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President Joe Biden came into office promising to reverse President Donald Trump's restrictive immigration policies but failed to deliver in his first year, disappointing liberals and overseeing a major border crisis that hurt his popularity.

Biden struggled to follow through on vows to rescind Trump's "Remain in Mexico" program for asylum-seekers, to end the practice of using pandemic public health authority to automatically expel illegal immigrants, and to resolve problems in Central America that prompt many to flee to the United States.

The public has turned on him. Biden's approval ratings on his handling of immigration plummeted through his first year, dropping from upwards of 55% approval to 35% this month, according to RealClearPolitics averages.

In his first year, the president took swift action to halt some of the most harmful and legally indefensible policies of his predecessor, Gregory Chen, the senior director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, wrote in an email. But with each step forward, the president also took major steps backwards.

Conservatives, meanwhile, fault Biden for the policies he has been able to enact.

We said this would be the most radical policy changes in immigration before he even took office. And they were very effective, very quickly, said Lora Ries, the senior research fellow for homeland security at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington. I would say it's worse than even we anticipated.

47,705 MIGRANTS RELEASED WITH INSTRUCTIONS TO REPORT TO ICE HAVE GONE MISSING UNDER BIDEN

The new administration moved in last January, quickly rescinding a slew of former President Donald Trumps border policies and plans, including stopping billions of dollars worth of previously funded border wall construction, ordering a 100-day halt on deportations, and promising to debut an improved asylum system.

But before he got too far easing border restrictions, the administration was met by an enormous increase in illegal immigration. The full extent of illegal immigration at the southern border is unknown, but the number of migrants who are caught or surrender to Border Patrol is tracked. Over the past decade, before Biden took office, the number of apprehensions ranged between 30,000 and 50,000 noncitizens encountered in a single month. Last March, 170,000 noncitizens were encountered at the southern border. Encounters have remained between 160,000 and 210,000 every month since March 2021.

As border numbers rose, the public began to sour on Biden's management, forcing the White House to spend its first few months focused on the border instead of steering sweeping immigration reforms through Congress. In response to the surge at the border, the Biden administration was forced to choose between maintaining the Trump administration enforcement measures it had vowed to rescind (and disappointing liberal immigration activists) or seeing a rise in illegal immigration of the kind the GOP has predicted. It chose a little bit of both, and that is what has infuriated both Democrats and Republicans.

One such border initiative created by the Trump administration was the Migrant Protection Protocols, which required migrants who sought asylum at the southern border to remain in Mexico for months until their day in court. Biden ended it in June and was sued by Texas and Missouri. The Supreme Court ordered MPP to be restarted.

Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a restrictionist group in Washington, viewed the initial conclusion of MPP as Bidens most noteworthy promise kept. Liberal groups, though, are furious because Biden restarted the program and expanded it so that more migrants had the potential to be turned back than when the program was operating under Trump.

Biden was pushed early on in his first year by the same left-leaning immigration groups to stop using the pandemic public health measure, Title 42, which mandated that Border Patrol agents turn all illegal immigrants back to Mexico or to their home country. All illegal crossers, not just those seeking asylum, would be turned away.

Biden planned to end Title 42 as soon as the coronavirus was no longer a serious threat, but the spikes in cases, including the delta and omicron variants this past year, prevented him from doing so. Of the nearly 1.7 million encounters made by the Border Patrol in fiscal year 2021, more than 1 million people were turned away under Title 42, according to federal data.

It is absolutely indefensible that the president has stood behind a CDC ban on asylum-seekers put in place by his predecessor using falsely justified and now widely discredited public health statements, Chen wrote.

Chen said Biden promised to reduce the use of immigration detention, as well as eliminate the use of facilities operated by companies that are for-profit as opposed to nonprofit.

Instead, his agencies expanded detention and signed more contracts with private prisons reneging on those commitments, said Chen. During COVID, the administration continued to detain people unnecessarily in facilities that became Petri dishes for widespread infection, and it failed to provide vaccines and adequate protection for people detained in facilities.

More than 32,000 cases of the coronavirus have been detected among people jailed at Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities nationwide since the start of the pandemic, according to federal data. However, the Biden administration did stop using ICE family residential centers to hold migrants before release. Instead, it relied on hotels and also released people onto the street, but rather than using ankle monitors to track adults, it gave some migrants cellphones to track them in a less invasive way.

However, noncitizens released into the U.S. to await future court dates must wait several years due to massive backlogs for the fewer than 500 immigration judges nationwide. It's a problem that the Biden administration needs to do more to address, Chen said.

The president needs to take far more aggressive action to eliminate the 1.5 million case backlog that is keeping people waiting years for decisions, said Chen.

Within the interior of the country, Krikorian said, Biden has all but ended interior immigration enforcement deportations. His order to halt deportations for 100 days was blocked in court. But, Ries said, he was very effective at reforming ICE by significantly limiting the categories of migrants subject to arrest, making many with criminal records ineligible.

The Biden administration did follow through on a promise to roll back a Trump rule that deemed immigrants who were poor a public charge because they did not make enough money and therefore would not be given green cards. Rosanna Berardi, managing partner of Berardi Immigration Law, which has offices across the U.S. and England, praised Biden for taking down that restriction. Naturalizations, the ceremonies by which legal permanent residents become citizens, drastically increased last year, which she applauded.

But when it comes to overhauling the immigration system through Congress, Biden has not gotten far. The White House-backed Democratic bill, the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021, includes anearned roadmap to citizenship for11 million non-U.S. citizens illegally residing in the country and would drastically boost security at land, air, and seaports of entry on the border. Four billion dollars would be available over four years to address underlying reasons that people flee Central America for the U.S. southern border. The bill states that it will improve the immigration courts and expand family case management programs and reduce immigration court backlogs, which top 1.5 million. It has not made it through the House or Senate.

This is my 25th year of being an immigration lawyer. Ive lived through lots of administrations. They all promised the same thing. They promised comprehensive immigration reform, said Berardi. They promised ways of making illegals lawful and no administration, including the Biden administration, has delivered on that promise.

Even foreigners seeking to immigrate to the U.S. legally are having trouble doing so under the Biden White House. U.S. consulates and embassies overseas that are responsible for part of the visa screening processes have remained closed, understaffed, or have simply not prioritized immigration matters, preventing immigrants and tourists seeking admission to the U.S. from being able to reunite with family or take a job here, Chen said.

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Biden raised the number of refugees admitted to 125,000 but fell short this past year. Krikorian said the Trump administration shrank the U.S. government's capacity for reviewing refugee applications and that that has continued to affect the number of refugees able to be screened under Biden.

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Biden immigration promises after one year: Border chaos and frustrated liberals - Washington Examiner