From New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is the day.

This summer, attempted border crossings into the United States reached their highest levels in more than two decades.

My colleague Natalie Kichirov found that that has forced the Biden administration to choose between two major goals.

Stopping migrants or stopping the root causes of their migrations.

It's Thursday, August 26th.

Now, the last time we talked about immigration on the daily, it was very early in the Biden administration.

There was a surge of unaccompanied children trying to cross from Mexico into the United States, and it forced this new president to quickly develop a plan for the border.

So tell us about that plan.

Early on, the administration rolled out a two-pronged plan to address migration.

The first part of it was they were going to do enforcement at the border, meaning trying to stop migrants from getting across.

But this was going to be a different kind of enforcement than what we saw under Trump.

So Biden pretty quickly went about reversing Trump policies that Biden promised to undo.

For example, they stopped immediately deporting young migrant children from Central America.

They also did away with what was called remain in Mexico.

This program that had migrants who were applying for asylum in the United States wait in Mexico for months and months and months to do so, Biden did away with that.

Essentially, they're rolling back some of the most punitive components of the Trump plan.

Exactly.

And so the second prong of the approach, which is, you know, in many ways a kind of more ambitious part of this policy, was what Biden called an effort to address the root causes of migration in Central America.

The idea behind this effort was that the administration saw that the long-term solution to migration, the only way to stop these incessant cycles, was to fix the problems at home that kept driving people to the border.

They wanted to deal with the systems that people in Central America felt were so broken and so rigged against them.

And for that effort, he turned to his vice president, Kamala Harris.

Well, thank you, Mr. President, and for having the confidence in me. And in March, they do this press conference together.

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