Catherine Rampell’s “Trump broke the immigration system” column (March 22, page A5) is way off the mark.

The author, while understandably critical of former President Trump’s reduction of the refugee allocation to 15,000 per year, is wrong that Trump “sabotaged the U.S. immigration and refugee system.”

If “sabotage” means reducing “encounters” at the southern border to 646,822 in Trump’s last fiscal year, then let’s have more of it. In President Biden’s first year, there has been a threefold increase in “encounters” to 1,956, 519, a result of Biden’s first action as president to suspend work on the border wall, and then seek to eliminate the successful Migration Protection Policy that screened asylum seekers before they were allowed into the country.

The author talks of “mismanaged budgeting” and “backlogs” and the “U.S. government struggle to handle its existing immigration responsibilities,” but she should acknowledge that Trump’s success, by reducing the number of “encounters” at the border, and the number of asylum applicants let into the country, had a ripple effect of taking pressure off the Border Patrol, the immigration courts, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency processing refugees, and the issue of most concern to the author.

The current backlog of immigration court cases is 1,503,931, which will take seven years to clear at the current rate. It should be noted that 2008 was the last year when “completions” exceeded “initial receipts,” and this also means an asylum applicant will be here for seven years before their case comes up for a hearing.

At the USCIS, they have “more than 9.5 million pending applications.” It is USCIS officers who make the initial evaluation of asylum seekers at the border, so easing pressure at the border can help with the application backlogs (CBS News, March 29).

Rather than wringing her hands over agencies being “stretched too thin to assume responsibility for a few thousand Ukrainian refugees,” maybe the author should recommend that the Biden administration reinstitute those successful Trump-era measures. That may be too bitter a pill to swallow.

Robert Casimiro, executive director, Mainers for Responsible Immigration, Bridgton