It’s easy to look at Biden’s record on immigration and find it, well, inglorious. From the perspective of the left, he has done little to ease the suffering of the deserving would-be immigrants; too much of the Trump machinery is still in place, and there have been no dramatic new programs to solve the ongoing problems. From the perspective of the right, the increase in border crossings is his fault; it wouldn’t have happened under Trump. Not much to cheer about there.
But let’s look at the bigger picture–what is the guy supposed to do? He is required to enforce the law written by Congress with the resources provided to him by Congress. He has no legal authority to create generous new amnesty programs for particularly deserving migrants. Even most of the right admits that the Trump system of deterrence by cruelty (at least in the case of family separations) isn’t appropriate. The criticism from both sides is, therefore, understandable, but it is not justifiable; nobody is proposing a plausible and better alternative.
Everyone knows the solution to the problem is a deal in which the right gets more border protection and the left gets a reasonable path to citizenship, particularly for Dreamers. Everyone also knows that the reactionaries in the GOP won’t accept that deal, and it won’t happen. As a result, the system will just blunder on, with only as much humanity as it can muster under difficult circumstances.