Remember the good old days when Biden’s Department of Homeland Security did a masterful job ensuring that the US border was secure?
Well, it turns out those days weren’t so great, according to a deeply reported story in The New York Times, written almost 11 full months after Biden left office and more than 4 years after Biden’s team created a crisis they knew was coming and did nothing to avert.
His advisers warned that there would be “chaos” at the border unless he took a range of actions. But Biden and his top aides did not act on recommendations. A deep look at how Biden failed to head off the immigration crisis that beset his presidency @cflav https://t.co/5m7ZDf6eW8
— Peter Baker (@peterbakernyt) December 7, 2025
The Times has deep pockets and deep connections in the Democratic political and policy world. Still, somehow it took until now for them to write about the fact that even before Biden was elected in 2020, his team was warning that his immigration plans would cause a humanitarian disaster. Still, Biden and his closest advisors didn’t want to hear it.
They were worried that Latinos, or should I say the “LatinX” community, wouldn’t want better policies.
In the weeks after Joseph R. Biden Jr. was elected president, advisers delivered a warning: His approach to immigration could prove disastrous.
Mr. Biden had pledged to treat unauthorized immigrants more humanely than President Donald J. Trump, who generated widespread backlash by separating migrant children from their parents.
But Mr. Biden was now president-elect, and his positions threatened to drastically increase border crossings, experts advising his transition team warned in a Zoom briefing in the final weeks of 2020, according to people with direct knowledge of that briefing. That jump, they said, could provoke a political crisis.
“Chaos” was the word the advisers had used in a memo during the campaign.
As early as August of 2020, his advisors warned of the chaos that Biden’s proposals would bring, but Biden’s political team thought that immigration was a distraction, and doing anything to stem the chaos might be political poison with a constituency they were determined to service.
Ironically, their failures on securing the border helped seal Biden’s fate.
…a New York Times examination of Mr. Biden’s record found that he and his closest advisers repeatedly rebuffed recommendations that could have addressed the border crisis faster, and eased what became a potent issue for Mr. Trump as he sought to return to the White House and justify the aggressive tactics roiling American cities today.
Former Biden administration officials told The Times that Mr. Biden and his circle of close confidants — including Ron Klain, who was chief of staff during the president’s first two years, Mike Donilon, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon and Anita Dunn — made two crucial errors.
First, they underestimated the scale of migration that was coming. Second, they failed to appreciate the political reaction to that migration — believing that stronger enforcement would alienate Latino and progressive voters, and also that a border surge would not be an important issue to most voters. Those calculations would later prove to be mistaken, with many voters, including Latinos, citing immigration as a reason for supporting Mr. Trump in 2024.
During his administration, Biden’s people did exert a bit of effort trying to divert migrants from crossing the border, but those efforts were focused on encouraging illegal migrants to make asylum claims (mostly fake) and cross at other ports of entry. The goal wasn’t to slow the flow of migrants, but to regularize it and spread the chaos around rather than have it be so visually arresting by being focused in places like El Paso.
Mr. Biden’s policy advisers sounded the alarm before he even won the election.
In August of 2020, several aides wrote a memo cautioning Mr. Biden’s inner circle that his promises — coupled with pent-up demand from the Trump years and economic hardship from Covid — could provoke a spike in border crossings.
“A potential surge could create chaos and a humanitarian crisis, overwhelm processing capacities, and imperil the agenda of the new administration,” the advisers wrote, according to a copy of the memo viewed by The Times.
Mr. Biden was confronting challenges that had been years in the making. Migrants had increasingly turned to claiming asylum. By saying they were fleeing persecution, many had been permitted to live and work in the United States for years until their claims could be heard.
The Biden folks used a tried-and-true principle of Democratic policy: look at what Trump did and do the opposite. If Bad Orange Man did it, then Sleepy Senile Man should reverse course.
It wasn’t until Governor Abbott, followed by Governor DeSantis, started busing migrants to Democratic states that anybody in the party even gave immigration much of a thought. It was a border state issue, and those states were almost all Republican. But when Democrats suddenly had to deal with the chaos, the Biden administration started to think about how to address the crisis, but all they came up with was making it easier to apply for asylum, and hence turning illegal aliens into “asylum seekers” with even more access to government aid.
During his reelection campaign, Biden claimed that Trump had tubed a deal that would have reformed the immigration system, but it turns out that Biden didn’t want to have anything to do with the talks because it might come up with ideas that would offend his left base.
Democrats blamed Mr. Trump for sinking the deal. But Mr. Lankford pointed to another culprit: the Biden administration’s own foot-dragging.
When negotiations had gained momentum the previous fall, the White House had refused to get involved, according to Mr. Murphy and Mr. Lankford. “We don’t want our fingerprints on these negotiations,” Mr. Lankford recalled the White House telling him. Only as border crossings continued to spike did the administration relent, he said.
Of course, it’s not exactly news that Biden blew it big time on immigration, nor that he and his team lied constantly about how secure the border was.
But then again, the Times couldn’t report on any of this back when it was news, because doing so would hurt the Democrats. But now, almost a year since Biden left office and almost a year before the next election, the Times can drop a story and claim to be the newspaper of record, doing the deep reporting that nobody else does.
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