RUBEN NAVARRETTE JR.: For Biden, Supreme Court’s decision on ‘Remain in Mexico’ is a huge loss

For the Biden administration, immigration policy is all about deceit and deflection.

A good day is when the courts stop officials at the White House or the Department of Homeland Security from pursuing some “woke” reform that those officials didn’t really want to pursue in the first place. The Democrats dishonestly shrug and look remorseful and blame coldhearted Republican judges for thwarting progress. All while the administration continues to fool gullible progressives into thinking that Team Biden is solidly on their side.

A bad day is when the courts call the administration’s bluff and give a green light to what Team Biden claims it wants to do, even if it really doesn’t. The shrug gives way to a conundrum. If administration officials don’t proceed with the policy, the leftists might figure out they’re being hustled. If they do proceed — and take the train all the way to Woke Village — they’ll abandon the middle, lose moderate voters and get crushed in the 2024 presidential election.

As it closed out one of its most consequential terms in history, the Supreme Court delivered onto the Biden administration a very bad day.

In a 5-4 opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the high court recognized that the administration has the authority to end a program that forces asylum seekers who cross the U.S.-Mexico border to “remain in Mexico” while their applications are evaluated by immigration courts.

In doing so, the five justices who signed the majority decision — two Republicans, and three Democrats — all but ensured that President Joe Biden will not remain in the White House beyond January 2025.

Put simply: The Republican Party doesn’t have to worry about putting an end to the Biden administration. The Supreme Court did it for them.

If he runs for re-election in 2024, Biden will already be facing a litany of challenges, mistakes and problems for which he’ll have to answer: inflation, gas prices, racial strife, a botched exit from Afghanistan, an inadequate defense of Ukraine when it was attacked by Russia, etc.

The last thing the president wants to manage is another crisis of thousands of migrants coming up through the U.S.-Mexico border. Biden has shown a knack for co-opting his predecessor’s policies he once criticized. You had better believe he’s going to miss the “Remain in Mexico” policy when it’s gone.

It’s worth taking a minute to think about how Biden found himself in this pickle. As you probably know, Mexico has long served as America’s drugstore and temp agency. So it wasn’t a total shock when former President Donald Trump decided to also convert our neighbor into America’s waiting room.

After all, Trump didn’t want back then — anymore than Biden does now — those inconvenient images of desperate people on the evening news, showing up at the border to accept the Statue of Liberty’s offer to the world to welcome “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

A chaotic border is a problem, no doubt. But rather than solve it, Trump instead negotiated a deal with Mexico to move the problem just a few miles south. Out of sight, out of mind. Tens of thousands of aspiring refugees from countries such as Guatemala, Honduras, Haiti and El Salvador spent the past few years in unsafe and unsanitary shantytowns in Tijuana and other Mexican border cities.

It’s remarkable that anyone could consider Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy to be a success. It was not. It was nothing more than a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. And when Biden took office and ripped off the bandage — by ending the policy, until he was ordered to reinstate it by the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals — he caught the blame. He also got a reputation for creating an “open border.”

That is absurd. I’m no fan of Biden. I think he’s been a disaster as president, and I’m ready to consider possible replacements from either political party. Having said that, it’s not fair or honest for conservatives — who for decades oversaw a lax border to please their benefactors in big business — to accuse Biden of maintaining an “open border.” If anything, Biden has been too eager to co-opt some of Trump’s more closed-minded immigration policies.

All the while, the East Coast media — which will never understand the immigration issue — is labeling as a “win” the Supreme Court’s decision giving Biden the power to end the “Remain in Mexico” policy.

Sure, if you consider it a “win” to be put in a political straitjacket.

Ruben Navarrette’s email address is crimscribe@icloud.com. His podcast, “Ruben in the Center,” is available through every podcast app.