throughout a army operation,” she wrote. She mentioned of his go to to El Paso, “This checks a field, however it doesn’t even start to resolve the issues.”
The query of what to do alongside the southern border in locations like El Paso will likely be on the heart of the discussions when Mr. Biden arrives for conferences with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada.