WASHINGTON — In the summer before a tough 2012 reelection contest, President Barack Obama lost support from Latino voters who called him “deporter-in-chief.” He then signed a sweeping executive order protecting hundreds of thousands of young migrants from deportation.
Luis V. Gutiérrez, an Illinois Democrat and former congressman, recalled that some Latinos in his Chicago-area district celebrated the moment in the streets. “Everywhere I went, people said this: ‘Now we vote for him,’” he said. ‘I swear to God. That’s how important politics was to him.”
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Twelve years later, Chairman Joe Biden seemed to try to copy that move.
Biden drew cheers and several standing ovations from a room of about 200 people Tuesday, including congressional Democrats and immigrant rights leaders from across the country, as he unveiled an order expanding legal protections for undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens. He evoked Obama’s powerful moment by announcing it at an event commemorating the anniversary of the former president’s 2012 executive action on young immigrants, framing his proposal as a way to keep families together.
“I refuse to believe that to protect our border we must abandon Americanness,” he said, adding that the nation has been revitalized by immigrants for generations. “We can both secure the border and provide legal routes for families.”
News of Biden’s order received widespread praise even before it was announced, including from Latino and immigrant rights activists and from some former critics who had branded him just weeks ago as “Border Shutdown” Biden.
“This is the Biden administration listening to young people, to voters of color who are demanding a pro-immigrant message on immigration,” said Bruna Bouhid-Sollod, senior political director of the immigrant rights group United We Dream Action. “For those of us directly affected, it has always been about keeping families together.”
But beneath the celebration lies a great deal of uncertainty. It remains unclear what this decision will mean for Biden’s 2024 presidential campaign and whether he will be able to reset the narrative on an issue that has so far been dominated by his Republican rival. Donald Trump.
Unlike Obama, Biden faces a very different immigration landscape.
The president is facing pressure from members of his own party and from Hispanic voters, many of whom want to see both stricter enforcement and better pathways to citizenship. Republicans have stepped up their rhetoric as they move to blame Biden for what they describe as chaos at the border. Even before Biden unveiled his executive action, Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s anti-immigration policies, called it “amnesty for illegal aliens during a border invasion.”
In 2012, under pressure from a national immigrant rights movement, Obama signed his executive action as his administration rushed to pre-empt a similar legislative proposal from Senator Trump. Marco Rubioat the time a young and rising Republican star from Florida.
Rubio moved to the left of his party to issue work permits to “Dreamers,” the young immigrants who entered the country illegally as children. In a sign of how much the political waters have shifted, Rubio is now backing Trump in his bid to become his choice as running mate.
Biden has been criticized by Latino leaders, immigrant rights activists and progressives for pandering too much to far-right demands. Democratic leaders and strategists said it was too early to tell how much his latest move would energize Democrats, especially after the president’s executive order this month that drastically restricted asylums for migrants as border crossings increased.
Longtime immigrant rights leader Chris Newman said Biden’s order could still be a turning point. The president, he said, should deliver a message strong enough to galvanize public opinion in favor of the policy, which could help him on the campaign trail and in his defense as it is likely to be in court challenged.
“The performance is just as important as the politics and policy,” said Newman, legal director and general counsel of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, a labor organization based in Los Angeles. It will also depend, he argued, on whether Biden can achieve other forms of aid for other migrant groups.
Obama’s executive action created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. It provides work and study permits for immigrants who enter the country illegally as children if they pass a criminal background check and meet certain requirements. Its impact was soon felt across the country. But that initiative — which at its peak included some 800,000 immigrants — is still in limbo in the courts, and new applicants can no longer apply.
Biden’s decision on spouses is expected to benefit about 500,000 people.
Biden’s supporters and allies say the president has navigated the thorny issue of immigration for much of his career. In 2020, Biden, who served as Obama’s vice president, had to walk a fine line between invoking Obama’s legacy on health care and the economy while distancing himself from the massive spike in deportations under the Obama administration.
Biden helped negotiate the Dream Act, which sought a path to citizenship for people who entered the country illegally as children, when it came closest to passage from Congress in 2010. Three years later, he worked with Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham to push comprehensive immigration reform legislation through the Senate, although that effort was ultimately blocked by far-right Republicans who called it “amnesty.”
“He’s been in the middle of all of this ever since,” said Héctor Sánchez Barba, president of the Latino rights group Mi Familia Vota, adding that the president has sometimes sided with Obama in discussions over DACA.
In recent months, Biden has tried to flip the narrative on Republicans, with campaign ads, a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border and an attempt at bipartisan legislation, which Republicans have twice blocked. While promoting one of those Senate proposals at a dinner with South Carolina Democrats in January, Biden suggested he was taking enforcement seriously, saying: “If that bill were the law today, I would close the border now close and repair them quickly.”
On Tuesday, the Biden administration pushed back on the idea that the latest executive order was intended to offset the previous one, and campaign officials and allies previewed their new message on immigration progress: Biden is working to keep families together, while Trump has torn things up. them apart. The president’s event celebrating the Obama administration’s immigration milestone came just days after he and Obama shared a stage at a fundraiser in Los Angeles, where they hugged and joked.
In the White House briefing earlier in the day, Biden’s press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre linked their legacies. “There’s a history, if you will, of the president wanting to protect American families, wanting to protect American citizens — and this is what you see in this announcement,” she said.
In his response, Trump revised his tough rhetoric on immigration during an afternoon rally in Racine, Wisconsin. “All an illegal alien has to do to sign up for his new program is a marriage of convenience,” Trump said, as the crowd chanted, “Send them back!”
Immigration and the southern border are particularly central concerns for Republican and independent voters in the 2024 presidential campaign. But some Democratic pollsters and strategists have warned it may be too late to sway voters who say Trump is better at handling immigration then Biden.
Still, Biden’s latest move to protect spouses could be a game changer in some ways. The American Business Immigration Coalition, which represents hundreds of companies and supports Biden’s order, has predicted that the latest policy could help Biden in swing states. In Nevada, Arizona and Georgia, an estimated total of more than 300,000 voters live in “mixed status” households, or homes in which at least one person lives in the country without legal permission.
Gutiérrez, the former Illinois congressman, said polls did not take into account what he called the “X factor” of these recent actions — how quickly word of mouth could spread among Mexican American and Central American families with a mixed status who would benefit from this.
“This will bring a lot of joy and happiness, and the best thing it will do is bring hope,” he said.
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