In raising the issue of immigration during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, Donald Trump repeated online allegations that migrants were eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio. Those claims and the media response to them have overshadowed the bigger policy picture. While some anti-border control activists portray immigration as being like the tides and thus immune to human interventions, the past few years have demonstrated how much policymakers’ choices can influence immigration rates. This is especially the case with the executive branch, charged with enforcing and administering immigration law.

We don’t need to go to a small midwestern town to see the reality that U.S. immigration policy has created. From January 2021 onward, the Biden White House systemically set about dismantling border controls. President Biden rolled back interior enforcement, pushed the already-strained asylum system past its limits, and used executive power to grant legal status to migrants.

In September 2021, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas issued a memo that essentially exempted most illegal immigrants from deportation proceedings unless they presented credible threats to national security or public safety, or unless they tried to enter the United States illegally after November 1, 2020. That latter criterion would also seem to exempt from deportation migrants who entered the United States legally after November 1, 2020, and then overstayed their visa. This strategy of widespread non-enforcement took years to wend its way through the courts, but the message was clear: the Biden administration had little interest in enforcing immigration laws within the nation’s interior. A report from the Migration Policy Institute celebrated this measure as “perhaps [having] the most impact on the daily lives of immigrants and their families in the United States” of all the Biden administration’s actions on migration.