Imagine for a moment you are a dissident citizen of Nicaragua. Forced out of bed in the middle of the night and hounded out of your homeland because of your political activities, you have been deprived of all chances to work, let alone live, in the country you’ve always called home. Your opposition to Daniel Ortega’s regime has put your life and your family’s lives in danger. You must find safety immediately.

You know that, despite its long history of meddling in your country, the United States also has laws and traditions that enable people in your position to seek asylum. It may be far away, but the US is also the closest country where you believe you can truly feel safe. You must find a way there – any way at all – and it has to be quick.

Now, according to new rules just announced by the Biden administration, up to 30,000 Nicaraguans, Cubans and Haitians may soon be able to apply for “humanitarian parole” to the US, expanding a program that had previously been directed solely at Venezuelans. What a relief! you might think, until you discover more about the proposed program, which requires: a valid passport, a plane ticket, the ability and permission to travel to the US by plane, a US-based sponsor, a cell phone that can download a specific app that requires two-factor authentication, and a host of other requirements.

This is a program obviously designed to favor those with means and pre-established connections in the US, and it’s hard to imagine it as anything but meaningless for those forced to flee for their lives without money or planning. As Human Rights Watch explains, Biden’s proposed program is “contrary to international refugee law and international human rights law which prohibits discrimination in accessing asylum, including based on financial means”. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has also stated that the new measures are “not in line with international standards”.

Yet this problematic humanitarian parole provision is in fact the proverbial carrot of Biden’s proposed border program. The dreaded stick, found in how the administration now plans on processing asylum claims made at the border, is much worse. The opportunity to have your asylum claim heard if you’re a citizen from one of these four countries – all countries with deep legacies of American political interference, it should be pointed out – will now be severely curtailed, according to the proposed rules.

For one thing, the administration will require these asylum seekers to request refuge in the first country they cross into, similar to Trump-era “transit ban” policies which led to widespread human rights abuses in countries such as Guatemala and El Salvador.

If these asylum seekers somehow make it to the US’s southern border, they must claim asylum at an official port of entry at a previously scheduled time, even though, per US law, “you may apply for asylum regardless of how you arrived in the United States or your current immigration status”, as the US Citizenship and Immigration Services website states. Those who try to cross the border would also be subject to “expedited removal”, with Mexico accepting 30,000 of them each month, and be subject to a five-year ban from re-entry to the US.

The plan also expands the Biden administration’s use of Title 42, a rarely used clause of the 1944 Public Health Services Law that allows the government to take emergency action “to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries.” Through their own anti-immigrant hocus-pocus, the Trump administration conjured Title 42 as a quick and easy way to deport people at the US’s southern border.

Though Biden, as recently as last Thursday, has said that he doesn’t “like Title 42,” his administration continues to use the code to prevent people from entering the US. Since March 2020, almost 2.5 million people have been expelled, most of them during the Biden administration. And the new rules will translate into many more expulsions for asylum seekers from these four countries.

Democratic Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey got it right. “The Biden administration’s decision to expand Title 42, a disastrous and inhumane relic of the Trump Administration’s racist immigration agenda, is an affront to restoring rule of law at the border,” he said in a statement. “Ultimately, this use of the parole authority is merely an attempt to replace our asylum laws, and thousands of asylum seekers waiting to present their cases will be hurt as a result.”

What’s going on here? There’s no question that the current situation presents all kinds of challenges at the border. The US government recorded almost 2.4m encounters with migrants at the border last fiscal year, a record number. Extreme climate events, political corruption, and economic instability all play a role, and the US shares some responsibility in all those arenas. But it’s also clear that Biden feels compelled to get in front of the border issue ahead of Republican fearmongering (hence his visit Sunday to the border).

“Immigration is a political issue that extreme Republicans are always going to run on,” the president said. “But now they have a choice: They can keep using immigration to try to score political points or they can help solve the problem.”

But, in this terrible move rightward on the issue of border enforcement, Biden has proposed solutions that seem devised more to quell Republican objections (which, let’s face it, can never be mollified) rather than to take humanitarian and legal concerns to heart and turn them into workable policy. The proposed changes are also certain to bring greater chaos, confusion, and misery to the border.

I’m all in favor of foregrounding Republican obstructionism when necessary, and Republicans halted Biden’s proposed comprehensive immigration reforms from the moment they were announced, almost two years ago. But Biden can’t accuse his Republican opponents of exploiting immigration and then turn around and lean on their misbegotten policies. Not only is that playing politics with people’s lives, but it’s also playing with fire. If Biden’s proposed rule changes go through, we should worry for all those – Biden included – who are about to get burned.

• Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York