#BLM:

It wasn't supposed to be like this. In seeking the presidency in 2020, Biden actually made one of his primary pitches that he would wash away the moral stain of Donald Trump's xenophobic immigration agenda. Included in that was the Democrat's explicit pledge that he'd reverse Trump's policies that reduced the number of refugees granted U.S. political asylum to record lows, with a paltry annual target of just 15,000 going into the 2020 election. Biden promised to hike the yearly goal back to 125,000 "and to seek to raise it over time."

But since the moment that a predictable late-winter surge of Central American migrants led to scare chyrons on Fox News, Team Biden has aggressively moved to break his promise, lowering his actual target for 2021 to 62,000 and then admitting he wouldn't come close to meeting even that. At least before the Afghan crisis, Biden was on track for an even worse year in 2021 for refugee admission than Trump's last-year low point -- despite the fact that giving all political asylum seekers a fair hearing is both U.S. law and an international human right.

Biden's Haitian policy sums up his muddled and so far failed efforts to reverse Trump's legacy. Even before the second deadly and devastating earthquake in little more than a decade struck the island nation this summer, Biden's Department of Homeland Security extended Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, to Haitians in the United States threatened with possible deportation because of Haiti's economic and political crises. Yet just weeks later, the Biden administration invoked a public health order known as Title 42 to fill a plane with 86 of the first Haitians to arrive at the Mexican border and to send them back to the country that other U.S. officials had deemed too dangerous, and is now recovering from a natural disaster.

"That ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] would continue to carry out the mass deportations of our Haitian neighbors -- with Haiti in the midst of its worst political, public health and economic crises yet -- is cruel and callous," Democratic U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts said, and that was before the news that Biden wants to use Title 42 to move the thousands now trapped in Del Rio. People on the left and groups like the ACLU were righteously outraged last year at Trump for using that provision and the thinly veiled excuse of the COVID-19 crisis to deny asylum seekers their fundamental rights. That Biden is continuing this practice -- erecting walls to human suffering instead of building bridges -- is profoundly disappointing.

"The situation in Del Rio wouldn't be happening if the [administration] had cleaved to principle [and] focused on universal access to asylum in an orderly manner through ports of entry," Clara Long, Human Rights Watch's associate director for migrant policy and climate, wrote in a devastating Twitter thread on Saturday. "Instead its border policies are chaotic [and] unpredictable [and] people who need protection don't know what to do."

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