Biden’s new border rule shows progressives where they really stand

President Joe Biden’s announcement on Tuesday of an executive action that would allow him to temporarily shut down the US-Mexico border to asylum seekers appears intended to shore up voters ahead of this November’s election, as increasing numbers of Americans view immigration as their top issue.

But it placed the president once again at odds with the progessive wing of his party, a new point of contention after many vehemently disgreed with him on his support for Israel amid its war against Hamas in Gaza, which has led to almost 35,000 Palestinian deaths, many of them women and children.

The new action would allow for Biden to halt the processing of new asylum claims if more than 2,500 people cross the southern border in one day and would be dropped if crossings fell below 1,500 a day.

Biden’s order is essentially the shards of a bipartisan immigration deal which died in Congress earlier this year afterDonald Trump put pressure on Republicans to back out of it. Even then, progressives had a difficult time swallowing that measure, with New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez telling The Independent that “we are, in a lot of ways, contributing to an even worsening border crisis with this bill.”

There was little reassurance before Tuesday’s announcement.

“I’ll have to read the text of it, but I'm certainly concerned about any enforcement, executive orders,” Ocasio-Cortez told The Independent on Monday.

In recent months, Ocasio-Cortez has had to balance supporting Biden while he has occasionally taken steps that have frustrated progressives. As the co-author of the Green New Deal, she appeared with him for an Earth Day celebration touting his record on the environment even after he approved the Willow Project, a