Biden plans to reverse Trump’s immigration agenda, from deportations to asylum policy

While the COVID-19 public health crisis and its impact on the U.S. economy will concern President-elect Joe Biden in his first few weeks in office, the new Democratic administration is also expected to quickly begin dismantling the U.S.’s immigration program. President Trump.

After Mr. Biden is sworn in in January, his administration will move to completely restore an Obama-era program that protects 640,000 undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children of deportation, ending unsuccessful efforts of Mr. Trump to end it, people familiar with the plans told CBS News. The new administration also intends to lift Mr. Trump’s travel and immigration restrictions in 13 mostly African or Muslim-majority countries.

Mr Biden will seek to implement a 100-day freeze on deportations while his administration issues guidelines clarifying who can be stopped by immigration officials. Obama-era memos that prioritized the deportation of criminally convicted immigrants, recent border crossings, and those who entered the country illegally more than once were scrapped in 2017 by Mr. Trump so that no unauthorized immigrant is exempt from being arrested and deported from the country.

A source close to Mr Biden’s plans said new guidelines would be designed to curb so-called “collateral arrests,” which are apprehensions of immigrants who are not the targets of US immigration and control operations customs (ICE) but who are nevertheless detained. because they are in the country without legal status.

Mr. Trump made immigration a major theme of his campaign of insurgency and success in 2016. Despite frequent court challenges, his administration has achieved rare success on this front in four years, reshaping the immigration system America through more than 400 high-profile and little-noticed policy changes.

However, all of Mr. Trump’s immigration measures – from the so-called “travel ban” and efforts to end the Deferred Action Program for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), to the new green cards and asylum restrictions for migrants to the US southern border – were enacted without Congress through proclamations, memos, regulations or other executive actions.

With his defeat, Mr. Trump’s immigration policy changes are now vulnerable – and Mr. Biden’s team is eager to begin the process to undo most of them.

“All this was done administratively by the [president’s] executive authority, and therefore a new executive can basically throw them out and start from scratch, ”a source familiar with Team Biden’s plans told CBS News.

At the southern border, Biden pledged to end the Trump administration’s policy of requiring non-Mexican migrants to wait in Mexico for the duration of their asylum claims in the United States. It is not known, however, how the cases of the thousands of asylum seekers currently waiting in northern Mexico will be judged and whether any of them will be released on parole and allowed to continue their proceedings in the United States. United.

A source close to Biden’s team planning said the incoming administration would withdraw from the three bilateral deals Mr. Trump has negotiated with Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras that allow the United States to send rejected asylum seekers in these countries and to seek them there.

The new administration will also consider reinstating an Obama administration initiative that allowed some at-risk Central American children to apply for refugee or parole status and reunite with their families in the United States if their parents were allowed. to be in the country, the source said. . The Obama administration created the Central American juvenile program in 2014 in response to the increased number of border crossings by unaccompanied migrant children, but Mr. Trump ended it in 2017.

The potential revival of the program, coupled with increased foreign aid to Central America, would be part of a broader approach by the Biden administration to tackle unauthorized migration from the region – a diplomatic task Mr. Biden has was tasked with overseeing during President Obama’s tenure.

Mr Biden’s team also plans to begin the process of terminating the “public office” rules the Trump administration has implemented to deny green cards and immigrant visas to applicants US officials determine to count. – or could count in the future – on government benefits such as Medicaid, food stamps, and Section 8 housing vouchers. Since the 2019 rules were instituted through the regulatory process, experts expect that their cancellation take longer than that of the presidential directives.

Citing the coronavirus-induced economic downturn, Mr Trump invoked his executive authority this spring to limit legal immigration and the issuance of temporary work visas – and those restrictions have yet to be lifted.

The Trump administration also deported tens of thousands of unauthorized border workers, including unaccompanied children, without a court hearing or asylum check through an order issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ( CDC). While the Trump administration has championed the policy as a policy based on public health, former officials said they were pressured to allow it.

Mr. Biden has yet to say whether his administration will continue, change or completely remove Mr. Trump’s pandemic-era limits on immigrant and work visas. Mr Biden’s campaign promised that the former vice president would order the CDC to review the deportation policy “to ensure that people have the capacity to submit their asylum claims while ensuring that we let’s take appropriate security precautions against COVID-19 “.

The president-elect has pledged to dramatically increase refugee admissions, moving away from the record 15,000 places Mr. Trump set and raising the cap to 125,000. Biden also pledged to grant temporary protection status (TPS) to certain Venezuelan exiles in the United States to protect them from deportation.

León Rodríguez, who headed the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) during Obama’s presidency, said a Biden administration should prioritize reviewing Mr. Trump’s efforts to end the TPS protections for approximately 300,000 immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, Sudan, Nepal and Honduras. . In September, a federal appeals court authorized the Trump administration to end the programs, but TPS recipients are not expected to lose their protections until March 2021.

Jennifer Molina, spokesperson for the Biden campaign, said the new administration will also create a task force to help locate hundreds of migrant parents who were separated from their children at the US-Mexico border in 2017 and 2018 and remain inaccessible. “President-elect Joe Biden will restore order, dignity and fairness to our immigration system. Basically, his immigration policy will be driven by the need to keep families together,” Molina said in a statement. .

While Mr Biden’s team will have the legal authority to overturn Mr Trump’s policies, Doris Meissner, a former commissioner of the Immigration Naturalization Service (INS), who is now deceased, said it was not wouldn’t be an easy undertaking, given the bureaucratic demands, the COVID-19 emergency and the volume of changes implemented over the past four years.

“The Trump administration was extremely concerned about immigration issues and it has invested enormous attention and a resolute focus on immigration,” Meissner, who is also a senior fellow at the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute, told CBS News . “An administration that wants to undo these changes would have to put in just as much time and effort – and arguably more, because you don’t want to just undo things. You also want to have a proactive agenda in place.”

Lynden Melmed, who served as USCIS principal lawyer during President George W. Bush’s second term, said the Biden administration will have to be careful not to rush its policy reversals because it could face the same legal challenges that have hampered Mr. Trump’s immigration. agenda.

“They’re going to be attacked the entire way as they try to roll this stuff back,” Melmed told CBS News. “They will have to really think about how they will withdraw from some of these policies, otherwise opponents and supporters of the Trump administration policies will be able to suspend them in court.”

Mr Biden has vowed to introduce legislation that would allow the country’s roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants to legalize their status, but such an effort – which has proven elusive for two decades – is expected to be approved by a divided Congress . Several Democrats in the House lost their seats last week, and while Senate control will depend on the outcome of two races in Georgia in January, any potential Democratic majority would be extremely slim.

Asked about the possibility of extending temporary protections against deportation to some undocumented immigrants in the absence of congressional action, a source familiar with Mr Biden’s planning said the president-elect would consider all options “legally available “.

Marielena Hincapié, a member of a task force of Biden and Bernie Sanders supporters that created a unified immigration platform, said the incoming administration should use “all the levers of government” to protect some undocumented immigrants, including essential COVID-19 workers, from the eviction.

“We cannot at the same time continue to applaud all of these essential workers that we rely on and not legally recognize them,” Hincapie told CBS News. “And so, providing them with some kind of protection and work authorization so that they can do the job without fear of being detained or deported, and of being able to work within the law, is also very important. critical.”

While Mr. Trump has yet to acknowledge his defeat or allow his administration to release congressional-authorized government funds and resources to Biden’s transition team, Mr. Biden’s staff continue to stand up to them. prepare for a transfer of power.

“We don’t see anything slowing us down,” Biden said Tuesday.