HOUSTON (AP) – For nearly 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 have been repeatedly about to be deported. On the Friday before Christmas, the two were driven to San Antonio airport and boarded a plane, to be removed when lawyers working for immigrant advocacy groups filed new appeals.
“I have faith first in God and in the new president who has taken office, who will give us a chance,” said the mother, who is nicknamed “Barbi.” Her daughter was 8 years old when they crossed the US border in August 2019 and will turn ten in a few weeks. “It hasn’t been easy.”
It is unlikely to be easier soon.
President Joe Biden was quick to send the most ambitious review of the country’s immigration system in a generation in Congress and signed nine executive actions to end some of his predecessor’s tougher measures to strengthen the U.S.-Mexico border. But a Texas federal court suspended Biden’s 100-day moratorium on deportations, and immigration law is likely to be tightened as lawmakers face legislation to relieve the coronavirus pandemic. as well as a second indictment of former President Donald Trump.
Even if Biden gets most of what he wants in immigration, fully implementing the kind of changes so broad he has promised will take weeks, months, maybe even years.
This means that, at least for now, there is likely to be more overlap between Biden and Trump’s immigration policies than many of the activists who supported the success of the Democrat’s presidential campaign. he had waited.
“It’s important that we adopt policies that are not only transformative, inclusive, and permanent, but also policies that don’t increase the growth of deportation,” said Genesis Renteria, director of member services and commitment 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 asylum in the United States. Biden has 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 to enter makeshift tent camps a few steps from American territory. He has also formed a working group to bring immigrant children apart from their parents and has stopped federal funding to expand walls along the U.S.-Mexico border.
On Saturday, the Biden administration said it was withdrawing from agreements with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras that restricted people’s ability to seek U.S. asylum.
But these orders probably won’t help Barbi and his daughter. They applied for 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 overturned by a federal court of appeals, which protected them from deportation until now.
Still, Barbi and his daughter, like others who have been detained for months in Dilley, could be removed from the county at any time, perhaps even in the next few days. Elsewhere at the Immigration and Customs-run facility, a dozen Hondurans were told to pack their bags this past week, but had not yet been deported.
“It’s very traumatic,” said Barbi, who left two other children behind in El Salvador and called for his real name not to be revealed so as not to draw the attention of criminal gangs. “My daughter cries and says to me,‘ Why don’t they let 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.”
Proponents who originally congratulated Biden for advocating for immigration reform now worry that not enough will be done. Omar Jadwat, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrant Rights Project, called it “worrying” that Biden’s efforts “did not include immediate action to rescind and develop more of the illegal and inhumane policies that this administration inherited – and now owns “.
“We are tired, as Latinos and immigrants, that there is always another priority,” said Hector Sanchez Barba, executive director and CEO of Mi Familia Vota, which led the voting actions in Hispanic communities before the election. of November. “Immigration should continue to be the top priority, especially given how our community was 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 increasing as conservative forces mobilize to reclaim the House and Senate for Republicans in 2022.
“There will be electoral consequences if we fail to comply,” Arellano said.
Biden administration officials have advocated 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 achieve this) will not be enough for many activists.
President Barack Obama was named “Chief Deportee” for having eliminated a record number of immigrants during his eight years in office. His administration also built the detention center where Barbi is detained, as well as a similar facility in the same rural town of Karnes City, Texas, 95 miles east.
Biden has banned private prisons, but his order does not apply to closures such as those in Dilley and Karnes City. Far from advocating his closure earlier, Biden as vice president flew to Guatemala during a wave of unaccompanied minors heading to the U.S. border in 2014 and personally warned that his country would increase the detention of families, which the Obama administration did later.
Trump tried to take advantage of the issue during the presidential campaign, denouncing Biden for being part of an administration that originally put “children in cages.”
Biden responded that Obama’s White House “took too long” to get the immigration policy right, and pointed to the reform of the policies implemented later. As president, Biden has already taken steps to preserve some of these, including Obama-era legal protections for immigrants brought to the United States as children, while legislation promoted by the president would provide a path to citizenship of the approximately 11 million people living in the country illegally.
Both the Karnes City and Dilley facilities were used to reunite families separated by the Trump administration. But after the outbreak of the coronavirus, the Karnes center became a reception area for families from Haiti and distant lands that the Trump administration sought to expel under public health emergency regulations: more policies that the Biden administration has not yet touched on.
This is last March, when Vice President Mike Pence, then head of the White House coronavirus working group, ordered the implementation of emergency health measures. which sought to effectively ban immigrants from entering the United States or impose their rapid withdrawal to prevent the spread of the virus. These restrictions have been maintained despite pending asylum clams by immigrants and little evidence that border sealing is slowing 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 now used pandemic health restrictions at the border to eliminate more than 183,000 immigrants since October. The figure would have been even higher if a federal court had not banned the withdrawal of unaccompanied immigrant children from the United States in November.
Expulsions under sanitary boundaries at the border have continued unabated in Biden. A White House spokesman said the goal was to return the entire U.S. asylum process to pre-Trump normalcy “as much as possible,” but noted that “we live on the brink of the pandemic,” which limits specifically “the intake 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 suffer. persecution, torture or other harm “.
“This cannot be postponed because it is uncomfortable in its policy plan,” Kizuka said. “It’s about both U.S. law and our treaty obligations, so you can’t pass it while you’re thinking about how to reform the system.”
Biden’s promises to make quick improvements had raised hopes that are now fading along the border. The day before his inauguration on January 20, immigrants staged a protest in the Mexican city of Nogales that ended with some heading for a border crossing into Arizona and demanding to be prosecuted for asylum. USA.
A Customs and Border Protection agent said no, but added, “Please 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 rally. “Of course, they didn’t prosecute them that day either.”
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Weissert reported from Washington