When President Biden announced that he was going to deport asylum-seekers without respecting their legal right to due process because the border is too congested, many liberals and moderates cheered. They viewed this draconian measure as Biden finally reassuring the voters that he is, in fact, not “soft” on the immigrant “invasion.” And they were convinced by the president’s argument that he had no choice but to “close down” the border.

But that’s simply not true. He had (and still has) viable alternatives that would both alleviate the humanitarian crisis at the southern border and, at the same time, respect the human rights guarantees of this country’s own refugee law. That Biden ignores those alternatives — despite his people being fully aware of them — is a sign of how comfortable the Democrats have gotten over the past few years implementing anti-immigration measures that in a not-so-distant past would have been considered the exclusive province of xenophobic hard-right politicians.

It is, of course, true that the U.S. is having to deal with more asylum-seekers than ever, a challenge that reflects a wider global problem. (The U.N. estimates that, at the end of 2023, more than 117 million people around the world were forcibly displaced by violence alone. This number does not include people driven from their homes by poverty or climate disasters). And it is also true that the most effective border-control measure the American government can take is drastically enlarging its refugee-intake capabilities. Furthermore, it is true that Biden’s proposal to do just that — allocate more money for border agents and immigration judges — was time and again shot down by the Republicans.

But immigration-friendly scholars, lawyers, activists and politicians have long identified a whole raft of potential executive actions that are available to the president. Here’s one such measure the president could announce tomorrow, if he wanted to: To speed up the asylum adjudication process, don’t just expedite refusals and deportations, but also approvals. In other words, instead of approaching each asylum-seeker as a potential criminal or fraudster, approach them neutrally and fast-track them in one direction or the other based on the proof they produce for their claim. Reconsider the overpowering presumption against immigrants that Trump capitalized on eight years ago (“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. […] They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”)

In a paper that will be published in the Georgetown Law Journal at the end of this year, Michael Kagan, a law professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, argues in favor of what he calls “a faster way to yes.” When immigration agents encounter asylum-seekers, he says, “[t]hey should look for categories of people who are known to be targeted for human rights abuses, people who have clear documentation of central facts, and people whose asylum claims fit clearly within the legal rubrics of asylum law. Instead of being asked to look for weaknesses in asylum claims, asylum officers conducting initial screenings should also be directed to look for strengths. By doing so, they can avoid the inevitable pressure for expediency necessarily translating into a pressure to deny protection. There is no reason why a need to move efficiently cannot lead to an efficient approval just as easily as it might lead to a fast denial.”

In 1993, President Bill Clinton and Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy proposed a piece of legislation whereby any asylum-seeker who is brought into the country illegally (or, in Kennedy’s words, who found themselves “in an alien smuggling situation”) would be subjected to an abridged interview to establish whether they had a “credible fear” of persecution. If they failed that, they would be deported immediately.

Four years later, the “credible fear” test became an official statute. In practice, what this meant was that asylum-seekers who crossed the border without authorization (because they couldn’t wait years in an ever-shifting “line,” and because refugee law generally requires the claimant to physically be in the U.S. in order to ask for asylum) were not given a real chance to rest, collect their documents, or secure legal representation before they went up for the interview of their lives. Predictably, according to immigration attorneys and advocates, many asylum-seekers who had indeed fled their countries because of persecution failed to clear the bar and were returned to the dangerous places they came from.

In a recent Zoom interview, Kagan explained to me how, since that Democrat-presided policy shift in the ‘90s, the U.S. government has exhibited a “failure of imagination” when it comes to handling large numbers of refugees.

“Most people, ranging from practitioners on all sides to government officials are so immersed in the system they know that they often can’t image that there’s another way,” Kagan said. And so he wrote this paper as “a memo to a better Biden administration,” suggesting one way in which a well-meaning president can circumvent the problem of inadequate funding of the asylum system.

Kagan is just one of many people who are deeply versed in refugee law and the history of American immigration who have identified ways in which President Biden can deliver on his refugee-friendly promises. The “how” is not the problem; the lack of political will is.

Razvan Sibii is a senior lecturer of journalism at UMass Amherst. He writes a monthly column on immigration.