Promises, Promises

Haitian-American activists in South Florida told Axios Today they feel like President Biden has gone back on campaign promises he made to the community to stand up for them.
"Advocates say Biden has let Haitian migrants down"

I've heard quite a bit about the supposed promises that President Biden is said to have made to the Haitian community, minus one important detail: what the promises actually were.

I admit that I don't pay much attention to promises made by candidates for President; mainly because so many of them are not things that can be simply done with an executive order from the Oval Office. And that means that many of them should likely be formulated as "if-then" statements, since they tend to rely on something other than the specific candidate being elected to the presidency before they can come to pass.

And that's what I suspect happened here; President Biden either needs some number of people in Congress to go along with a plan before a "promise" can be fulfilled, or it requires a higher level of political capital to enact than the beneficiaries will be able to replace on their own. The second can be viewed as more of a failing, since a sitting President is often expected to expend political capital to get things done, but it's often a resource in shorter supply that advocates presume, and it doesn't make generally sense to allow important domestic policy priorities to fall by the wayside, because the President has used a bunch of favors to benefit a constituency who can sing his praises, but can't ensure his reelection or effectively ensure the election of Representatives and Senators who will carry those other priorities forward.

In this, I'm usually somewhat surprised when people expect that the President will go out of his way for the benefit of non-citizens. People in Haiti may be desperate to be elsewhere, but without a sizable number of Americans equally desperate for them to come to the United States, expecting the Democratic Party to gear up for the fight in the Senate that any legislation would certainly provoke seems unrealistic. But then again, I don't need the President to do anything for me; I'm not in a situation where government action might be the only thing standing between me and being forced to live in a chaotic, devastated, environment. Perhaps if I were, I'd be prepared to put more stock in campaign promises.

As it is, I'd still like to know what the President is supposed to have promised. It's possible that it was nothing more than to "stand up" or "fight" for the rights of Haitian migrants to settle in the United States. But promising a conflict is one thing. Promising a public conflict is another and promising to win something else again. I wonder if what's at issue here is simply the famously opaque workings of government leaving people wondering where the fireworks they expected are.