Joe Biden will leave office having taken more action on climate change, arguably, than any US president before him — but 1 pillar of his climate plan has fallen apart. Climate-driven disasters have displaced millions all over the world, an issue Biden acknowledged early in his word yet did small to address. But as climate change and migration are becoming increasingly intertwined, US policy is anything but prepared.
Without any explicit legal protections for climate migrants, the US continues to have a giant blind place as it abandons those fleeing ecological disaster. Where Democrats have under-delivered — and, in any cases, moved to the right — on border issues, Republicans seek to entirely upend the immigration system, dismantle asylum altogether, and strip distant environmental regulations. erstwhile president Donald Trump has promised to pull the US out of the Paris agreement, an global treaty to halt global warming. Vice president Kamala Harris has pledged to proceed the Biden administration’s climate initiatives and his tougher stance on the border.
“What’s coming up for me is deep heartbreak,” says Ama Francis, climate manager at the global exile Assistance task (IRAP). “There’s been this push towards more xenophobic immigration policies across both sides of the aisle. That has crucial implications for who the United States considers itself to be — but besides for how people can search safety as we live in these times where our climate is changing and borders are becoming even more violent places.”
Climate migration is happening now
Under current national climate policies, “the best we could anticipate to accomplish is catastrophic global warming,” the United Nations late warned. Already, disasters push any 25 million people from their homes each year — typically more than the number displaced by conflicts or force annually, according to the interior Displacement Monitoring Centre. In 2023, only one-quarter of those disasters were related to earthquakes. The remainder were wildfires, droughts, storms, floods, or weather-related events. Climate change is making each of those problems worse, strengthening hurricanes, raising sea levels, and setting the phase for explosive blazes with hotter, more arid conditions in many parts of the world.
While the majority of people decision to another part of the same country afterward, worsening environmental disasters can compound another factors that might yet lead to global migration. A storm that wipes out crops or knocks down someone’s home could be the final straw that makes it untenable for individual to stay. another disasters might be more drawn out and could exacerbate another crises. Struggles over dwindling resources can spark larger conflicts, 1 reason why climate change is frequently described as a “threat multiplier.”
Over the past year, IRAP and respective another organizations that supply legal assistance to US-bound migrants surveyed more than 3,600 people of the individuals they’ve helped. The survey found that 43 percent of the people said they’d experienced any kind of climate-related disaster in the country of origin they left. The most common challenges people faced were severe rainfall and flooding, hurricanes, and utmost heat.
Residents survey harm in the aftermath of Hurricane Otis in Xaltianguis, Guerrero state, Mexico.Photo: Getty Images
“Hurricane Otis blew off the full roof of our houses, and with everything exposed to the elements, everything was damaged and spoiled, including the failure of crops,” said a 39-year-old man from Guerrero, Mexico, in the report. The devastation added to another individual losses; the man says his brother was murdered amid ongoing force in the region where organized crime has had a deadly foothold.
A 24-year-old female from Guerrero, meanwhile, talked about drought affecting her home. “Due to deficiency of water, we did not have good harvests, which is what we trust on in Guerrero,” she said in the report.
While climate change might not be the only or even main reason why individual has to leave their home, its footprint is clear in these kinds of stories. Hurricane Otis intensified more rapidly than nearly any another tropical storm on evidence before making landfall as a Category 5 hurricane in October 2023, becoming 1 of the costliest disasters of its kind to hit Mexico. Research conducted after the storm determined that dense rainfall from Otis was “mostly strengthened by human-driven climate change.” Separate research besides suggests that climate change will “significantly increase the risks that already susceptible subsistence farmers’ face in the present” across regions of Mexico where many people grow their own food, including Guerrero.
Biden turns his back on climate migrants
These kinds of experiences are becoming more common, but climate change remains mostly unacknowledged in US immigration policy. In the US, the only policy that carves out protections based on environmental catastrophes is called Temporary Protected Status, or TPS. The Secretary of Homeland safety can designate a country for TPS if there are “conditions in the country that temporarily prevent the country’s nationals from returning safely, or in certain circumstances, where the country is incapable to handle the return of its nationals adequately.” That includes environmental calamities like hurricanes and earthquakes.
TPS safeguards people from those countries from deportation and allows them to legally work in the US. But as the name suggests, it’s temporary and doesn’t give individual a way to permanent residency or citizenship. Moreover, only people already in the US prior to TPS designation are eligible — it doesn’t extend to fresh arrivals. The policy is besides susceptible to the whims of each presidency; Trump tried to roll back TPS designations during his first word in office as part of his broader crackdown on anyone seeking refuge in the US. (A akin policy, called Deferred Enforced Departure, gives individuals from certain countries temporary reprieve from deportation if their country of origin has been affected by civic conflict or environmental disasters.)
Biden seemed to reverse course upon stepping into office, issuing executive orders saying he’d undo restrictive Trump-era immigration and asylum policies. An executive order in February 2021 directed the Assistant to the president for National safety Affairs to produce a report that would include recommendations for how to recognize, protect, and resettle people “directly or indirectly” displaced by climate change.
