HOUSTON (AP) – For almost 17 months, the Trump administration has 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 remote Dilley, Texas, but have repeatedly been deported. On the Friday before Christmas, they were both taken to San Antonio airport and boarded a plane to be sent when lawyers working for immigrant advocacy groups filed new appeals.
“First of all, I have faith in God and in the new president who took office, that he will give us a chance,” said his mother, who is nicknamed “Barbi.” Her daughter was 8 years old when they crossed the US border in August 2019 and will turn 10 in a few weeks. “It was not easy.”
It is unlikely to become easier soon.
President Joe Biden rushed to send the most ambitious review of the nation’s immigration system in a generation to Congress and signed nine executive actions to erase some of his predecessor’s toughest measures 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 be slashed as lawmakers face major legislation to save the coronavirus pandemic, as well as a second lawsuit. removal of former President Donald Trump.
Even if Biden gets most of what he wants on immigration, the full implementation of the kind of radical change he promised will take weeks, months – maybe even years.
This means that, at least for now, there may be more overlap between Biden’s and Trump’s immigration policies than many of the activists who supported the Democrat’s successful presidential campaign. he had hoped.
“It’s important to adopt policies that are not only transformative, inclusive and permanent, but also policies that do not increase deportation growth,” said Genesis Renteria, director of membership and engagement programs 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 US asylum. Biden ordered a review of Trump’s policies of sending people from Central America, Cuba, and other countries to Mexico while their cases were being prosecuted – often forcing them into makeshift tent camps just steps from American soil. He also formed a working group to reunite immigrant children separated from their parents and stopped federal funding for the expansion of 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 restrict people’s ability to seek US asylum.
But these orders probably won’t help Barbi and her daughter. They sought asylum, but were denied because of a Trump administration rule banning such protections for people who crossed another country to reach the U.S. border – in their case Guatemala and Mexico.
This measure was rejected by a federal court of appeal, protecting them from deportation so far.
However, Barbi and her daughter, as well as others who have been detained for months in Dilley, could be removed from the county at any time, perhaps even in the coming days. Elsewhere at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, a dozen Hondurans were asked to pack their bags last week, but were not actually deported – yet.
“It’s very traumatic,” said Barbi, who left two other children in El Salvador behind and demanded that her real name not be revealed so as not to attract the attention of criminal gangs there. “My daughter cries and says, ‘Why don’t you leave us out? ””
As a candidate last summer, Biden suggested he would do just that, stating: “Children should be released immediately from ICE detention with their parents.”
Lawyers who initially congratulated Biden on promoting immigration reform are now worried that not enough will be done. Omar Jadwat, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrant Rights Project, said it was “worrying” that Biden’s efforts “did not include immediate action to overturn and disappoint the many illegal and inhumane policies that this administration has inherited – and which he 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, which led the voting momentum in Hispanic communities before the November election. “Immigration should remain the top priority, especially given how our community has been devastated, attacked, separated.”
Antonio Arellano, interim executive director of Jolt Action, which seeks to build the power and influence of young Latin Americans in Texas, said political pressure is growing as conservative forces mobilize to reclaim the Republican House and Senate in 2022.
“We will have electoral consequences if we fail to get results,” Arellano said.
Biden officials have pleaded for longer, saying Trump’s policies are too broad to be overturned overnight. But simply going back to pre-Trump practices – if Biden is able to do that – will not be enough for many activists.
President Barack Obama named “chief deportee” to eliminate a record number of immigrants in the eight-year term. His administration also built the Barbi Detention Center, as well as a similar facility in the rural town of Karnes City, Texas, 95 miles east.
Biden banned private prisons, but his order does not apply to prisons like Dilley and Karnes City. Far from supporting their previous closure, Biden, as vice president, flew to Guatemala during a 2014 wave of unaccompanied minors heading for the U.S. border and warned staff that his country will increase family detention – which the Obama administration later did.
Trump tried to take advantage of this issue during the presidential campaign, deceiving Biden because he is part of an administration that initially put “children in cages.”
Biden responded that Obama’s White House “took too long” to correct immigration policy, emphasizing the reform policies implemented later. As president, Biden has already taken steps to preserve some of them, including Obama-era legal protections for U.S. immigrants as children, while legislation the president promotes would provide a path to citizenship for about 11 years. millions of people living in the country illegally.
Both Karnes City and Dilley facilities were used to reunite the families the Trump administration separated. But after the outbreak of the coronavirus, the Karnes center became an area of exploitation for families in Haiti and in the distant lands that the Trump administration was trying to expel under public health emergency rules – several policies that the Biden administration did not follow. he still touched.
They date back to March last year, when Vice President Mike Pence, then head of the White House coronavirus working group, ordered the implementation of emergency health measures. who tried to effectively prevent immigrants from entering the United States or force them to leave quickly to prevent the virus from spreading. These restrictions have remained despite immigrants waiting for asylum shells and little evidence that border sealing is slowing the pandemic.
Some immigrants were sent to the town of Karnes because of the health order. But many others, especially from Central America, were deported to Mexico. Federal authorities have now used pandemic health restrictions at the border to eliminate more than 183,000 immigrants since October. The number would have been even higher if a federal court had not banned the removal of unaccompanied immigrant children from the United States in November.
Expulsions below the health limits at the border continued uninterrupted under Biden. A White House spokesman said the goal is to bring the entire US asylum process back to normal pre-Trump “as much as possible,” but noted that “we live within the limits of the pandemic,” which specifically limits “Consumption and processing” of asylum seekers at the border.
Kennji Kizuka, a senior researcher and policy analyst for refugee protection at Human Rights First, said that “with people in danger, the United States has a legal obligation not to return them to a place where they would face persecution, torture. or other damages. . ”
“It’s not something you can postpone because it’s uncomfortable in your policy plan,” Kizuka said. “It’s about both US law and our treaty obligations, so you can’t go into that while thinking about how to reform the system.”
Biden’s commitments to make rapid improvements have raised hopes that are now fading along the border. The day before its inauguration on January 20, immigrants staged a protest in the Mexican city of Nogales, which ended with some heading for a border crossing in Arizona and demanding to be prosecuted for US asylum.
A Customs and Border Protection officer said no, but added: “Try again tomorrow.”
“We came back the next day,” said Joanna Williams, director of education and advocacy for 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