HOUSTON (AP) – For almost 17 months, the Trump administration tried to deport El Salvador’s mother and daughter. The Biden administration can finish the job.
They are being held in a family detention center in remote Dilley, Texas, but are always on the verge of deportation. On the Friday before Christmas, the two were taken to San Antonio airport and loaded onto a plane, only to be removed when lawyers working for immigrant advocacy groups filed new appeals.
“I have faith first in God and in the new president he took on, that he will give us a chance,” said the mother, who goes by the nickname “Barbi”. Her daughter was 8 when they crossed the border into the United States in August 2019 and will turn 10 in a few weeks. “It has not been easy.”
It is unlikely to get any easier anytime soon.
President Joe Biden hurried to send the country’s most ambitious immigration reform in a generation Congress and signed nine executive actions to eliminate some of its predecessor’s toughest measures to strengthen the US-Mexico border. But a federal court in Texas has suspended Biden’s 100-day moratorium on deportations, and the immigration bill is likely to be reduced as lawmakers grapple with coronavirus pandemic relief legislation and a second impeachment trial by former President Donald Trump.
Even if Biden gets most of what he wants in immigration, the full implementation of the kind of radical changes he promised will take weeks, months – maybe even years.
This means that, at least for now, there is likely to be more overlap between Biden’s and Trump’s immigration policies than many of the activists who supported the successful Democratic presidential campaign I had waited.
“It is important that we approve policies that are not only transformative, inclusive and permanent, but also that do not increase deportation growth,” said Genesis Renteria, director of membership and involvement services programs at Living United for Change in Arizona, who helped to mobilize Democratic voters in the critical battleground state. “Our organizations will continue to hold management accountable.”
Federal law allows immigrants facing credible threats of persecution or violence in their home country to seek asylum in the United States. Biden ordered a review of Trump’s policies that sent people from Central America, Cuba and other countries to Mexico while their cases were being processed – often forcing them into makeshift camps just steps from American soil. He also formed a task force to bring together immigrant children separated from their parents and suspended federal funding to expand the walls along the US-Mexico border.
On Saturday, the Biden government said it was withdrawing agreements with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras that restricted people from seeking asylum in the United States.
But those orders are unlikely to help Barbi and her daughter. They sought asylum, but were denied because of a Trump government rule that prohibited such protections for people crossing another country to reach the border with the U.S. – in their case, Guatemala and Mexico.
That measure was overturned by a federal appeals court, protecting them from deportation so far.
Still, Barbi and her daughter, like others who have been detained in Dilley for months, could be removed from the county at any time, perhaps even in the coming days. Elsewhere in the facilities run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a dozen Hondurans were instructed to pack their bags last week, but have not been deported – yet.
“It is very traumatic,” said Barbi, who left two other children in El Salvador and asked that his real name not be revealed so as not to attract the attention of criminal gangs there. “My daughter cries and says, ‘Why don’t they let us out?'”
As a candidate last summer, Biden suggested he would do just that, declaring: “Children must be released from ICE detention with their parents immediately”.
Supporters who originally praised Biden for defending immigration reform now fear that not enough will be done. Omar Jadwat, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrant Rights Project, found it “worrying” that Biden’s efforts “did not include immediate action to rescind and undo more of the illegal and inhumane policies this government inherited – and now has” .
“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, who led election campaigns in Hispanic communities before the November election. “Immigration must remain a top priority, especially considering how our community has been devastated, attacked and separated.”
Antonio Arellano, interim executive director of Jolt Action, which seeks to build 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 consequences if we don’t meet the targets,” said Arellano.
Biden government officials pleaded for longer, saying that Trump’s policies are too broad to be rescinded overnight. But simply returning to pre-Trump practices – if Biden is able to really achieve that – will not be enough for many activists.
President Barack Obama has been called “chief deportor” for removing a record number of immigrants during his eight years in office. His administration also built the detention center where Barbi is being held, as well as a similar facility in the equally rural Karnes City, Texas, 95 miles to the east.
Biden has banned private prisons, but his order does not apply to prisons like Dilley and Karnes City. Far from defending its closure earlier, Biden, as vice president, flew to Guatemala during an outbreak of unaccompanied minors in 2014 going to the U.S. border and personally warned that his country would increase detention of families – which the Obama administration later did.
Trump tried to take advantage of the issue during the presidential campaign, scolding Biden for being part of a government that originally put “children in cages”.
Biden replied that the Obama White House “took too long” to settle the immigration policy, pointing to reform policies implemented later. As president, Biden has already taken steps to preserve some of them, including Obama-era legal protections for immigrants brought to the US as children, while the legislation the president is promoting would provide a path to citizenship for the approximately 11 million people who live in the country illegally.
The Karnes City and Dilley facilities were used to bring families together that the Trump administration separated. But after the coronavirus outbreak, the Karnes center became a waiting area for families in Haiti and distant countries that the Trump administration was trying to expel under emergency public health rules – more political than the Biden government has not yet. rang.
These dates date back to March, when Vice President Mike Pence, then head of the White House coronavirus task force, ordered the implementation of emergency health measures. which aimed to effectively stop immigrants from entering the United States – or impose their rapid removal – to prevent the spread of the virus. These restrictions remained, despite pending asylum threats from immigrants and little evidence that closing borders slows down the pandemic.
Some immigrants were sent to Karnes City because of the health order. But many others, especially from Central America, were expelled to Mexico. Federal authorities have already used pandemic health restrictions on the border to remove 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 under border health limits remained unshakable under Biden. A White House spokesman said the goal was to get the entire U.S. asylum process back to normal pre-Trump “as much as possible”, but noted that “we are living on the edge of the pandemic”, which specifically limits “entry and processing” of asylum seekers at the border.
Kennji Kizuka, senior researcher and policy analyst for refugee protection at Human Rights First, said “with people who are in danger, the US has a legal obligation not to return them to a place where they would face harassment, torture or other harm. ”
“This is not something you can postpone because it is inconvenient in your policy plan,” said Kizuka. “It’s both US law and our treaty obligations, so you can’t go through this while you’re thinking about how to reform the system.”
Biden’s promises to make quick improvements have raised hopes that are now fading across the border. The day before his inauguration on January 20, the immigrants staged a protest in the Mexican city of Nogales that ended with some going to a border crossing to Arizona and asking to be prosecuted for asylum in the United States.
A Customs and Border Protection officer said no, but added, “Try again tomorrow.”
“We’ll be back the next day,” said Joanna Williams, director of education and defense for the Kino Border Initiative, which provides humanitarian assistance to immigrants and participated in the demonstration. “Of course, they didn’t sue them that day either.”
___
Weissert reported from Washington