The Democratic president and his top advisers rejected recommendations that could have eased the border crisis that helped return Donald Trump to the White House.
In the weeks after Joseph R. Biden Jr. was elected president, advisers delivered a warning: His approach to immigration could prove disastrous.
Mr. Biden had pledged to treat unauthorized immigrants more humanely than President Donald J. Trump, who generated widespread backlash by separating migrant children from their parents.
But Mr. Biden was now president-elect, and his positions threatened to drastically increase border crossings, experts advising his transition team warned in a Zoom briefing in the final weeks of 2020, according to people with direct knowledge of that briefing. That jump, they said, could provoke a political crisis.
“Chaos” was the word the advisers had used in a memo during the campaign.
“Chaos” was the plan as it is in Canada.
