How Infighting Over the Border Divided the Biden White House

WASHINGTON — President Biden was livid.

He had been in office only two months and there was already a crisis at the southwest border. Thousands of migrant children were jammed into unsanitary Border Patrol stations. Republicans were accusing Mr. Biden of flinging open the borders. And his aides were blaming one another.

Facing his bickering staff in the Oval Office that day in late March 2021, Mr. Biden grew so angry at their attempts to duck responsibility that he erupted.

Who do I need to fire, he demanded, to fix this?

Mr. Biden came into office promising to dismantle what he described as the inhumane immigration policies of President Donald J. Trump. But the episode, recounted by several people who attended or were briefed on the meeting, helps explain why that effort remains incomplete: For much of Mr. Biden’s presidency so far, the White House has been divided by furious debates over how — and whether — to proceed in the face of a surge of migrants crossing the southwest border.

Senior aides have been battling one another over how quickly to roll back the most restrictive policies and what kind of system would best replace them.

Now, Mr. Biden finds himself the target of attacks from all sides: Immigration activists accuse him of failing to prioritize the human rights of millions of immigrants. Conservatives have pointed to surges of migrants at the border as evidence that the president is weak and ineffective. And even some moderate Democrats now fear that lifting Trump-era border restrictions could hurt them politically.

Officials from the Department of Homeland Security expect record numbers of migrants to cross the border this summer, just months ahead of the midterm elections that will determine control of Congress and help shape the arc of Mr. Biden’s presidency for the next two years.

This account of the Biden administration’s handling of the border over the past 15 months is based on interviews with 20 current and former officials, lawmakers and activists, most of whom requested anonymity to discuss private deliberations.

Mr. Biden came into office with high hopes, saying he wanted a system that would allow the United States to determine, in a more compassionate way, which migrants should be allowed to stay in the country. He recruited a team of immigration advocates and others eager to put in place the humane system they had envisioned for years. But the slow pace of change has left some of Mr. Biden’s longtime allies doubting his commitment and wondering whether he is more interested in keeping the highly charged issue from dominating his presidency.

Virtually all of the aides who came on board early in the administration have left the White House, frustrated by what they describe as repeated fights with some of the president’s most senior advisers over whether to lift Trump-era policies. Even some of Mr. Biden’s more enforcement-minded aides have departed.

White House officials did not dispute the internal disagreements over immigration. Vedant Patel, a spokesman for Mr. Biden, said the president understood that changing an outdated system was not “going to happen overnight,” though he said Mr. Biden was “working every day to secure our border and use the power we do have to build a fair, orderly and humane immigration system.”

But the border has been a constant headache for Mr. Biden — one that ballooned into a series of crises even as he tried to stay focused on the pandemic, the economy, Afghanistan and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“Our old debates about border security and deterrence and open borders are not capturing the actual policy challenge at hand,” said Andrea R. Flores, who resigned as the director for border management at the National Security Council, disillusioned and frustrated by senior aides and “the opportunities I saw them not take.”

“This is an inflection point,” she said.

Debates and Clashes

Ron Klain issued a warning to his staff last summer.

Mr. Klain, the White House chief of staff, gathered senior aides, including Susan Rice, the president’s domestic policy adviser; Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, the homeland security adviser; and Amy Pope, the top migration adviser, in the Roosevelt Room. Mr. Klain told them that they needed to make sure the administration was not pandering to people who wanted an immediate end to Trump-era border restrictions, according to two people familiar with his comments.

If they did not find a way to deter soaring illegal crossings at the southwest border, he said, accusations about border chaos would grow worse, anger moderate voters and potentially sink the party during the 2022 midterms.

Mr. Klain was channeling his boss, who had complained to top aides about the intensifying attacks from Republicans characterizing him as an open-borders president, according to a person familiar with Mr. Biden’s comments.

But the source of the president’s frustration was as much…