WASHINGTON — Top Democrats are warning President Joe Biden against restarting the controversial practice of detaining migrant families who cross the U.S. southern border without authorization.
“I urge you to learn from the mistakes of your predecessors and abandon any plans to implement this failed policy,” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., and 17 other senators wrote in a letter sent to the White House on Sunday and shared exclusively with The Times. Family detention, the senators argued, is “ineffective and impractical as an immigration management tool.”
As he prepares for an expected 2024 presidential campaign, Biden has tried to distance himself from the left, showing more willingness to crack down on illegal immigration and approving a GOP-backed bill to block an overhaul of the District of Columbia’s criminal code. The Senate Democrats’ letter amounts to an attempt to warn Biden against taking that effort too far.
