< President Biden will temporarily bar most asylum seekers at the US southern border.

AMANDA: Hi. This is Amanda (ph) in Barcelona, Spain, and I'm sitting down to write an email to my grandma. This podcast was recorded at...

SUSAN DAVIS, HOST:

11:36 a.m. on Tuesday, June 4.

AMANDA: Things might have changed by the time you hear this, like I'm getting married...

SUSAN DAVIS AND MARA LIASSON: Oh.

AMANDA: ...But hearing the sound of Mara Liasson's voice is always going to remind me of my Grandma Mary. Here's the show.

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MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: (Laughter) I don't know how to take that one.

DAVIS: I'm choosing to believe that's a compliment, Mara.

LIASSON: Well, congratulations, period.

(LAUGHTER)

DAVIS: And congratulations to your grandma. Hey there. It's the NPR POLITICS PODCAST. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics.

LIASSON: And I'm Mara Liasson, senior national political correspondent.

DAVIS: And Sergio Martinez-Beltran is back with us. He covers immigration for NPR. Hello, my friend.

SERGIO MARTINEZ-BELTRAN, BYLINE: Hello.

DAVIS: Today on the podcast, President Biden plans to take executive action aimed at sharply curbing U.S. southern border crossings, including for people seeking asylum. This is a significant policy move on the president's part but also a decision weighted in election year politics. Sergio, let's start with the policy. What is President Biden trying to do?

MARTINEZ-BELTRAN: I mean, we've been waiting for this policy for a few weeks now. And you mentioned seeking asylum. That's key here, right? This action that the president took today is aiming at reducing the high number of asylum claims that are happening at the border. And so once the measure goes into effect, migrants who cross without authorization, absent exceptional circumstances, would not be eligible for asylum. And senior administration officials say they expect to remove those individuals in a matter of days, if not hours. And then also, those migrants who crossed the southern border unlawfully and happen to be processed for expedited removal would get a credible fear screening only if they say they have a fear of returning to their country, but that threshold for credible fear would be increased.

Again, this is probably one of the most impactful border policies that the Biden administration has implemented. The restrictions will remain in place until 14 days after the average of illegal crossings drops below 11,500, and then the measures will be implemented again if that number goes to 2,500 or more. And currently, with the numbers that we're seeing at the border - and the administration has also confirmed this - they expect that this policy will go into effect immediately.

DAVIS: Sergio, to be frank, this sounds a whole lot like a border enforcement strategy that was supported by then-President Donald Trump. It sounds like Biden is trying to revive some of the former president's policies here.

MARTINEZ-BELTRAN: I mean, Biden is using the same law that President Trump used when in 2017, he tried to ban immigration from several majority-Muslim countries. And also in 2018, former President Trump used it to suspend the entry of migrants between ports of entry along the southern border. So it's the same law that the president back in 2017, 2018, President Trump, used. President Biden is using it now, and it's one of those things that immigration rights advocates say that it's weird to see the president do this, especially when we are five months away from the election.

DAVIS: Mara, this action seems pretty clear here. You know, Biden tried to get a border law passed through Congress. There was a bipartisan Senate border deal that fell apart when Donald Trump and top Republicans came out against it. Does doing something like this provide Biden the political cover he's seeking on this issue?

LIASSON: Well, I think if it does, it will be very, very skimpy political cover. I think that Biden is hoping that there can be some new visuals coming out of the border showing that there's not a backlog; there's not tons of people there. But the problem is politically, this is an issue that is so firmly identified with Donald Trump and the Republicans. Don't forget he came down the escalator in 2015 and announced that all sorts of rapists and criminals were coming over the border. And one of the reasons that Donald Trump stopped the bipartisan border deal from happening is because he wanted this issue to continue to help him for the election. He didn't want the border problem solved.

But I think that Democrats have a recurring political problem. They are very late to understand how important basic public safety issues are for voters. We saw this with crime. All during the '80s and '90s, Democrats were slow to understand that you have to have a safe neighborhood before you can talk to voters about almost anything else. Same thing with the border. But I do think this will help him a little bit. But I think that the feelings that voters have about which party, which candidate is better on immigration are really set in concrete, and Trump has the advantage there.

DAVIS: I think that's an important point though because on a lot of issues, sometimes Republicans care about it more, Democrats care about it more. But immigration is one of these issues in this election environment that does seem to have broad concern. It's not just conservatives and Republicans saying it. You're hearing it from independents. You're hearing it from Democrats, from Biden supporters who are still saying, I want to see something done at the boarder.

LIASSON: And I'll tell you when that really changed - when busloads of asylum-seekers were sent from border state Republican governors to Northern states and blue states and blue cities, and blue city mayors started saying, we cannot handle this influx. But there's a lot of misinformation and disinformation about the problem at the border. A lot of disinformation promoted by Republicans about the problems that migrants cause in communities - often exaggerated. But still, I see this as a basic public safety issue like crime. It's a threshold issue. People have to feel safe in their neighborhoods, and they have to feel that the border is safe before you can talk to them about other issues.

DAVIS: They want to see their politicians doing something about it.

LIASSON: Yes, and they want to see their politicians...

DAVIS: They don't always know what the it is, but they want something.

LIASSON: That's right. That's right. And this is very late, but Biden is now doing something, and we'll see if it helps him.

DAVIS: So is it safe to expect that there's going to be some legal challenges to this? It seems like executive actions on immigration always beg for those.

