USA Today: Biden’s Legacy Can Be a Humane Transition or a Slammed Door on Asylum Seekers

This op-ed was originally published on December 5, 2024 in USA Today.

Nearly two years ago, President Joe Biden announced a “carrot and stick” approach at the border: expanded legal pathways for asylum seekers and penalties for those who crossed the border without authorization.

But even as Border Patrol encounters dropped 75% over the past year, the Biden administration has refused to expand the processing of asylum seekers at land border ports of entry.

This refusal sets the stage for an impending humanitarian and security crisis if President-elect Donald Trump fulfills his promise to end the legal pathways and strand tens of thousands of asylum seekers in Mexico.

It is incumbent on the Biden administration and in the interest of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum that they work together to minimize this crisis by expanding asylum seekers’ safe transit and access to U.S. land border ports of entry as quickly as possible. 

When unauthorized border crossings reached historic highs in late 2023, the Biden administration pressured the Mexican government to increase enforcement and keep asylum seekers away from the border.

In the past year, Mexican immigration authorities stopped an estimated 100,000 migrants each month from reaching the U.S. border. One tactic was forcibly busing migrants from central and northern Mexico to southern Mexico between January and September 2024, according to information provided by the nonprofit organization Institute for Women in Migration. 

Migrants have tried to follow Biden’s asylum policy

Many of those bussed south were only trying to do what the Biden administration asked: Use a smartphone application called CBP One to request an appointment at a land border port of entry, effectively a digital metering system that is the only way to access asylum in the United States.

The wait for an appointment can be several months long; appointments are assigned partly randomly and partly based on wait time. Those waiting for the limited number of appointments lack means of support or legal status in Mexico so they can be arrested and bused south.

Two months ago, we met three exhausted and destitute Afghan women in a shelter in Villahermosa, Tabasco. After about two months of waiting for a CBP One appointment in Mexico City, they were arrested and bused south. 

By the time they arrived, Mexico had begun to bus a much smaller number of people with confirmed CBP One appointment from southern Mexico to the U.S. border. According to information we received from the Mexican government, only 1,355 people had been bused north through this “safe mobility” or humanitarian corridor in its first six weeks (through mid-October.) This is fewer than the 1,450 CBP One appointments processed each day at the U.S. border, meaning the vast majority of people must make their way at great cost and peril through Mexico to the U.S. border on their own.

This is precisely what the three Afghan women had to do after finally receiving their appointment. 

Further, most migrants who have gotten CBP One appointments have to risk traveling north without official Mexican documents permitting such travel, increasing their vulnerability to targeted violence at the hands of government officials and cartels.

Migrants in Mexico City told us they were taken off private buses and vans and extorted and robbed both by Mexican authorities and organized criminal groups in Juchitan, Oaxaca. Many people who get CBP One appointments in Mexico City are kidnapped when they arrive in northern border cities like Nuevo Laredo, Matamoros and Reynosa, including at the airport and bus terminals.

Trump’s proposed border policy will only weaken security

Indeed, wherever people in Mexico wait for CBP One appointments, violence and criminality increase.

At a shelter in Tapachula at the end of September, we spoke to four women who had fled targeted threats of violence against themselves or their children in Honduras. All were waiting for CBP One appointments and were scared to leave the shelter since they had been kidnapped and extorted in Chiapas.  

Insecurity in Mexico will only increase in 2025 as Trump has promised to immediately end CBP One – leaving in the lurch thousands of people waiting for appointments. 

To lessen the likelihood of desperate asylum seekers rushing across the border in December and to reduce the number of stranded migrants and power over them by organized crime in Mexico, the Sheinbaum and Biden administrations should work together to bring as many asylum seekers waiting in Mexico to U.S. ports of entry in an orderly way. 

The Biden administration should shift officers from the field to the ports – a reverse of what was done in late 2023 – to process asylum seekers who cannot use CBP One as well as increase the number of CBP One appointments each day, which should be allocated to those waiting the longest.

The Biden administration should also encourage the Mexican government to organize more buses to safely transport those with CBP One appointments – especially those identified by nonprofit and international organizations as urgently needing protection – to shelters in northern border cities.

The Mexican government should also provide official documents authorizing travel to the U.S. border from anywhere in Mexico to anyone with a CBP One appointment.

President Biden’s approach to asylum seekers has already imperiled many. The Biden administration now has a last chance to prevent an impending disaster by working with the Mexican government to expand access to asylum at land border ports of entry, a policy approach that a majority of American voters support. 

Ari Sawyer is an expert on immigration and border policy in North America and a consultant at Refugees International. Yael Schacher is director for the Americas and Europe at Refugees International.