David Remnick: In 2021, Joe Biden came into office determined to ease what he saw as the cruelty and indifference of Donald Trump's immigration policies. With that came new problems each day last year, migrants arrived in record numbers at the US-Mexico border. Biden has been criticized on immigration from every angle and all sides.

Republicans generally say that Biden prioritizes illegal immigrants over US citizens. Donald Trump, obviously, wants more wall, and he's talked about the undocumented as a national poison.

Some big city democratic mayors, too, are complaining loudly about the surge of people seeking asylum at the border. They just don't have the resources, they say, to take care of them all. At the same time, the ACLU is suing the administration for new restrictions on the asylum process. Staff writer, Dexter Filkins made numerous trips along the southern border while reporting on the immigration surge. His story in The New Yorker this week is called Biden's Dilemma at The Border.

Dexter, for a long time, you've mainly been a foreign correspondent for us and for the New York Times earlier. You've written about conflict in the Middle East, in Afghanistan, all over the world. Now, you've spent months reporting on the border, the border between the United States and Mexico. What were you witnessing and had you ever experienced anything similar before?

Dexter Filkins: I think there's no way I could have imagined what I saw or what I encountered. I think you need to-- it's difficult to appreciate the scale and the magnitude of what's happening there unless you see it.

David Remnick: Tell us about your experience. Where did you fly to? What were your impressions? What did you see?

Dexter Filkins: I went to a bunch of different places all up and down the border. I was in, I think I started in El Paso. I made a bunch of trips to a little town called Del Rio. I went to another place called Eagle Pass. I was like working my way up and down just depending on what was happening and who told me what. Then I went out, and this is in the piece, but I went out up in a helicopter with the state troopers in Texas.

David Remnick: What are the numbers?

Dexter Filkins: They're astounding. I think about 4 million people, as best as I could count, have come into the country since then, and that's a lot of people. It's bigger than a lot of states,

David Remnick: That's 4 million people who are going to stay in the United States?

Dexter Filkins: No, I mean, probably about a million and a half of those people are what the Border patrol calls 'gotaways', which is they're basically counted but they're not apprehended. Either by, they've seen them on cameras or sensors or whatever. Two and a half million, and a lot of the piece is an attempt to explain the other two and a half million, which is, "I will be persecuted by my home country if you send me back." What's really striking, overwhelming is the numbers of people who are coming.

David Remnick: Where are those people coming from? Not just Mexico, they're not just Mexicans.

Dexter Filkins: Oh my gosh, they're coming from everywhere, everywhere in the world, Tajikistan, Burkina Faso, China. Again, the numbers are amazing, but also just the diversity of people who are coming across. You have to try to visualize it. There's border walls, there's fences, there's all kinds of things, but in the places where there's a border wall, they can't build a border wall in the middle of the river. If you can get across the river and you can get your foot on American soil, that's all you need to do.

David Remnick: Why did the numbers change so radically in 2021?

Dexter Filkins: That's a really good question. One of the questions I tried to answer, I think the short answer is Trump's rhetoric, President Trump, deterred a lot of people. He basically said, "I don't want you people, you're from these terrible countries, stay out." He was very, very brutal in his language about it. At the same time there was the pandemic, and so you can look at the numbers, they drop when the pandemic begins. To answer the question of why did the numbers skyrocket, which they did.

Joe Biden and his campaign for president, and I think he and the party, the Democratic Party, rejected basically the whole Trump vision of the border and of immigration. Biden literally said on many occasions, "If you're feeling persecuted, if you are persecuted, come, come and make your case." In fact, he did that in one of the presidential debates that also happened to be co-hosted by Univision, the big network. His critics would say he invited people in, and that's pretty strong language, but it's not inaccurate.

Joe Biden: I would, in fact, make sure that there is, we immediately surge to the border all those people are seeking asylum. They deserve to be heard. That's who we are. We're a nation that says, "If you want to flee and you're fleeing oppression, you should come." I would change the order that the president just changed, saying--

Dexter Filkins: Look, the problem here is that the American immigration system is antiquated, it's too small, it's completely broken, it's too old. Congress, in its mutual animosity, has been unable and unwilling to fix it. We're stuck with this system that doesn't work, that was designed for something, a reality that hasn't existed for decades. At the same time, you have these extraordinary numbers of people who are coming, in part because of the terrible political and economic conditions in Latin America and in Central America and other parts of the world. For instance, Venezuela, which has produced, the political turmoil and the economic collapse there has produced 7 million refugees.

David Remnick: Actually, you met a lot of migrants in your reporting. Does any of their stories particularly strike you as either particularly moving or emblematic of what's happening now?

Dexter Filkins: I met a woman named Julie. She's Colombian, she's gay, was being routinely beaten by her family. She couldn't live in her country anymore. As she said, "I couldn't get a job because I was being discriminated against. My partner, we were disgraced. We had to go, we decided to make the journey." This is every single person that crosses the border has a story like this. It's the journey. She makes this, she and her partner and her young child make this epic journey. They start by, they pretend that they're tourists. They go to Cancun, Mexico, then they make this long, long bus journey to the border, to the American border.

