Despite Joe Biden’s promise to reverse his predecessor’s immigration policies, Ijeoma “Golden” Kouadio is increasingly fearful that Biden will not rescue his family’s suspended American dream.
In 2019, Kouadio’s family won the diversity visa lottery, which aims to increase the diversity of immigrants in the United States. But just before the visa interviews, Donald Trump implemented an immigration ban that runs through March 31. If the president does not intervene, Kouadio’s family will lose their visas.
“I don’t even know how to feel,” Kouadio told the Guardian from his home in Ivory Coast. “I stopped working because I thought I was going to move in January.”
Biden has taken a series of actions to reverse or revise Trump’s anti-immigrant policies, but activists say Biden must do more to prove his commitment to significant change.
Anxiety is growing around certain policies, such as the 10014 and 10052 proclamations, the banning of immigrant and non-immigrant visa holders, which is keeping Kouadio and his family outside the United States.
Lawyer Jesse Bless, who is involved in litigation against the bans, estimated it would take about 10 minutes for Biden to revoke them. “If President Biden allows these visa bans to continue until sunset on March 31, he will effectively have ended the opportunity for diversity visa holders forever,” said Bless.
Bless, director of federal litigation for the American Immigration Lawyers Association (Aila), is also involved in litigation over the Trump era health insurance claim, which requires immigrants to prove they will have health insurance within 30 days of entering the United States. , or who have the financial resources to cover any foreseeable costs.
It is similar to the public charging rule, which sought to penalize immigrants who used public benefits, and which Biden’s team said they opposed.
Bless said that while the Biden White House lifted the travel ban, which blocked people from Muslim-majority countries, by leaving these proclamations in place, people are not seeing the benefits of the terminated travel ban.
“The executive actions signed so far are just the beginning,” said a White House spokesman. “President Biden was very clear about how to restore compassion and order to our immigration system and correct the divisive, inhuman and immoral policies of the past four years, which is our focus in the coming weeks and months.”
One complication for Biden has been to get the agencies that work on immigration policy, especially Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), to comply with the law.
A court blocked Biden’s 100-day moratorium on deportations and Ice tried to resume deportation flights that defy the guidelines introduced by the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Ice also tried to violate the guidelines by deporting asylum-seeking families detained in Texas, but was stopped after a coalition of 110 advocacy groups, including Amnesty International USA, intervened.
An Amnesty refugee and migrant rights researcher, Denise Bell, said Alejandro Mayorkas’s confirmation last week as DHS secretary could improve adherence to the guidelines, known as Pekoske’s memo, and change the agency’s culture.
“Immigration authorities were more encouraged to detain and deport people and this correlates with rhetoric and an agenda that was very much based on the anti-immigrant, anti-asylum and anti-refugee sentiment that dehumanizes people,” said Bell.
Although Bell said that much more change is needed, including a drastic reduction in the detention of immigrants, she was encouraged by what has happened so far, including the refugee protection order issued last week.
“They are there because of defenders, because of the public, saying that we need to do differently, we need to do better, we need to reverse what has happened in the last four years,” said Bell.
An initial test for Biden will be his response to the expected increase in unaccompanied children at the border. Defenders are monitoring two facilities being opened to prepare for the projected increase.
Lawyers are also waiting for the government to take a stand that accuses the government of denying due process to children, some as young as four, who cross the border on their own.
These children arrived at the border with their families, but were rejected by Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy, which forces asylum seekers to wait in northern Mexico before their case is processed instead of waiting in the United States, as was the policy. in the past.
“Many of these children ended up crossing on their own, sometimes their parents send them, because they fear they will not be able to keep their children safe on the Mexican side of the border,” said Esther Sung, a lawyer in the case. “I heard that some older children choose to abandon themselves.”
Unaccompanied children should be excluded from the program, officially known as migration protection protocols (MPP), but it is being executed against them, said Sung, a senior lawyer at the Justice Action Center. “What we have with these MPP children is still family separation,” she said.
They expect the Biden administration to debate the case or resolve it, but while they wait, the Trump administration’s influence hangs over the children.
Maleny Delgado, who was raised in the United States without papers, said she was pleased that Biden had prioritized immigration reform, but she would not be happy until there was a path to citizenship and a suspension of deportations.
Delgado, a member of the right-wing immigrant group Casa, knows not only the stress of being undocumented, but is also frightened to see her mother being deported in early 2015.
Ice agents came to his home in Pennsylvania one night and tried to take everyone into custody, including Delgado, then a citizen, and his six-year-old sleeping daughter. Her nine-year-old son still struggles with separation anxiety disorder and is always at Delgado’s side, afraid that she will disappear like her grandmother.
With a new president in office, Delgado is determined to fight to ensure that no other family goes through what hers has gone through. Delgado said: “It is not something that I am able to erase or that the government is able to erase, but I want my story not to happen to anyone else.”