WASHINGTON – President Biden plans to sign three executive orders on Tuesday with the aim of reversing his predecessor’s attack on immigration and reuniting migrant children who have been separated from their families on the Mexican border, according to government officials.
In a request, the president will direct the secretary of homeland security to lead a task force to try to unite several hundred families that remain separated under former President Donald J. Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy, which sought to discourage migration across the country’s southern border.
With two other orders, Biden will authorize a review of Trump’s immigration policies that have limited asylum, stopped funding to foreign countries, made it difficult to obtain green cards or naturalized and slowed legal immigration to the United States.
The three requests help to keep the promises Biden made during the campaign to reverse Trump’s immigration agenda. But they also underscore the difficulty the new president faces in unraveling a large number of individual policies and regulations.
Senior government officials said Monday night that most of Biden’s guidelines on Tuesday would not bring about immediate changes. Instead, their goal is to give officials at the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice and the State Department time to assess how best to undo policies.
This is likely to disappoint defenders of migrants, who are eager for action to help people immediately. One of Biden’s orders, for example, will instruct authorities to review a Trump-era program that has forced Central American migrants seeking asylum to wait in miserable camps in Mexico.
But the order will not immediately address the reality that many of these migrants, including families and children, have been waiting for months in dangerous conditions.
The most prominent of the three orders aims to remedy the family separation policy, which was widely condemned after Trump officially put it into effect in the summer of 2018. More than 5,000 families have been separated.
Under Biden’s order, the federal government will seek to bring parents to the United States or return their children to parents living abroad, depending on the wishes of the families and the specifications of the immigration law.
The authorities said this could include providing visas or other legal means of entry for parents who were deported back to their countries of origin. Or it may involve sending children living in the United States back to those countries to be with their parents. They said that each case would be analyzed separately.
Officials said Alejandro N. Mayorkas, Biden’s nominee for secretary of homeland security, would lead the task force. The Senate cleared the way last week for a confirmation vote on Mayorkas, and is expected to approve it on Tuesday. The secretary of state and the attorney general will also be part of the task force, officials said.