Advocates and legislators alike have been angered and devastated over the mistreatment and deportation of Haitian asylum-seekers and migrants at the U.S. southern border. “Asylum is and always will be a human right,” Ohio Rep. Joyce Beatty said earlier this week. That frustration is apparently bubbling over within the Biden administration, as well. BuzzFeed News reports several officials with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) similarly describe feeling “despair” over the administration’s current trajectory on immigration, and some are even contemplating resignation. 

“They are almost exclusively focused on detention, deterrence, and generally treating asylum-seekers with as much violence and inhumanity as the prior administration,” one unnamed official told BuzzFeed News. “Honestly, I don’t know how much longer I can stay at DHS if this continues. I stayed because I believed Joe Biden and Kamala Harris when they promised to build it back better.”

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One career official told BuzzFeed News that they acknowledged “progress on policies for creating a more humane immigration system” but said the Biden administration has still been “maintaining some of the most inhumane policies for asylum-seekers.” That includes the administration’s inexplicable continuation of the unsound Title 42 policy, implemented under political pressure and against CDC recommendations to stomp on the rights of asylum-seekers. It’s the policy currently being used to deport Haitians quickly.

“You can reverse all of the terrible court cases … but as long as Title 42 remains in place, none of that matters,” the official continued to BuzzFeed News. “We are turning our backs on the most vulnerable.” 

President Biden on Friday called the documented abuses against Haitians at the southern border “outrageous” and said there would be “consequences,” Yamiche Alcindor reported. Vice President Harris on Friday also said that “[h]uman beings should not be treated that way.” But a senior DHS official told BuzzFeed News the “words are not backed up by policy choices or deeds.”

“The border would be challenging under any circumstances, but this administration is stuck in a deterrence-only posture, expecting different results from similar approaches. Flows are going to continue,” the official continued to BuzzFeed News. It is simply a fact that deterrence policies don’t work, experts have said. “Ratcheting up the cruelty at the border does nothing but inflict unnecessary harm while doing little to prevent people from coming,” Immigration Impact noted earlier this year. Since the 1990s, nearly 8,000 people have died in the harsh borderlands after being pushed to make more dangerous journeys due to deterrence policies. “The true death toll is likely much higher.”

Echoing words from these immigration policy experts, the DHS official told BuzzFeed News it “would be better for the administration to focus on how to process them in a faster and more humane manner instead of focusing on how to convince desperate people not to make the journey.” Another official told BuzzFeed News they “don’t know what our immigration strategy is at all. I don’t know if we are building an infrastructure for the future, or what direction we will be going in as we head into a midterm election year.”

It should be what the electorate demanded in the 2020 presidential election. Faced with a choice between more of the previous administration’s anti-immigrant and anti-asylum policies or a more humane path promised by the Biden campaign, voters decisively chose the latter. Polling has shown that not only do Americans across parties lines support citizenship for young immigrants, temporary status holders, and essential workers, Democratic voters, in particular, will be majorly pissed off if they don’t act. But instead, we’re continuing to enforce Stephen Miller’s anti-asylum policy even though he’s now long gone from his government position.