Marshall Fitz

David starts this out with an immediate and flagrant distortion. I don't think any of us argue that the administration *didn't loosen policy in any way.* Of course it did. The argument, rather, is that Biden loosened in some areas and tightened in many others. That the loosening was in response to terrible humanitarian outcomes produced by things like MPP, excluding unaccompanied migrant kids, and deporting longtime residents. That David should level with readers about the difficult nature of those particular dilemmas, rather than oversimplifying them, and should say forthrightly whether in his view Biden should/shouldn't have kept Trump policies that were producing those terrible outcomes. That the tightening Biden did do was meaningful, extensive, and predated 2024, even if that coexisted with some loosening. And that David's ideological leanings render him unwilling to seriously grapple with all of these facts. Indeed, a serious reckoning with the Biden legacy should require a real effort to grasp his actual overall approach, which was/is to shift incentives away from asylum-seeking at the border, and toward employing broadened and more orderly legal pathways from abroad, i.e. the CNVH parole programs and CBP One app. David tends to miss the significance of these latter innovations because he only views them through a frame of "is it tighter, or looser?" As a result, he sometimes lumps things like parole into the "looser, therefore bad" category, when in fact, it is an effort to *disincentivize* the very sort of border-overwhelming migration that he decries, and it has actually had some success at this (not sure he's ever acknowledged that). I'm not really a defender of the Biden administration. I think they erred in all kinds of ways. But that effort at a paradigm shift deserves more serious discussion. @nytpolitics should report more seriously on it. The current coverage does not inform readers adequately about it.

No reader of this @nytpolitics piece will come away with a better understanding of the most fundamental reasons all this poses such a major challenge. It's largely boiled down to, "be less welcoming, and everything will be better."

I'd respectfully ask @DLeonhardt: Are you saying Biden should *not* have ended Remain in Mexico, should *not* have let in unaccompanied kids, and should *not* have deprioritized the removals of longtime residents? These Qs are not reducible to, "should we be welcoming or not?"