WASHINGTON – The White House is likely to delay implementation of a series of executive orders on immigration, including the long-awaited announcement of a task force to bring together separate migrant families under the Trump administration, according to two sources familiar with the discussions. .
During his presidential campaign, Joe Biden ran ads promising to establish a task force “on his first day as president”. In a memo outlining the first executive actions, the White House chief of staff, Ron Klain, said the Biden government “would begin the difficult but critical work of bringing together separate families on the border”. A separate planning document that circulated among Biden officials indicated that the immigration executive’s action would be revealed on Friday.
Sources involved in the discussions say the delay is “at least a few days”, but did not say what is causing the delay.
When the task force is announced, it is expected to be an interagency effort by the Department of Homeland Security, Health and Human Services and the State Department, led by Biden’s choice to head DHS, Alejandro Mayorkas, according to three sources familiar with planning.
His focus will be to reunite all families of migrants separated on the border – not by deportations from the interior of the country – over the entire four years of Trump’s presidency, the sources said. They will also produce a report on what led to the separations and recommend that such a policy should never be repeated, although they do not conduct an investigation that could lead to criminal referrals from the responsible officials, the sources said. Instead, any investigation that requires subpoenaed witnesses will be left to the Department of Justice to conduct, the sources said.
But other important details are still being worked out, such as what factors may disqualify families from being reunited and whether those who qualify but have been deported will receive special protections, such as humanitarian aid, to come to the US
All families separated on the border during the four years of the Trump administration, not just those separated during “zero tolerance”, will be eligible for task force reunification, according to three sources familiar with the planning discussions.
Nearly 3,000 migrant children were separated from their parents on the U.S.-Mexico border under the “zero tolerance” policy, which systematically separated children from parents whose only crime was to cross the border illegally during May and June 2018. But before that, more than 1,000 families were separated on a pilot program in and around El Paso, Texas. And after June 2018, the ACLU estimates that another 1,000 families have been separated at the U.S. border.
But many of these parents have already been deported, making them more difficult to find and, if found, potentially presenting them with the difficult choice of bringing their children home to a dangerous country or allowing them to live in the United States with relatives. The task force announcement should not include details on whether families will be given special permission to come to the United States to meet with their children.
Pro-bono groups that have so far worked to reunite separated families in the 2017 pilot program and with zero tolerance in 2018 say they have failed to reach the parents of more than 600 children and believe that two-thirds of them have been deported.