They're robbed the whole way up. They basically run out of money. They're begging, borrowing, doing everything they can. They finally piece together the money. This takes weeks and weeks and weeks. They find a smuggler. They give the smuggler, essentially, all the money that they have, and they get across the border. She's in New York now, one of 70,000 or so immigrants who've come. It's crushing because you realize the world's full of people like Julie.

David Remnick: The world is full of violence and instability and climate change and all the factors that lead to this.

Dexter Filkins: Yes.

David Remnick: Every time there's a political campaign, if the candidate himself is not a Trumpist and is particularly cruel about the issue of immigration, you'll hear the phrase 'sensible immigration reform'. Everybody's for sensible immigration reform, and there have been attempts in our recent history to have so-called sensible immigration reform. What was it and why did it fail?

Dexter Filkins: Well, the last time the Congress came pretty close to reforming the system was in 2013.

David Remnick: During Obama?

Dexter Filkins: Yes, complete overhaul, the system was passed in the Senate in 2013. Basically the outlines of any compromise, they're sensible, but they're also pretty predictable. The Republicans want greater border security, and the Democrats typically want more legal immigration. That's basically what was in that bill. What happened really was they sent it over to the House. This was as the Tea Party was gaining momentum, and they couldn't get the votes. It hasn't ever come back. Trump comes along two years later, 2015, and launches his campaign, and that has changed everything.

Donald Trump: People, criminal, aliens, we will begin moving them out, day one, as soon as I take office.

Dexter Filkins: More than a couple people explain this to me, political people who said, what the Republicans wanted was, they want to kind of, they don't want chaos at the border, and this includes voters. They don't want chaos at the border, and they want legal orderly processes for immigration. If you can do that, people will support it.

David Remnick: Do they only want immigration from Norway?

Dexter Filkins: That's what's changed is that is no longer true. Trump essentially came along and changed the vision of the Republican party when the Democratic senators would go into the room in 2013 and say like, "Here's our proposal and here's yours and let's hammer something out," they weren't that far apart. Now, they're far apart. Now, they're just-- as one Democratic senator puts me, there's no appetite for it anymore in the Republican party.

David Remnick: You said the system is broken and that it's incredible mess and chaotic. Describe for us what that looks like.

Dexter Filkins: For starters, there's not enough border patrol agents on the border, there aren't enough immigration judges to hear cases, the whole system is overwhelmed. It's a series of gigantic bottlenecks. If you come into this country, get your foot on American soil, ask for asylum, you're not going to get a hearing on your case for, on average, four or five years.

David Remnick: Where are you living? How are you living your life in those four or five years?

Dexter Filkins: You can see by looking at the way the system works, it's just a series of like ad hoc decisions and workarounds. As more than a couple of people put it to me, once a person gets in the country, they're in for a good decade because they can appeal their case and it'll go on forever. Nothing really works the way it was supposed to work. Nothing.

David Remnick: Among the many people you talked to for this story is the former Democratic mayor of Del Rio, Texas, Bruno Lozano. Tell me about him and the phone call that he received while he was mayor from the Border Patrol chief. What happened there?

Dexter Filkins: Del Rio is like a little town or a small city. It's like 35,000 people. Mayor Lozano said to me, he was the mayor in 2021. He said, "I got a phone call one day from the Border Patrol and they said we're expecting 10,000 migrants to cross the river at Del Rio by the end of the week." He just said, "What are you talking about?" This is a Democratic mayor. This is not an anti-immigration mayor. He just flipped out. He said, "You've got to be kidding me. 10,000 people?" It turned out to be 16,000 people and at one point he said there were a thousand people crossing the river every hour. They all were brought to under a bridge, but it was basically a city sprung up overnight, pretty small city.

Mayor Lozano, just it basically broke him, I think. The city was completely overwhelmed. He couldn't deal with it. Again, he's a Democrat, very angry at the Biden administration. Feels like he was let down, but more important, he literally said to me, "I can't govern the city. I can't do it because it's not in my control anymore what happens here." He basically gave up. He didn't run for another term.

David Remnick: What has the Biden administration proposed in specific terms, in policy terms?

Dexter Filkins: I think in the first week and upon taking office, President Biden put forward a comprehensive proposal to reform the immigration system. I think not terribly unlike the 2013 proposal. Dead in the water. It didn't go anywhere. He's trying, but absent that, it's an impossible situation. For instance, a federal judge ruled about a decade ago that the immigrant children crossing the border cannot be detained for more than 20 days, so they have to be released into the country. Now, that sounds like a very humane decision but the result of that has been since then an enormous surge of migrant children coming across the border, some of them are unaccompanied.

Their parents bring them to the border, they send them across, and because typically a child comes with his or her parents, they can't be detained either. That's what you're dealing with, which is like you want to do this but you can't do that. President Obama, who was very tough on illegal immigration, he tried to detain children and families and was basically blocked from doing it. It fell apart. All the presidents, Trump, Obama, Biden, they all faced the same problem, which is they can't get Congress to act. They can only act on their own.

