The White House is finalizing plans for a U.S.-Mexico border clampdown that involves shutting off asylum requests and automatically denying entrance to migrants once a daily threshold is exceeded, Politico reports. President Joe Biden is expected to sign an executive order as early as Tuesday, according to four people familiar with the matter. The number of illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border has declined for months, partly because of stepped-up efforts by Mexico. Still, immigration remains a top concern as the U.S. presidential election approaches in November, and Republicans are eager to criticize Biden on the issue. The Democratic administration’s effort would aim to avoid any potential crossing spikes that could occur later in the year, as the fall election draws closer and the weather cools, when numbers tend to rise.
The restrictions being considered are an aggressive attempt to ease the nation’s overwhelmed asylum system, along with a new effort to speed up the cases of migrants already in America and another meant to quicken processing for migrants with criminal records or those who would otherwise be eventually deemed ineligible for asylum in the United States. The administration also has weighed some of the policies that had been written into a stalled bipartisan Senate border deal, including capping the number of encounters at an average of 4,000 per day over a week and whether that limit would include asylum-seekers coming to the border with appointments through U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s CBP One app.