Morning Report — Can Biden straddle border battle?

President Biden’s restrictive new order on asylum-seekers, combined with tougher immigration enforcement by Mexico, appears to be constraining crossings at the southern border, Reuters reports.

Migrant apprehensions fell just below 2,500 on Sunday, the lowest daily figure since February 2021, according to a senior U.S. Customs and Border Protection official. The detentions outpaced 1,450 available interview appointments through a mobile phone app promoted by the administration as a lawful approach to a port of entry daily at eight border crossings, officials said.

The general questions inside the administration are many, but here are two: Will the number of undocumented asylum-seekers fall, as intended? And will Biden’s election-year efforts to use his executive powers to tackle the immigration crisis boost his reelection chances?

The six states with the largest undocumented immigrant populations during Biden’s first year in office, according to the Pew Research Center, included some he expects to win again in November, including California, New York, New Jersey and Illinois. Trump is expected to repeat his 2016 and 2020 victories in the other two, Texas and Florida.

Republicans in a survey conducted last fall said immigration was among the top threats on their lists. Democrats, however, said immigration was one of the least concerning among their tallies of key threats. 

The president’s midyear approach to a divisive challenge he’s weighed since he was a senator and then vice president is twofold: Lock up the border to migrants who haven’t made it into the U.S. and help some of those already here.

On Tuesday, Biden paired his asylum restrictions with an announcement of legal protections for undocumented spouses of American citizens who’ve lived in the U.S. for a decade or longer. He expects to spar during a debate next week with former President Trump, who has made border security a centerpiece of his bid to return to the White House. Democrats want to see Biden dig out from his reelection policy vulnerabilities.

Matt Barreto, a Biden campaign pollster focusing on Latino politics, told The New York Times that Americans draw a distinction between “long term, undocumented immigrants” and “new arrivals.”

“We see them, and most Americans see them, as totally different,” Barreto said.

Voters support immigrants whom they see as “my friend or my uncle who’s been here a long time and is even working or paying taxes and is just trying to get a work permit,” he added.

More Democrats now endorse the types of border security measures their party denounced during the Trump presidency. The previous administration helped sour public opinion on undocumented immigrants who entered the U.S. for reasons of personal safety, jobs, public support and to pursue legal status. Biden early in his term was quick to criticize Trump and his border wall and slow to recognize evolving public angst — including in Europe. The results are mixed from moves right on immigration among centrists from the U.S. to Germany.

“I’ve been clear from the very beginning, the system is broken,” Biden said early this year while encouraging Congress to send him bipartisan reform legislation that soon stalled. “I’m ready to act.” 

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🪖 Draft registration for women? As if this year’s authorization measure for the Defense Department isn’t controversial enough, senators from both parties inserted language into a must-pass measure that would require women to sign up for the draft. Republicans want to erase that language, The Hill’s Alexander Bolton reports.

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LEADING THE DAY

POLITICS 

ONE DAY AFTER POLLS CLOSED, House Freedom Caucus Chair Bob Good (R-Va.) is still fighting for his political life. The bitter race between Good and his primary challenger, John McGuire — a state senator who won the coveted endorsement from Trump — remains too close to call. McGuire holds a razor-thin edge over Good, leading by just 310 votes — or 0.4 percent — with 95 percent of the vote in, according to results from The Hill/Decision Desk HQ. The contest is more than certainly headed to a recount, but McGuire, encouraged by his late — yet little — lead Tuesday night, went ahead and declared victory in a room full of supporters, mimicking the game plan utilized by Trump in 2020.

With bitter anger about Good’s vote to oust former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) stoking opposition, those who worked against Good say the race should serve as a warning against the kind of tactics, style and demeanor that contributed to discord in the House.

“He represented, for many of us, what was wrong with this Congress, the dysfunction. And he was sort of part of the soul of it — the seed of all this dysfunction,” said Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), who endorsed McGuire. “Is it conservative to shut down government? I don’t think it is. What does conservative mean? I think the way he went about it by trying to dethrone, you know, McCarthy — he did — and all the other shenanigans this year, I don’t think that’s conservative.”

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ZOOM IN

STATE WATCH

THE EXTREME HEAT affecting the eastern U.S. this week may be a sign of things to come as monthly temperature records continue to give way. A broad swath of the country is currently under a heat dome, caused by a high-pressure system in the Earth’s upper atmosphere that compresses the air beneath it. More than 76 million people were under some form of heat advisory Tuesday morning in the U.S., and about twice that number faced temperatures of more than 90 degrees (The Hill).

“Every summer we get heat waves, and heat waves are getting more extreme and they’re getting more frequent and they’re lasting longer,” said Jonathan Overpeck, the dean of the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. “If it keeps rocketing up, we’ll have to think about why climate change [is] accelerating.”

Louisiana became the first state in the nation to require the Ten Commandments be displayed in public school classrooms starting in 2025 after Gov. Jeff Landry (R) signed the Republican-led bill Wednesday. The move has already sparked legal challenges; the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) announced its intent to sue, arguing the law violates the First Amendment (The Hill).

“The First Amendment promises that we all get to decide for ourselves what religious beliefs, if any, to hold and practice, without pressure from the government,” the ACLU said Wednesday. “Politicians have no business imposing their preferred religious doctrine on students and families in public schools.”

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ELSEWHERE

INTERNATIONAL

TENSIONS ARE HEATING UP along Israel’s border with Lebanon as the Israeli military approved a plan for a possible invasion of its northern neighbor — should a larger-scale conflict break out — and Hezbollah showed off what it said was drone surveillance of northern Israeli cities (The Wall Street Journal). Meanwhile, the Israeli military’s chief spokesperson said Wednesday that Israel cannot defeat Hamas without installing a new administration in Gaza, reflecting frustration over the government’s failure to advance a postwar alternative in the enclave and deepening rifts between the armed forces and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (The New York Times).

“The idea that it is possible to destroy Hamas, to make Hamas vanish — that is throwing sand in the eyes of the public,” Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said in a local television interview. “If we do not bring something else to Gaza, at the end of the day, we will get Hamas.”

IN A BLOW TO THE U.S., Russia and North Korea strengthened their alliance this week. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s treaty with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is the largest pact that Moscow has signed in years. The U.S. has tried to isolate both countries, but they have continued to deepen an alliance that was forged after Pyongyang began supplying Russia with artillery shells to use in Ukraine (The Hill).

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THE CLOSER

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