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WASHINGTON – The new Biden administration has vowed to unfold President Donald Trump’s immigration legacy, but faces an uphill battle to keep that promise. Three people involved in shaping Biden’s immigration platform said the changes will be fought hard and may not all happen at the same time.
Reuniting separated migrant families
As NBC News reported, lawyers charged with finding migrant parents separated from their children by the Trump administration have yet to find parents for 666 children.
The difficulty, lawyers say, is finding relatives who have been deported and for whom the government has not provided phone numbers. And many parents who were contacted have chosen to leave their children behind in the United States, deciding their future will be brighter and more secure despite the pain of separation, lawyers say. Advocates called on US authorities to bring parents back to the US to locate their children and give parents a chance to seek asylum.
“The parents, the kids have been snatched from their arms and separated. And now they can’t find more than 500 pairs of these parents, and these kids are alone. Nowhere to go. Nowhere to go. criminal. It’s criminal, “Biden told the October 22 Presidential Debate.
During the debates and in his podium, Biden made reunification a priority. But he has so far not said publicly whether separated parents will be able to come to the U.S. He has pledged to form a task force to reunite children, including working in countries of Central America and spreading the message through public service announcements.
Ending “ staying in Mexico ”
An estimated 20,000 migrants wait in northern Mexico in cities like Matamoros as they seek asylum in the United States.
But the exact number is not known for sure, largely because the Department of Homeland Security has yet to share this data with Biden’s transition team, two Biden sources said.
Asylum seekers have been waiting, in many cases for over a year, under a Trump policy known as “Stay in Mexico,” which forces asylum seekers to wait outside United States until their hearing date, then to enter only for the proceedings. .
If all are allowed in at the same time, they could overwhelm migrant detention centers, creating the need for additional detention centers, potentially tent cities. So far, the incoming administration has not said whether it will automatically allow all those on standby to “stay in Mexico” in the United States or if it will attempt to keep them all in detention pending decisions in their case. .
A source close to Team Biden’s deliberations on ending “Stay in Mexico” said the Biden administration would work to end the policy but how it would do so has not been finalized. The incoming administration is “very determined to do something, but the physical way in which it happens is still being determined.”
‘Dreamers’
The Biden campaign is committed to not only restoring protections for immigrants brought into the country illegally as children, known as “Dreamers,” but also to expanding protections for their health care and education. . A threat to the Deferred Action Program for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama-era executive order that protects dreamers, is making its way to court, so Biden’s camp is under pressure to act quickly to hold his promise.
Increase in refugees
Biden has pledged to increase the number of refugees admitted to the United States each year to 125,000, a historic high and a dramatic increase from the historic low of 15,000 set by the Trump administration. But according to those familiar with the planning, it could be months before the United States is able to start admitting refugees at this rate, mainly because so few refugees are in the pipeline. Typically, refugees go through a two-year screening and screening process before being resettled in the United States.
“They have decimated the infrastructure to such an extent that in order for refugees to be resettled, that infrastructure has to be rebuilt. This will have an impact on the ability to implement the 125,000 refugee policy and for refugees to start to feel impact, ”said Marielena Hincapié, co-chair of the Biden-Sanders unit working group, who described the key political positions shared by Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., shortly after the Democratic National Convention.
“It could take months,” she said.
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