NASHVILLE, TN –Republicans worry about “the border crisis”. They say waves of migrants are flooding into the country and the unprecedented arrests show what an unmitigated disaster Biden has created along the border between U.S. and Mexico.
President Biden took 155 immigration actions in his first six months in office. “He is going three times the rate as Trump who was considered an immigration presidency on steroids,” said Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute (MPI). MPI is a nonpartisan think tank dealing with migration and immigration issues.
“Of the 155 actions, half of them have been unwinding Trump and the other half have been improving on pre-Trump policies,” Chishti said. He said Biden has “built back better” on immigration issues that previous democratic administrations were unable to do.
On his first day in office, Biden rescinded all of the Trump’s travel bans, paused border wall construction, he reversed Trump’s policy on not counting the unauthorized in the U.S. Census, he reversed Trump’s directive on interior enforcement; he said that he would expand and preserve DACA, and he reinstated the deferred enforcement for Liberians.
“Most importantly on that very day he sent to Congress a blueprint… which became his main immigration reform package for legalization of the 11 million people,” Chishti said.
Republicans make regular pilgrimages to the border providing photo ops for the news media. They include Governor Bill Lee who went to the Rio Grande Valley last month to visit Tennessee national guardsmen who have been dispatched there.
The last significant changes to immigration law were made in 1996. Republicans like to rail against Biden and the Democrats for problems that have existed for decades. Republicans have no intention of taking up Biden’s immigration reform package in Congress where the only hope of reforming the broken U.S. immigration system lies. (See Border Trouble)
Meanwhile, Biden has pursued an enforcement policy limited to recent arrivals.
That is welcome change to an estimated 87% of the 11 million undocumented immigrants who have spent the Trump years looking over their shoulder. “Than means ordinary status violators who are not criminals can leave their home in the morning and be reasonably sure they can come home at night and see their kids which we could not guarantee at the end of the Trump administration,” Chishti said.
“That’s an existential change in the lives of 11 million people and he has been able to keep that promise,” he added. Chishti said the number of arrests has gone way down and the number of people who have been detained has gone way down.
“Prolonged family detention has ended. At the end of the Trump administration a family typically stayed in detention for 60 days. Today a typical family stays in detention for one week. Now that’s a big change.”
However, migrants have been detained along the border in record numbers. The Border Patrol said almost 210,000 people were apprehended along the border in July, a 20 year high. Three quarters were single adults and most of them were turned around and sent back. Republicans keep on saying Biden has opened up the borders. He has not.
Biden has not eliminated Title 42, a Trump policy that used the coronavirus pandemic to essentially stop all immigration at the border. But Biden has not applied Title 42 to unaccompanied children and most families; he ended the Migration Protocol Plan (MPP) which returned immigrants to Mexico while they await the date of their immigration hearing; he ended he ended the practice of the per country transit rule which denied immigrants the right to apply for asylum if they came from certain countries.
MPI estimates that 750,000 people are now eligible for temporary protected status who were denied it during the Trump administration. Last month, U. S. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that people who are victims of gang violence or domestic violence can apply for asylum.
“That’s a sea change in the world of asylum,” Chishti said. Biden has increased per country immigration caps that reached an historic low during the Trump years of 15,000. Biden increased them to 62,000 for 2021 and next year that number will be raised to 125,000.
“A positive development is something that gets us back to the status quo ante pre-Trump. It was already a disastrously overburdened unfair system before Trump got his hands on it,” said Ava Benach, an immigration attorney in Washington.
Benach reported that cases are moving through the immigration courts once again. That reverses Trump’s policy that virtually eliminated them. She said priorities have changed. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas told lawmakers the same thing during a hearing on Capitol Hill this week.
“You don’t want to waste our time on people who are here working and not really causing any problems. We want to focus on national security and law enforcement threats,” Benach said.
“We’re seeing less people put into removal proceedings, fewer people in detention. We went from 60,000 people in detention to 15,000 people in detention (because of the pandemic) to 30,000 people in detention. Ok, that’s better than Trump but it’s not where all of us want it to go,” she said.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have issued new directives to their attorneys and detention officers: “don’t detain these people, don’t put these people into removal proceedings, if there is a way to help a person by reopening a case, do that.”
Benach is not sure those agencies are getting with the new program or if they are just happy to get cases off their plate.
“When someone is in removal proceedings or has a removal order, there are two ways to get that case done, resolved, and over. One way is to deport the person. Another way is to let them apply for something that they can get. Either way you are bringing down the undocumented population.”