“We were so excited,” Francis says. “There was a sense that this administration was truly engaged on this issue, and there was this beginning to truly push the needle forward.”
But Biden’s attempts at undoing Trump’s most harmful immigration policies rapidly gave way to a harsher stance on the border. In the end, Biden’s rightward pivot on immigration did small to appease his right-wing critics and only disappointed the migrant advocates who helped get him elected in 2020.
During his first 2 years in office, Biden kept 1 of Trump’s most stringent border policies in place: a pandemic-related asylum shutdown called Title 42. Under Title 42, migrants who arrived at the US-Mexico border could rapidly be “expelled” to Mexico without a hearing. Customs and Border Protection continued its expulsion policy under Biden but besides began granting exemptions to asylum-seekers who met certain criteria. erstwhile the Biden administration attempted to end the expulsion policy in 2022, a national justice blocked it from doing so.
By the time Title 42 expulsions ended in the late spring of 2023, the public sentiment had mostly shifted on immigration — and so had that of Biden’s administration. Title 42’s end was coupled with a fresh policy punishing migrants for attempting to enter the US without authorization. Under the administration’s “Circumvention of Lawful Pathways” rule, most migrants could be denied asylum for crossing the border between ports of entry, even if they would have otherwise been granted protection in the US.
Migrants camping in the border area of Jacumba, California, effort to cross the US border from Mexico as they are detained by US border patrol officers. Photo: Getty Images
At the same time, Biden dramatically expanded TPS and created new parole programs for migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, as well as for people fleeing the war in Ukraine and the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan. The parole grants, however, are only valid for 2 years, and DHS officials late said the department would not renew parole for Cubans, Haitians, Venezuelans, or Nicaraguans after the programs expire. As of August, more than 530,000 people from the 4 countries had entered the US via parole.
Biden’s expansion of temporary migration programs notwithstanding, there are inactive no dedicated immigration policies for people fleeing climate change-fueled disasters. And while Harris has previously acknowledged that climate change helps drive unauthorized migration, her run hasn’t commented on the link between the two; instead, she’s promised to proceed Biden’s crackdown at the border.
What’s next?
Congressional efforts to aid people affected by climate change overseas resettle in the US have stalled. legislature has not voted on the Climate Displaced Persons Act, a bill introduced by Rep. Nidya Velázquez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) that would create a fresh visa category for those forced out of their countries of origin by climate disasters, allowing up to 100,000 immigrants to be admitted into the US each year.
Given the fact that legislature Republicans killed a bill limiting asylum due to the fact that they believed it wasn’t restrictive enough, specified government is improbable to pass in the immediate future. If Trump wins the presidential election, there’s virtually no way the US will grow the criteria for asylum or exile status. In his last year in office, Trump set the yearly exile limit at just 15,000 — the lowest in history. The administration had reportedly considered not admitting any refugees into the country at all.
“President Trump has been very clear on where he stands on this issue,” says Ahmed Gaya, the manager of the Climate Justice Collaborative at the Partnership for fresh Americans. “We would one more time face far more utmost restrictions on the legal rights, safe pathways, and on legal immigration, as well as a promise for the largest deportation operation in history.”
In another words, while there’s no negotiating with Trump, advocacy groups may be able to convince Harris to usage existing policies to grant protections to climate migrants.
If elected, Harris could grant parole to people from countries affected by hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, and another disasters. She could designate TPS to those countries as well, so undocumented immigrants already surviving in the US could be shielded from deportation. no of these policies would warrant that climate migrants have a permanent future in the US, but they would be a start.
Regardless of who is in office in 2025, immigration lawyers can besides fight for asylum within the confines of the current law — and they’re already doing so.
Under the exile Act of 1980, individual who wants asylum or exile position has to prove that they face persecution in their country of origin due to their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a peculiar social group, an expansive category that even immigration attorneys say is hard to define. The “particular social group” category is simply a reasonably amorphous one, and any immigration judges have interpreted it generously: for example, it has been utilized to grant asylum to people fleeing gangs or intimate partner violence. This category’s vagueness besides leaves it susceptible to narrow interpretations. The Trump administration prohibited immigration judges and officers with US Citizenship and Immigration Services from granting migrants asylum on these grounds, a decision that was reversed under Biden. IRAP’s study includes respective examples of environmental activists and land defenders who were granted asylum after being persecuted for their advocacy.
Taking swift action on climate change, of course, is what it’ll take to prevent displacement in the first place. That includes the US, the world’s biggest historical polluter of planet-heating carbon dioxide, slashing its emissions. Activists from little wealthy countries — including low-lying island nations most susceptible to sea level emergence and strengthening storms — have besides pushed for global funds to aid their communities recover and adapt.
“I think there request to be a host of options available, and 1 of those is supporting the right to stay safely in one’s community, knowing that most people do want to stay,” says Jocelyn Perry, elder advocate and program manager of the climate displacement program at Refugees International.
For many people around the world, though, the option to stay is washing distant with rising tides or dissipating in the heat. Looking back on their first excitement after Biden’s executive order on climate migration and what small advancement there’s been since then, Francis says, “I think we, like others, were disappointed.”
