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It's not just republicans, it's "moderates" too...
The executive action will invoke Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, echoing the Trump administration’s previous entry ban. The ACLU and partners successfully challenged an asylum ban by the Trump administration that took the same approach as the Biden administration. It would also rush vulnerable people through already fast-tracked deportation proceedings, sending people in need of protection to their deaths.
"We intend to challenge this order in court. It was illegal when Trump did it, and it is no less illegal now,” said Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project.
So there are three urgent problems with immigration in this country, two of which root back to a sudden wild spike upwards in the number of people coming into the country which wasn't matched by a corresponding increase in resources for the agencies that deal with them:
- The agency which runs the border patrol and immigration is made of oppressive and racist people
- There's a huge backlog of asylum / deportation cases which means people stay in custody in racist and oppressive overcrowded prisons (see point #1)
- We're rate limiting the people coming into the country (see point #2), which means a lot of asylum seekers who are trying to do it legally wind up waiting for months (maybe years now, IDK) on the other side of the Mexican border, basically just living in a big, dangerous, squalid, crime-ridden open-air field with no facilities for life, and no job, no medical care for anyone no matter how young or old, it's fuckin dangerous
Biden is unable to fix #1 without an act of God (basically firing all existing ICE and CBP agents and then finding 45,000 people who really want to work as immigration police but who aren't racist or oppressive). He's unable to fix #2 or #3, although those ones do have legislative solutions, because the Republicans block anything he does, even when he tried promising to do some cruel or racist things as a compromise in order to get them to also agree to some badly needed things (mostly, increasing ICE funding so they can at least house the people they have in better conditions, and increasing the number of judges to process cases so people don't wait for a year before their case is heard).
And, any time he tries to do anything about it (e.g. this thing you cited), everyone on the left yells at him, because US immigration policy is cruelty and interacting with it involves interacting with a cruel system.
I would ask you the same thing I asked ozma about marijuana policy: What exactly should Biden do to fix the situation? Without resorting to magical solutions like "make ICE not racist" or "just make the backlog go away" or just making wild assertions like that he could fix it if he wanted to, he just doesn't want to?
I'm open to almost anything; I'm happy to talk about details or exact things or policies, as long as it's grounded in "X and Y are policies he could realistically do and here is how it would help."