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HOUSTON (AP) – For nearly 17 months, the Trump administration tried to deport the mother and daughter from El Salvador. The Biden administration can finish the job.
They are being held in a family detention center in Dilley, Texas, but have repeatedly been on the verge of deportation. On the Friday before Christmas, the two were driven to San Antonio airport and boarded a plane, to be removed when lawyers working for immigrant advocacy groups filed new appeals.
“I first have faith in God and in the new president who has taken office, that he will give us a chance,” said the mother, nicknamed “Barbi”. Her daughter was 8 when they crossed the US border in August 2019 and will be 10 in a few weeks. “This has not been easy.”
It’s unlikely to get any easier anytime soon.
President Joe Biden rushed to send the most ambitious overhaul of the country’s immigration system in a generation in Congress and signed nine executive actions to eliminate some of the harshest measures of its predecessor to fortify the US-Mexico border. But a Texas federal court has suspended Biden’s 100-day moratorium on deportations, and the immigration bill will likely be scaled back as lawmakers grapple with major pandemic legislation coronavirus as well as a second impeachment trial for former President Donald Trump.
Even if Biden gets most of what he wants when it comes to immigration, fully implementing the kind of sweeping changes he has promised will take weeks, months, if not years.
This means, at least for now, that there will likely be more overlap between Biden’s and Trump’s immigration policies than many activists who have supported the Democrat’s successful presidential campaign. had hoped.
“It is important that we adopt policies that are not only transformative, inclusive and permanent, but also policies that do not increase the growth of eviction,” said Genesis Renteria, Director of Programs for Member Services and the engagement at Living United for Change in Arizona, which helped mobilize Democratic voters in the critical state of the battlefield. “Our organizations will continue to hold the administration accountable.”
Federal law allows immigrants facing credible threats of persecution or violence in their home country to seek asylum in the United States. Biden ordered a review of Trump’s policies that sent people from Central America, Cuba and other countries to Mexico while their cases were processed – often forcing them to settle in makeshift tent camps in a few steps from American soil. He also formed a task force to reunite immigrant children separated from their parents and halted federal funding to widen the walls along the US-Mexico border.
On Saturday, the Biden administration said it was withdrawing from agreements with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras that limited the ability of people to seek asylum in the United States.
But those orders probably won’t help Barbi and her daughter. They applied for asylum but were denied due to a Trump administration rule prohibiting such protections from people who crossed another country to reach the US border – in their case Guatemala and Mexico.
This measure was overturned by a federal appeals court, protecting them so far from deportation.
Still, Barbi and her daughter, like other detainees for months at Dilley, could be deported from the county at any time, possibly even in the coming days. Elsewhere in the facility run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a dozen Hondurans were asked to pack their bags last week, but not yet deported.
“It’s very traumatic,” said Barbi, who left two other children in El Salvador and asked that her real name not be revealed so as not to attract the attention of criminal gangs. “My daughter cries and says, ‘Why won’t they let us out?’”
As a candidate last summer, Biden suggested This is exactly what he would do, stating, “Children should be released from ICE detention with their parents immediately.”
Supporters who initially praised Biden for championing immigration reform now fear that enough is not being done. Omar Jadwat, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, called it “troubling” that Biden’s efforts “did not include immediate action to overturn and further untangle illegal and inhumane policies. which this administration inherited – and which it now owns. ”
“We are tired, as Latinos and immigrants, that there is always another priority,” said Héctor Sánchez Barba, executive director and CEO of Mi Familia Vota, who has led the voting campaigns in Hispanic communities before. the November elections. “Immigration must remain the top priority, especially given the way our community has been devastated, attacked, separated.”
Antonio Arellano, interim executive director of Jolt Action, which seeks to strengthen the power and influence of young Latinos in Texas, said political pressure was already mounting as conservative forces rallied to take over the House and Senate to Republicans in 2022.
“There will be electoral consequences if we are not successful,” Arellano said.
Biden administration officials pleaded for more time, saying Trump’s policies were too broad to be overturned overnight. But simply reverting to pre-Trump practices – if Biden is able to pull it off – won’t be enough for many activists.
President Barack Obama has been called “chief expeller” for expelling a record number of immigrants during his eight years in power. His administration also built the detention center where Barbi is being held, as well as a similar facility in the equally rural town of Karnes City, Texas, 95 miles east.
Biden has banned private prisons, but his order does not apply to dungeons like those in Dilley and Karnes City. Far from advocating their closure before, Biden as vice president flew to Guatemala in a wave of unaccompanied minors in 2014 heading for the US border and personally warned that his country would increase family detention – which the Obama administration did afterwards.
Trump tried to take up the issue during the presidential campaign, criticizing Biden for being part of an administration that originally put “children in cages.”
Biden responded that the Obama White House “took too long” to put in place a correct immigration policy, pointing to reform policies implemented later. As president, Biden has already taken steps to preserve some of them, including Obama-era legal protections for immigrants brought to the United States as children, while the legislation the president is promoting would provide. a pathway to citizenship for the approximately 11 million people living in the country. the country illegally.
The facilities in Karnes City and Dilley were used to reunite families separated by the Trump administration. But after the coronavirus outbreak, the Karnes center became a waiting area for families from Haiti and distant countries that the Trump administration sought to deport under emergency public health rules – more than policies that the Biden administration has yet to touch.
These date back to last March, when Vice President Mike Pence, then head of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, ordered the implementation of emergency health measures. which was aimed at effectively preventing immigrants from entering the United States – or enforcing their early withdrawal from the United States to prevent the spread of the virus. Those restrictions have remained despite pending asylum claims from immigrants and little evidence that border seals are slowing the pandemic.
Some immigrants were sent to Karnes City because of the sanitary order. But many more, especially from Central America, were deported to Mexico. Federal authorities have now used pandemic health restrictions at the border to deport more than 183,000 immigrants since October. The number would have been even higher if a federal court had not prohibited the removal of unaccompanied immigrant children from the United States in November.
Evictions under border sanitary limits continued unabated under Biden. A White House spokesman said the goal was to bring the entire US asylum process back to pre-Trump normal “as far as possible” but noted that “we are living on the edge of the pandemic” , which specifically limits the “admission and treatment” of asylum seekers at the border.
Kennji Kizuka, senior researcher and policy analyst for refugee protection at Human Rights First, said: “With those in danger, the United States has a legal obligation not to return them to a place where they would be at risk of be persecuted, tortured or others. . ”
“It’s not something you can put off because it doesn’t suit your political plan,” Kizuka said. “This is both US law and our treaty obligations, so you can’t accept that while you think about how to reform the system.”
Biden’s promises to make quick improvements had raised hopes that are now fading along the border. The day before his inauguration on Jan.20, immigrants staged a protest in the Mexican town of Nogales that ended with leading a border crossing in Arizona and a claim for asylum in the United States.
A customs and border protection officer said no, but added: “Try again tomorrow.”
“We went back the next day,” said Joanna Williams, director of education and advocacy for the Kino Border Initiative, which provides humanitarian aid to immigrants and participated in the protest. “Of course, they didn’t treat them that day either.”
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Weissert reported from Washington
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