Immigration reform stalled decade after Gang of 8’s big push

MIAMI — Ten years ago this month, Sen. Chuck Schumer declared, “We all know that our immigration system is broken, and it’s time to get to work on fixing it.” Sen. John McCain quoted Winston Churchill. “There are big questions about whether or not anything in the immigration family — anything at all — has the votes to pass,” said Cecilia Muñoz, who served as President Barack Obama’s top immigration adviser and was a senior member of Joe Biden’s transition team before he entered the White House. Years after the creation of Obama’s program, President Donald Trump called for walling off all of the nation’s 2,000-mile southern border, and his administration separated migrant children from their parents and made migrants wait in Mexico while seeking U.S. asylum. Gil Kerlikowske, who was commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection under Obama, said “a lot of things are coming together at once,” including Title 42 possibly ending, a spike in the number of South American migrants crossing through the treacherous rainforests of the Darian Gap between Colombia and Panama, and a 2024 presidential election ratcheting up the political pressure. “We urge you to learn from the mistakes of your predecessors and abandon any plans to implement this failed policy,” Schumer and 17 other Senate Democrats recently wrote in a letter to Biden that called family detention policies “morally reprehensible and ineffective as an immigration management tool.” Republicans have blasted Biden’s “border crisis” and, since Trump’s rise, made gains among voters in some heavily Latino areas.