WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden is in hot water with the progressive wing of his party over his new, tough-on-migrant border policy.
"I think it's a profound disappointment," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) told Raw Story after voting on the House floor Wednesday.
Biden’s new executive order will force asylum seekers to be turned back at the border whenever the seven-day average for migrant encounters — an unscientific measurement that sometimes double or triple counts asylum seekers — tops 2,500 between entry points.
With immigration firmly on voters' minds, AOC and other progressives are questioning why Biden seems to be borrowing a play from former President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant playbook.
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“It’s wrong. It’s not okay,” said Ocasio-Cortez, who has endorsed Biden in his reelection bid. “I think what we need to do is support a natural path to citizenship and the resources necessary.”
It’s not just AOC and her fellow so-called “Squad” members up in arms this time. This week, the American Civil Liberties Union announced it’s challenging Biden’s executive order in court, just as it did under then-President Trump.
“The Biden administration just announced an executive order that will severely restrict people’s legal right to seek asylum, putting tens of thousands of lives at risk,” the ACLU tweeted on X. “This action takes the same approach as the Trump administration’s asylum ban. We will be challenging this order in court.”
Biden took the bait laid out by the conservative messaging machine, said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
“I think it’s a mistake, what he's doing,” Jayapal told reporters on the Capitol steps Wednesday. “I think it's using tools — and I want to be clear that Joe Biden is significantly different from Donald Trump — but he’s using tools that Donald Trump used and that we all spoke out against.”
Progressives are banking on the courts overturning the measure, but they complain Biden’s White House has now caved to the far-right.
“I think this will be declared unconstitutional, just as Trump's was when he tried to do the same thing, but it's troubling that our Democratic president and some Democrats are endorsing this strategy. It's not going to fix things at the border,” Jayapal said. “You can't fix things because to fix things, you need legal pathways and you need resources. You need to modernize the system, which Republicans have refused to do over and over again.”
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Jayapal is questioning why their party’s standard-bearer ceded this issue to the GOP, especially after Republicans — at Trump’s behest — walked away from a bipartisan Senate immigration reform package earlier this Congress.
“We need to talk to the American people, because I don’t think that they, despite all the badgering from many Republicans, I think the American people actually want immigrants here. They just want an orderly process, which we all want. So we need to talk about our vision,” Jayapal said. “And it needs to be very different from Republicans.”
More moderate Democrats are defending Biden in the face of the withering criticisms he’s facing from the far-left of the party.
“The president's promise was that he was going to present an immigration reform bill to the Congress that would be comprehensive, and that's what he did. He did that in the very first piece of legislation on his first day,” Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA) said just off the House floor Wednesday. “His intention is a broad immigration reform package. That's getting nowhere. We've been pushing that for years, with no support in the Republican conference.”
After Republicans walked, the president still moved forward with some of the policies being pushed by the far-right, which is infuriating progressives.
“Isn't he caving to Fox News talking points?” Raw Story asked.
“No. I think he's trying to address half the issue — the half of the issue that he is able to address. He needs to address the other piece of it,” Garcia told Raw Story of the push for broader immigration reforms. “I am hopeful through my conversations with the White House that there's more action coming.”
Democrats still want immigration-related measures such as a pathway to citizenship for otherwise law-abiding people living in United States illegally and dealing with so-called “Dreamers” — children brought to America illegally and who, in many cases, have lived here most of their lives.
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Also on the agenda: a variety of guest worker programs, variety of other opportunities,” Garcia said. “We do have a major challenge to address. He's trying to address this. We’ve got to address the other half. Just addressing border security is not going to solve the challenge.”
Without Republican buy-in, Garcia says to expect more action from Biden on immigration in the coming months, as he and Trump get closer and closer to Election Day.
“What I can say is there are other executive orders that I think the White House is assessing,” Garcia said.
It’s unclear if those actions will be enough for the younger, energetic progressive wing of the party.
When it comes to Gen Z voters, Ocasio-Cortez has a simple message — one she and other progressives hope reverberates all the way down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House.
“I’m profoundly disappointed by it,” AOC told Raw Story.
AnaBelle Elliott and Caroline Pierce contributed to this report.
