In one day, President Joe Biden showed that he is committed to proposing real  solutions to address a broken immigration system, while congressional Republicans only want to play politics. Yesterday, he announced he will restore $700 million in aid for countries in the Northern Triangle, and that he has appointed Vice President Harris to lead efforts to address migration.

This comes on the heels of new reporting from NBC highlighting how Trump administration officials “were sitting on their hands” and refused to heed calls from Biden transition officials to increase capacity for child migrants.

As a reminder, here are the facts about what’s happening on the border.

THE TRUTH: There is no migrant “surge” due to Biden administration policies.

Washington Post: “We analyzed monthly CBP data from 2012 to now and found no crisis or surge that can be attributed to Biden administration policies. Rather, the current increase in apprehensions fits a predictable pattern of seasonal changes in undocumented immigration combined with a backlog of demand because of 2020’s coronavirus border closure.”

Washington Post: “In other words, in fiscal year 2021, it appears that migrants are continuing to enter the United States in the same numbers as in fiscal year 2019 — plus the pent-up demand from people who would have come in fiscal year 2020, but for the pandemic.”

THE TRUTH: President Biden is working to repair the damage Trump caused to our immigration system.

CNN: “‘I can say quite clearly: Don’t come,’ Biden told ABC in an interview aired on Tuesday. The President continued: ‘We’re in the process of getting set up, don’t leave your town or city or community.’”

Council on Foreign Relations: “Still, the administration has inherited a migration system in crisis. The institutional capacity of immigration courts and other parts of the bureaucracy to humanely manage caseloads has eroded. It will take time and money to clear the backload of more than 1.2 million pending immigration cases and put back into place working asylum processes. The pandemic has made managing these flows and the containment of people all the harder.”

Greg Sargent of the Washington Post: “Trumpists will claim this supposed Biden permissiveness is drawing more migrants relative to last year to make the trek. But Wendy Young, the president of Kids in Need of Defense, told me it’s far more complex than this.  Migration was suppressed last year during the pandemic, and arrivals are now rising due to many factors in Central America.”

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