I'm saying that if Biden didn't open the borders like he did, you wouldn't have ICE raids during Trump v2.
He didn't, at least not in the "ICE's current actions are an equal and opposite response" manner you are implying. Point of fact, immigration had
already been surging for reasons unrelated to policy, and indeed had already hit a 21 year high
during Trump's term of office.
The issue you're complaining about was already there before Biden was even sworn in, and the data shows that the surge in immigration was not because of 'weak border policy' but
because of extant circumstances, such as the massive spike in labor demand between 2020 and 2022, to name just one of the many factors. For that matter, we see that the surge
started before Biden was even elected and it
ended before he left office. Moreover, a deeper dive into the data shows that it was broadly driven by a perfect storm of regional instability, post-COVID movement, and economic shock,
not the immigration policy of either administration.
In fact, while Trump et al have liked to paint the Biden administration as having an "open border" policy and being weak on enforcement, and like to point to the raw border crossing numbers in that period as proof...that's cherry picking the data by ignoring the
enforcement statistics. In actuality, during the same period the Biden administration tripled interior detention over what Trump had done in his first term, increased Border Patrol detention by 12-fold from January to July 2021, and increased US removal flights by 55 percent during his term. (For context, in 2020 there were 1,009 flights. In 2021 there were 1,049, in 2022, that was up to 1,416, then 1,482 in 2023, and 1,565 in 2024). He extended unprecedented
contracts with airplane charter companies when the prior contract lapsed, negotiated broader expulsion deals with other countries, and removed or expelled three times as many border crossers as the Trump administration.
Yes, numbers were high, but to infer that meant the lack of enforcement argued by Trump et al's "open borders" claims is pure "heads I win, tails you lose logic" determined to force the data to fit their predetermined rhetoric. Deportation numbers are down? "Oh, clearly that shows that enforcement is lax and undocumented immigrants are just getting away with it! It's all Biden's fault!" Deportation numbers are up? "Oh, clearly that
also shows that enforcement is lax and it's all Biden's fault!" It's an argument rooted in
spin, not fact, demanding that we treat
any permutation of the numbers (increase, decrease, or lack of change) as damning to the Biden administration's policy without actual examination of the numbers, their causative factors, or significance: Just invoking them in abstract as a prop.
Hell, for that matter, one of those causative factors of the increase in illegal immigration was the Trump Administration's implementation of Title 42 expulsions - starting in March 2020, and which Biden did not lift until May 2023 - which both incentivized border patrol evasions by removing legitimate avenues of immigration (such as asylum) and ended up incentivizing repeat crossings
due to the specifics of implementation, which actually made it
easier to make repeat attempts in a short period of time, inflating the border crossing figures substantially.
But because Donald Trump wanted to campaign on immigration, he and allied outlets characterized the matter as the Biden administration having "opened the borders" with "weak immigration policy". And that's a framing that
isn’t supported by the broader enforcement data. While encounter numbers were high, enforcement actions like removals, detention capacity, and processing operations continued at substantial scale - and in many respects increased in response to rising migration volumes - undermining the premise that the system became a permissive vacuum requiring drastic correction.
Hell, want to look at the
actual track record of the administration? Because that track record is very different from what you imply. In fact, it includes things like negotiating stricter enforcement in other countries (including Mexico, Belize and Costa Rica) to make it harder for undocumented migrants to reach the US border in the first place, reopening detention facilities and opening new ones, launching anti-migration messaging in foreign countries to disincentivize migrants from approaching the border, reinstating expedited removal, initiating expulsion flights, hiring a record number of deportation judges, surging the border with National Guard troops, increasing migration criminal enforcement by 33%, opening up new detention facilities, and even initially supporting - and even extending - the aforementioned Title 42 expulsion policy to name but a few examples
Contrary to the claims of Trump and his supporters, enforcement structure under Biden remained
quite active - and indeed removal and flights
increased substantively and deportation and processing capacity
expanded in a variety of ways
So no, Trump's usage of ICE has nothing to do with Biden's border policy and you can't just say "Trump's decisions are Biden's responsibility". Migration was largely driven by external forces, and enforcement under Biden contradicts the idea that he created a permissive vacuum requiring correction.
By no stretch of the imagination is ICE's current behavior the "equal and opposite reaction" to Biden's policy that you claim it is. Because that would first require the system to have moved to such a lax enforcement state under Biden as to require immediate desperate measures, which the data simply does not show.
