Top Democrats are warning President Biden against restarting the controversial practice

by

detaining migrant families who

crossing the southern US border without permission. modified wording per Lauter

“I urge you to learn from the mistakes of your predecessors and forgo plans to implement this failed policy,” said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the second Democrat in the Senate.

Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (DN.Y.) and 17

other senators wrote in a letter sent to the White House on Sunday and shared exclusively with The Times. Family detention, the senators argued, is “ineffective and impractical as an immigration management tool.”

As he prepares for an anticipated presidential campaign in 2024, Biden has sought to distance himself from the left, show more willingness to crack down on illegal immigration and pass a GOP-backed bill to overhaul the penal code. of the District of Columbia. The letter from Senate Democrats amounts to an attempt to warn Biden not to take that effort too far.

The message is also indicative of the potential of immigration issues to divide Democrats as Biden seeks to reduce the large number of migrants seeking to enter the US and seek asylum. Most signatories to just over a third of the Senate Democratic caucus come from the party’s progressive wing, including

Alex Padilla of California and former presidential candidates Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). Some moderates, including Senator Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Catherine Cortez-Masto, also added their names.

Resuming family detentions would represent a significant shift from Biden’s previous positions. The president ended the practice, reversing a series of Trump-era immigration restrictions during the first few months of his administration, promising a more humane approach.

“I’m not making new law. I’m eliminating bad policies,” he declared on his first day in office.

In recent months, Biden administration officials studying how to manage the record number of migrants appearing at the southern border have discussed the possibility of re-detention of migrant children and their parents.

During fiscal year 2022, 2.76 million

undocumented

immigrants crossed the US border

illegal,

shattered the previous annual record by more than 1 million, according to data from Customs and Border Protection.

The internal debate and Biden’s decision in February to drastically restrict access to asylum for people illegally crossing the border are likely to undermine the administration’s efforts to transform US immigration and customs enforcement into a more progressive institution after four tumultuous years under

former president

Trump.

Biden has rolled back many Trump ICE policies, including mass raids on job sites, and introduced a number of new policies, including limiting arrests of pregnant women and expanding sensitive areas such as playgrounds where arrests are generally prohibited. Under Biden, ICE generally has high-profile arrests of

undocumented

immigrants

illegally in the country

including families, which became more common under Trump.

However, one of the government’s most important decisions was to phase out the detention of families in ICE facilities.

“The best part of the government’s immigration policy for the first two years is that they ended family detention,” said Sen. Bob Menendez (DN.J.)

,

told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on March 19. “If the government goes down this path, I’m afraid the president will become the ‘asylum denier.'” ”

Former Presidents George W. Bush and

Barak

Obama used family detention as they too struggled with a spate of border crossings, but a court settlement banned detention of children for more than 20 days. Trump tried to detain families indefinitely as part of his tough border policy, but was blocked by the court.

ICE has been holding families in two facilities near the border: the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, which can hold up to 2,400 people, and the Karnes County Family Residential Center near San Antonio since 2014.

During his presidential campaign, in June 2020, Biden tweeted, “Children should be immediately released from ICE detention with their parents. This is pretty simple, and I can’t believe I have to say it: Families belong together.

His government followed suit by initially converting the so-called Family Residential Centers into 72-hour shelters in March 2021. Previously, families would be detained for weeks after being arrested for crossing the border without permission. The agency stopped housing families in detention by December 2021 and converted both detention centers into shelters

for single adults.

Under the current policy, families have been released in the US pending trial. Authorities track these migrants using an ankle bracelet monitoring device or mandatory check-ins.

In

the

letter, Durbin pointed to studies showing the negative health effects of family detention on children’s well-being. He also argued that detention has failed to deter migrants from crossing the border. The implementation of the detention policy corresponded to an increase in the number of encounters of children and individuals in families by an average of 57% per year between 2015 and 2019, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

“We understand that your administration faces significant challenges, especially in light of Congress’s failure to pass immigration reform to control the influx of asylum seekers arriving at our southern border,” the senators wrote.

“However, the recent past has taught us that family detention is both morally reprehensible and ineffective as an immigration management tool. We look forward to working closely with your administration on more thoughtful and humane responses to such challenges.”

SOMETHING LIKE THIS: The Democrats’ letter won’t necessarily find a listening ear in the Oval Office. Biden has embraced stricter border policies in recent months to stave off Republican attacks ahead of a possible re-election campaign. The end of Title 42, a Trump-era policy due to expire in May that gives border agents the power to deport migrants without legal process, could lead to a spike in border crossings, some Biden officials worry. The president has tried to end Title 42 but has faced legal challenges from officials in Republican-led states who argue that ending it would lead to a wave of migrants to the US-Mexico border. The Supreme Court ordered the administration to keep the policy in place until it rules on the state’s lawsuit. However, the government plans to allow the public health emergency for COVID-19, which underpins Title 42, to expire on May 11. Following that announcement, the Supreme Court dropped the arguments scheduled in the case from its docket. As part of its planning, the government recently rolled out a policy proposal that would restrict access to asylum for immigrants who enter the US without authorization and fail to apply for protection en route to the southern border. That proposal will not go into effect immediately and will go through a regulatory process to allow for public comment. After that time, the policy will be in effect for two years from the effective date. It is the Biden administration’s latest proposal to deter migrants from entering the US without authorization and to reduce the number of migrants crossing the southern border. The US and Canada

reached an agreement last week

to allow any country to return asylum seekers who cross the northern border without authorization in another effort to crack down on illegal crossings. A senior Democratic aide told The Times the administration was making it harder for Democrats to negotiate immigration reforms, including granting permanent legal status to the roughly 3.6 million Dreamers, or unauthorized immigrants brought to the US illegally as children. and who are protected from deportation by former President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. “Pulling out a Trump-inspired transit ban before even requiring Republicans to come to the table to protect DACA recipients ruins any possibility of compromise on this issue,” the aide said. in January,

Biden announced migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and Venezuela

would be returned to Mexico and not eligible for a legal entry program if they attempt to cross illegally. Illegal border crossings from those four countries fell from 84,190 in December to 2,050 in February, according to

U.S. Customs and Border Protection records.