Biden is playing the Obama game on immigration now

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden announced a surprising policy that would allow for spouses of Americans who migrated to the United States illegally to gain citizenship.

The announcement comes just weeks after Biden announced some of the strictest crackdowns on migration at the US-Mexico border.

That executive order would give him permission to “shut down” to border if more than 2,500 migrants cross in a single day. It also allowed the order to be suspended if crossings dropped to below 1,500 a day — an exorbitantly low number that almost guaranteed the border would remain closed indefinitely. The order also said that people who cross the border outside of ports of entry could not claim asylum “absent exceptionally compelling circumstances.”

The provisions in that order infuriated Latino Democrats and progressive activists, who said the provisions were reminiscent of the worst policies from the Trump presidency.

But Biden’s recent announcement shows that he has essentially reverted back to his former boss Barack Obama’s approach to immigration, which is to say: crack down on migrant crossings while at the same time offering relief for immigrants who are already here.

Obama’s presidency saw some of the most sweeping deportations and crackdowns at the US-Mexico border ever conducted. In fact, the Obama administration deported more migrants than Donald Trump’s administration.

The Obama White House would have argued they did this in service of showing Republicans they were serious about border security to get them to agree to immigration reform. But many immigrant advocate groups were infuriated by his conduct, which led to them dubbing him “the deporter-in-chief.”

Much in the same way, Obama enacted the Deferred Action