The Biden administration’s newly announced immigration policy represents concessions to the white nationalist spin machine and the extremist contortions of Republican politicians who are aware that claiming that they are handling a “crisis” at the US-Mexico border reliably stokes their base and gets out the vote. Contradicting Biden’s promises to reverse “senseless and cruel” Trump-era policies, these policies punish migrants and betray the work of immigrant and civil rights organizations to elect him.

The new plan marks a decisive shift in how the United States manipulates migrants in service of national security. It consolidates an immigration system that ignores the particularities of migration from different nations, replacing a residual, Cold War cartography based on the State Department’s interpretation of international relations with expensive, hypermilitarized borders throughout the Americas and an almost complete abandonment of the international laws governing the admission of refugees and asylum seekers.

The new plan includes expanding the controversial Trump-era Title 42 to migrants from Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Haiti, excluding asylum seekers from nations like Cuba and Venezuela, which the State Department has long considered hostile to US interests. Instead, the policy favors white, European migrants. This plan denies asylum to anyone entering the country between official ports of entry on the US-Mexico border, as well as to anyone who traveled through another country but did not seek asylum there. And it imposes use of the CBP-One app, with its potential for surveillance and abuse of personal data, on migrants who do manage to cross into the United States.