HOUSTON (AP) – For nearly 17 months, the Trump administration tried to deport the mother and daughter from El Salvador. Biden’s administration can get the job done.
They are being held in a family detention center in remote Dilley, Texas, but were repeatedly on the verge of deportation. The Friday before Christmas, both were driven to the San Antonio airport and put on a plane, only to be lashed out when lawyers working for immigrant advocacy groups filed a new appeal.
“I have faith first in God and in the new president who takes 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 years old in a few weeks. “It hasn’t been easy.”
It is unlikely that it will get any easier any time soon.
President Joe Biden rushed to direct the most ambitious overhaul of the immigration system in a generation to Congress and signed nine executive actions to undo some of its predecessor’s toughest measures to strengthen the US-Mexico border. But a federal court in Texas suspended Biden’s 100-day moratorium on deportations, and the immigration law is likely to be scaled back as lawmakers grapple with major coronavirus pandemic legislation, as well as a second impeachment trial for former President Donald Trump.
Even if Biden gets most of what he wants in terms of immigration, the full implementation of the kind of sweeping changes he’s promised will take weeks, months – maybe even years.
That means, at least for now, there will likely be more overlap between Biden and Trump’s immigration policies than many of the activists who 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 are policies that do not increase the growth of deportation,” said Genesis Renteria, program director for membership services and involvement with Living United for Change in Arizona. , which helped mobilize Democratic voters in the critical battlefield state. “Our organizations will continue to hold the administration responsible.”
Under federal law, immigrants who face credible threats of persecution or violence in their home countries can seek asylum in the US. Biden has ordered a review of Trump policies that sent people from Central America, Cuba, and other countries to Mexico while their cases were being handled – often forcing them into makeshift tent camps just steps from US soil. He has also formed a task force to reunite immigrant children who are separated from their parents and has halted federal funding for expanding walls along the US-Mexico border.
On Saturday, the Biden government said it was withdrawing from agreements with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras that limited people’s ability to apply for U.S. asylum.
But those orders are unlikely to help Barbi and her daughter. They sought asylum but were denied due to a Trump administration rule banning such protections for people who crossed another country to reach the US border – in their case, Guatemala and Mexico.
That measure was dropped by a federal appeals court, thus protecting them from deportation until now.
Still, like others detained in Dilley for months, Barbi and her daughter could be expelled from the province at any time, perhaps even in the next few days. Elsewhere in the facility run by immigration and customs enforcement, a dozen Hondurans were told to pack over the past week, but they were not actually deported.
“It’s very traumatic,” said Barbi, who left two other children in El Salvador and asked not to reveal her real name so as not to attract the attention of criminal gangs there. “My daughter cries and says, ‘Why don’t they release us?’ ”
As a candidate last summer, Biden suggested he would do just that by stating, “Children should be released from ICE detention immediately with their parents.”
Proponents who originally praised Biden for standing up for immigration reform now worry that not enough will be done. Omar Jadwat, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, called it “disturbing” that Biden’s efforts “did not include immediate action to reverse and reverse the illegal and inhumane policies that this government has inherited – and now owns. to settle. ”
“We are tired, as Latinos and immigrants, that there is always a different priority,” said Héctor Sánchez Barba, executive director and CEO of Mi Familia Vota, who led the polls in Latin American communities ahead of the November election. “Immigration must remain the top priority, especially given how our community has been devastated, attacked and separated.”
Antonio Arellano, interim executive director of Jolt Action, which aims to bolster the power and influence of young Latinos in Texas, said political pressure is already mounting as conservative forces mobilize to retake the House and Senate for Republicans in 2022.
“There will be electoral ramifications if we don’t deliver,” Arellano said.
Biden government officials have argued for more time, saying Trump’s policies are too far-reaching to be repealed overnight. But simply reverting to pre-Trump practices – if Biden can actually achieve that – isn’t going to be enough for many activists.
President Barack Obama has been dubbed the “deporter-in-chief.” for the removal of a record number of immigrants during his eight years in office. His government also built the detention center where Barbi is being held, as well as a similar facility in equally rural Karnes City, Texas, 95 miles to the east.
Biden has banned private prisons, but his warrant doesn’t apply to lockups like the ones in Dilley and Karnes City. Rather than advocating their closure earlier, Biden flew to Guatemala as vice president during a wave of unaccompanied minors in 2014 who headed to the US border and personally warned that his country would increase the detention of families – which the Obama administration then did.
Trump tried to address the issue during the presidential campaign, scolding Biden for being part of a government that originally put “ children in cages. ”
Biden replied that Obama’s White House “took too long” to get immigration policy right, pointing to reform policies that were later implemented. As president, Biden has already taken steps to preserve some of them, including Obama-era legal protections for immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, while the legislation promoting the president would provide a path to citizenship for the United States. an estimated 11 million people living in the US. the land illegally.
Both the Karnes City and Dilley facilities were used to reunite families separated by the Trump administration. But after the coronavirus outbreak, downtown Karnes became a waiting area for families from Haiti and distant lands that the Trump administration was trying to oust under emergency public health rules – more policies the Biden administration has yet to address.
That date to March last year, when Vice President Mike Pence, then head of the White House coronavirus task force, ordered the implementation of emergency health measures. aimed at denying immigrants entry – or their prompt removal from – the US to prevent the spread of the virus. Those restrictions have remained despite pending asylum applications from immigrants, and there is little evidence that sealing borders is slowing the pandemic.
Some immigrants were sent to Karnes City because of the health order. But many others, especially from Central America, were driven to Mexico. Federal authorities have used pandemic health restrictions at the border since October to remove more than 183,000 immigrants. The number would have been even higher if a federal court had not banned the removal of unaccompanied immigrant children from the US in November.
Deposits below health limits at the border continued unabated under Biden. A White House spokesman said the goal was to return the full US asylum process to a pre-Trump normal “as much as possible,” but noted that “we live within the confines of the pandemic,” specifically “intake and processing ”of asylum seekers at the border.
Kennji Kizuka, a senior researcher and policy analyst for the protection of refugees at Human Rights First, said, “With people at risk, the US has a legal obligation not to return them to a place where they would encounter persecution, torture or other harm. ”
“You can’t postpone that because it’s inconvenient in your policy plan,” said Kizuka. “It’s both US law and our treaty obligations, so you can’t pass that while you think about how to reform the system.”
Biden’s commitments to make quick improvements had sparked 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, which ended with some heading for a border crossing to Arizona asking to be treated for U.S. asylum.
A customs and border guard official said no, but added, “Try again tomorrow.”
“We went back the next day,” said Joanna Williams, education and advocacy director of the Kino Border Initiative, which provides humanitarian assistance to immigrants and participated in the demonstration. “Of course they didn’t process them that day either.”
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Weissert reported from Washington