MARTINEZ-BELTRAN: I mean, I'm not a man who bets, but I would bet that that's going to happen. And that is because we've already heard from different advocacy groups who have said they are monitoring this announcement and that they will sue. And right - we saw advocacy groups like the ACLU that sued President Trump in 2017 and 2018 when he implemented the same policy. So we are expecting the same, and actually, the administration is even expecting it. They have said that they know that they would probably be sued by some of the immigrant rights groups and also maybe by some of the right leaning groups but that they're confident that the steps they're taking with this particular action are consistent with their obligations under international law.

DAVIS: All right, let's take a quick break, and we'll talk more about this when we get back.

And we're back. And Mara, I wonder if there's a question here on the politics from the left side of the spectrum because polling and other reporting has indicated that President Biden has a base problem. He has an enthusiasm problem. He has a problem with young voters, and the Democratic Party coalition is far less white than the Republican Party coalition. Also in this election, the president seems to have dipped support among Latino voters. And so could an action like this also continue to create problems within his own house?

LIASSON: If it does, I think they're minuscule compared to the problems he has with independent voters and voters who aren't young or minority voters. But what's really interesting here is don't assume that Hispanics want more lenient border policy.

DAVIS: Sure.

LIASSON: The border - as I keep on saying, it's a very basic, basic issue, and people think the border should be secure. That doesn't mean people are against legal immigration or against immigrants, but they don't like the border looking out of control. I think that the issues that are causing young voters, people of color to turn away from Joe Biden - immigration is not at the top of their list. It's more about the war in Gaza, inflation, the cost of housing, the cost of groceries. That's what's causing them to tune out Biden. I think that if this helps him, it's going to help him with the voters that the Biden campaign is really worried about, which is not base Democratic voters. They're worried about independents.

DAVIS: Sergio, can we talk about the timing here? It seems convenient in many ways that President Biden is announcing he's going to take this action when the number of people approaching the border naturally falls in the summer months, doesn't it?

MARTINEZ-BELTRAN: Yeah. And, you know, it's also happening at a time where we're seeing even additional patterns that are defying the tradition when we talk about seasonal migration. Usually, in the spring months, we would see the number of crossings go up. But this year, those numbers have gone down drastically. And the reason for that is Mexico. Mexico has been enforcing their immigration laws. And so they've been cracking down on their side of the border, and that has prevented migrants from crossing into the U.S. And by the way, that is happening because Mexico and the U.S. have agreed on that.

But, you know, one thing that I hear over and over by talking to people in border communities - in fact, I was talking yesterday to the mayor of Eagle Pass, Texas, which is at the epicenter of this immigration fight between the state of Texas and the federal government over immigration. Mayor Rolando Salinas told me that, you know, he wished this announcement would have come in December, when his community was seeing 2,000, 3,000 illegal crossings every single day. So he's also questioning the timing here of - why is the president coming out now, when, again, the numbers, particularly in states like Texas, have gone drastically down?

DAVIS: And assuming this action goes into place, obviously, the legal challenges to it are unknown. But would the impact be felt immediately, or is it something that would actually take time to see a change at the border?

MARTINEZ-BELTRAN: People are worried that this new action would go into effect immediately. In terms of impact, the administration is saying that they expect to start removing people right away, so they're saying that they expect those numbers to continue to go down. Now, the thing with the border - right? - and I think this is something that I think it's important to remind people - is that the border is huge. And - right? - there are the port of entries, but people tend to cross between the port of entries oftentimes, and then they seek asylum that way.

What we're hearing from advocacy groups is that they worry that this would make people who have real, legit asylum claims try to skirt Border Patrol in order to make it into the country because they might be afraid that their asylum claim will be rejected under these expedited processes now.

DAVIS: Mara, do you think that, in this election, where immigration does seem to be a central issue that concerns Americans, that the winner of this presidential election could argue next year that they have a mandate to finally address comprehensive immigration legislation, which has been incapable of getting done since the Reagan era?

LIASSON: Well, the failure of comprehensive immigration legislation is one of the biggest political and policy tragedies that we've had in decades. There is a bipartisan consensus, or at least there used to be, which is we should have no illegal immigration, but we should have enough legal immigration to solve our labor shortages. And there used to be a consensus where there would be a path to citizenship for the DREAMers - these young kids who were brought here undocumented when they were infants.

There would be more resources for the border. Why do we have this 2 million backlog of asylum cases? Because Congress hasn't passed enough funding for more asylum judges and Border Patrol officers. But if the next president is Donald Trump, he will say that he has a mandate to deport somewhere between 11 and 15 million people. That's who he says are in the country illegally, and he says that he'll deport them - something like what Eisenhower did. He'll even build detention camps if necessary. That is quite different from what you're talking about - comprehensive immigration legislation...

DAVIS: That can actually get through Congress.

LIASSON: ...That can actually get through Congress. Yeah.

DAVIS: All right. Sergio Martinez-Beltran, as always, thank you for coming on the podcast.

MARTINEZ-BELTRAN: So good chatting with y'all.

DAVIS: And before we go, a huge thank you to everyone who supports the show by signing up for NPR Politics+. It's a great way to show your support for our work. And as a side benefit, you get sponsor-free listening and bonus episodes. In our latest bonus episode, even more on President Biden's problem with younger voters - we dig into the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll with Domenico Montanaro. To sign up for Plus, just go to plus.npr.org/politics. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics.

LIASSON: And I'm Mara Liasson, senior national political correspondent.

DAVIS: And thanks for listening to the NPR POLITICS PODCAST.

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