Democrat Says Party Paid ‘Heavy Price’ for Biden Admin’s Immigration Views

Democrats “paid a heavy price” for President Joe Biden’s policies toward the U.S. southern border in last week’s election losses, New York Representative Ritchie Torres said.
As Democrats grapple with President-elect Donald Trump’s decisive victory last Tuesday over Vice President Kamala Harris, many party figures have come out against Biden, both for his administration’s agenda and for his choice to stay in the 2024 race as long as he did despite concerns from others in the party.
On Tuesday, Torres raised concerns about the White House’s delay in reacting to what he described as a “migrant crisis” that has “raged on for years.” Trump’s campaign repeatedly attacked Harris for the administration’s handling of the border and accused her of being the president’s “border czar” over the past four years. Exit polling showed that immigration was one of the top issues on voters’ minds last week.
“We as Democrats paid a heavy price for the Biden Administration’s malpractice of acting like a deer in the headlights as the migrant crisis raged on for years,” Torres, who represents New York’s 15th Congressional District, wrote to X, formerly Twitter.
“Since 2022, there has been an overwhelming wave of migration whose impact was felt not only at the border but in blue cities like New York, where the shelter system came under severe strain. Despite widespread public outcry, the Biden Administration waited two years before issuing an executive order restricting migration at the border. By then, it was too late.
“Lesson learned: when there’s a metaphorical fire provoking widespread public outrage, you must act decisively to extinguish it or else the voters will decisively punish you at the ballot box.”
After a bipartisan border bill failed to pass in the Senate in the spring, in part thanks to Trump’s efforts to kill the measure, Biden signed an executive order in June that halted the number of migrants able to cross the U.S.-Mexico border once illegal entries surpassed 2,500 a day over a seven-day average. The measure was almost immediately met with legal challenges from groups like the American Civil Liberties Union.
Torres noted in his post to X that the executive order has “enjoyed widespread public support from every racial category—Black and White, Latino and Asian.”
“If the [executive order] enjoyed broad public support, why did the President take so long before issuing it?” he wrote. “Though popular among most Americans, the [executive order] was unpopular among far-left elites, who have been given outsized power over the policymaking and messaging of the Democratic Party.”
“Therein lies the second cause of our defeat,” he concluded. “The first cause is inflation.”
Newsweek reached out to the White House press office via email for comment on Tuesday.
Since last week’s defeat, several critics have accused the Biden-Harris administration of catering too much to the far-left wing of the party. Political strategist and commentator James Carville said last week during an episode of Politics War Room that one of the “big mistakes” that Democrats made in the election was “the unfortunate events of what I would refer to as the woke era.”
Other Democrats, including Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton, have raised concerns over the party’s approach to LGBTQ rights, including transgender athletes playing in women’s sports. During an interview with The New York Times last week, Moulton said that he didn’t want his two little girls “getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
The comment sparked backlash, but Moulton has since doubled down on his statement, telling CNN on Sunday: “I was just speaking authentically as a parent about one of many issues where Democrats are just out of touch with the majority of Americans.”