President Joe Biden put a new rule in place on Tuesday that says people who come to the U.S. from Mexico without permission can’t ask for asylum. This rule is important because there’s going to be an election in November, and the winner will be in charge of the country.

People who are caught crossing the border illegally might be sent back to Mexico quickly or deported under this rule. But there are some exceptions, like if they’re children, if they’re in danger, or if they’re victims of trafficking.

President Biden, who is a Democrat, has been getting tougher on border security because a lot of people care about immigration. He’s probably going to run for president again in November, and his opponent might be Donald Trump, who was also tough on immigration when he was president.

President Biden became president in 2021 and said he would change some of the strict immigration rules that Trump had made. But there were still a lot of people coming into the country illegally, which made things hard for the border police and the cities where the new people were going.

President Biden said during a press conference at the White House that people can still ask for asylum if they use the right legal way, like signing up for an appointment with an app called CBP One. He hopes this new rule will help control the number of people coming into the country illegally.

President Biden said he won’t ever say bad things about immigrants. But he did say that some of the things Trump said about immigrants were wrong.

A lot of people who are allowed to vote prefer Trump’s ideas about immigration over Biden’s.

Some details of plan unclear

The new asylum ban becomes active when the daily average of border arrests tops 2,500 over a week, and figures are currently higher than that, officials said on a call with reporters, requesting anonymity as a condition of the call.

U.S. border arrests averaged 4,300 per day in April, according to the most recent government statistics available.

The ban will be paused when arrests drop below an average of 1,500 per day for three weeks. The last time crossings fell to that level was in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in July 2020, when global travel was at historic lows.

Key operational questions about the measure’s implementation remained unclear, including how the administration would quickly deport migrants from far-away and unco-operative countries and how many non-Mexican migrants Mexico would accept under the new enforcement regime.

The new restrictions resemble similar policies implemented by Trump and use a legal statute known as 212(f), which served as the underpinning for Trump’s travel bans blocking people from several majority-Muslim nations and other countries.

The Biden ban was attacked by critics on both sides of the political spectrum on Tuesday.

Lee Gelernt, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, said the organization intended to sue over the new restrictions. The group and other immigrant advocacy organizations have criticized Biden for adopting Trump-like policies and backtracking on U.S. legal obligations to asylum seekers.

In advance of the announcement, Trump’s campaign issued a statement criticizing Biden for high levels of illegal immigration and said the move to exempt unaccompanied minors would encourage child trafficking.

Republicans also slammed Biden’s moves as politically motivated and insufficient.

‘People give up everything they have’

Biden has pushed unsuccessfully for months to pass a Senate bill crafted by a bipartisan group that would toughen border security, but Republicans rejected it after Trump opposed it.

In addition to the latest measure, the Biden administration has taken a number of steps over the past year to toughen the asylum process, including issuing a regulation in May 2023 that heightened the standard for an initial asylum claim.