Biden’s bind: Dismantling Trump immigration policies without sparking a border rush

MEXICO CITY — A day after an SUV packed with migrants crashed in Imperial County last week, leaving 13 dead, police in southern Mexico encountered a disturbing scene: more than 200 U.S.-bound Central Americans, a quarter of them children without adult supervision, crammed inside a tractor trailer.

The two incidents — the fatal collision in California, and the discovery of the migrant-jammed big rig more than 1,000 miles away — dramatize the challenge facing the Biden administration as U.S. officials struggle with a conundrum: How to dismantle Trump-era immigration restrictions, as Biden has promised to do, without triggering a mass convergence on the Southwest border.

So far, repeated declarations from the White House and elsewhere seeking to discourage would-be migrants have failed to deter a surge of people hopeful that