David Remnick: Through executive order.

Dexter Filkins: Yes, and there's just a very limited number of things they can do.

David Remnick: Dexter, you wrote that, "Under Biden, remarkably fewer immigrants have been placed in deportation proceedings." How does that jive with the other numbers you've been discussing?

Dexter Filkins: When President Biden came into office, there was a overriding sense of, "We have to reverse everything that Donald Trump did," and they did. The result of that was a deluge. That's what we've been seeing basically over the last six months, which is Biden has been reversing course and becoming much tougher on immigration. In fact, he's imposing programs and proposals that look remarkably like some of the ones that Donald Trump was doing.

David Remnick: For example.

Dexter Filkins: For example, there's a rule called 'the transit ban', which basically means if you show up at the border and you ask for asylum, you have to prove that you've been rejected for asylum by another country that you pass through on the way here. That would disqualify a lot of migrants. When Trump did that, people went insane. Another example is 'Remain in Mexico'. Remain in Mexico was a Trump program which was, if you want to apply for asylum, you can but you're just going to get an appointment and you can sit down in Mexico until we call you and tell you to come.

David Remnick: Now Dexter, in your piece, you outline the Biden administration's current parole policies. A migrant is given a document ordering him to go to ICE on a specified day in the city of his destination. Is this policy for all migrants or only the ones who seek asylum? What's been the reaction to these parole policies?

Dexter Filkins: That's basically what you get if you're seeking asylum. You get to the border and you get on American soil you say, "I want asylum. I want to apply for asylum. I'm going to be persecuted if I go back." They hand you a piece of paper. The border patrol guy says, "Where are you going?" He says, "I've got a cousin in Chicago." He goes to Chicago. There's a piece of paper and it says, with your name and address and an ID, et cetera, et cetera, "Please, report to the Department of Homeland Security," the ICE office in Chicago.

Then down at the bottom, and I saw a bunch of these, it'll say, "You are likely to wait. The average wait time for your hearing is 1,752 days," whatever. In other words, check in with the ICE office when you come in and then expect to get a phone call from us in like three or four years.

David Remnick: Dexter, not so long ago you wrote a terrific profile of Florida governor and presidential candidate Governor DeSantis. It's been reported that migrants are leaving Florida because of DeSanti's anti-immigration law in Florida which is called SB 1718. Did we see anything nationally like that during the crackdown of the Trump era?

Dexter Filkins: We didn't. The law that I think you're referring to is essentially the employer has to verify the citizenship of the-- What we found in the past, in the last really big overhaul of the immigration system, which was 1986, that became unworkable very, very quickly and for a whole bunch of reasons. It's like, "What? Are we going to have national ID cards? How are we going to do this?" It becomes very intrusive and very difficult. It didn't work that well the first time.

Maybe it'd be different the second time but I think as to Florida, boy, he's skating on, I don't know if it's thin ice, but when you take a community like Miami, which is completely dominated by-- Miami's a Latin city. It's a Latin American city and it's filled with refugees and the children of refugees. He's going to have to find a way to explain that to them.

David Remnick: Dexter, Republicans often accuse Democrats maybe just Democrats and the left, but Democrats usually in general, of being for 'open borders'. What does that mean, and is, in fact, anyone in the Democratic party or in Congress for open borders?

Dexter Filkins: Look, that's a super catchy phrase. Everybody knows what it means. The border's not open. Biden, over the past couple of years, has turned around more than 2 million people at the border. It's incredibly vigorous enforcement. It's just that the problem is enormous and a lot of people have come in. When Republicans or anyone else says the border's open, it's a very emotional term. It's meant to evoke images of giant hordes of people flooding the country and flooding American cities. The border's not open in any sense.

David Remnick: As you said, you grew up in Florida where immigration is extremely vivid. You live in New York City. How did your experience at the southern border change your perspective on the extent of the immigration problem and what should be done about it?

Dexter Filkins: You can look at the numbers all you want. When you see the numbers of people coming, you realize, "What on earth can we do as a country and maintain our humanity?" That's a real tough one. I don't know the answer to that. To try to build a workable immigration system, we'll have to do it at some point. It will cost billions and billions of dollars. We could build a wall across the entire southern border but I'm not even sure that's going to work. I think what's the most--

David Remnick: That would be inhumane.

Dexter Filkins: That's the most disturbing thing, which is you look out in the world and you see what's happening. You see the misery and you see the desperation of the people, you see it in their eyes, who are coming to the border. How do you answer the question, "What can we do? What can we do as the United States of America, which has always prided itself on being a nation of immigrants but also the haven of last resort for people all around the world? What do we do?"

David Remnick: Dexter Filkins, thank you so much.

Dexter Filkins: Thanks, David.

David Remnick: Dexter Filkins's new piece is called Biden's Dilemma at the Border, and you can find it at newyorker.com.

[music]

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.