Biden Broke With Obama on Immigration, Only to Become Just Like Him

On Monday morning, President Joe Biden is slated to virtually address the National Immigrant Integration Conference, the largest gathering of immigration and refugee advocates in the country, with a list of his priorities for reforming the nation’s immigration system.

But for all of the campaign promises to fix what even Biden has called a “long-broken and chaotic” system, his pre-recorded remarks will fall on the ears of increasingly skeptical attorneys, activists, and civil rights leaders who say that Biden’s actions on immigration are merely an Obama-era redux—or even a slick repackaging of President Donald Trump’s worst policies.

“On the campaign trail, now-President Biden went to great lengths to establish the dramatic differences between himself and Donald Trump—and few policy areas were more divergent than the handling of immigration,” said Jacinta Gonzalez, senior campaign organizer with Mijente, a Latino political group. “But immigration organizers continue to feel whiplash.”

During the campaign, Biden pledged to break from President Barack Obama’s approach to immigration, acknowledging in his final debate with Trump that “we made a mistake” on immigration during his time as vice president.

“We made a mistake—it took too long to get it right,” Biden said at the time, pledging to “immediately” put DACA recipients on a path to citizenship and to send a pathway to citizenship to Congress.

“Many of them are model citizens,” Biden said of undocumented immigrants. “Over 20,000 of them are first responders out there taking care of people during this crisis. We owe them. We owe them.”

Nine months into the Biden administration, he has made good on his pledge to send an immigration reform bill to Congress, but advocates for immigration reform still have a long list of grievances: the continued reliance on a dubious public health order to bar nearly all asylum seekers from entering the country; putting the blame for the bungled extraction of Afghan interpreters and translators following the fall of Kabul on the interpreters and translators themselves; borderline-dangerous housing conditions for the few unaccompanied minors who are allowed to remain in the United States as they seek asylum; and the abuse of Haitian migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents last month.

But even the inarguable improvements implemented by the Biden administration are leaving advocates feeling like the president’s expansive campaign promises on immigration are just a regression to Obama-era enforcement. Case in point, last week’s announcement that the Department of Homeland Security had issued new guidelines on immigration enforcement, which the department said would better focus resources “on the apprehension and removal of noncitizens who are a threat to our national security, public safety, and border security.”

“For the first time, our guidelines will, in the pursuit of public…