WASHINGTON, USA.- Joe Biden’s rise to power in the United States raises expectations and also suspicion among immigrants, who expect relief after four years of restrictive policies. Donald TrumpBut at the same time do not forget the harsh measures taken when he was vice president under the administration of Barack Obama.
Biden promised the regularization of 11 million undocumented people living in the country and the reinstatement of protection systems, such as the one that protects from deportation the so-called “dreamers”, dreamers who arrived in the country as minors. next to his parents.
Among them are many young Hondurans enrolled in the DACA program.
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“I’m not a big fan of Biden, but I’m optimistic that this government will try to work with us,” Gabriela Hernández, a 22-year-old “dreamer” who came from El Salvador with the his mother when he was five years old.
In his situation there are about 700,000 young people who were undocumented all their lives until in 2012 the president Democrat Barack Obama granted them the Deferred Action for Newcomers to Children (DACA) protection statute by decree.
The “dreamers” lived in limbo during the Trump presidency, which decided to cancel this protection, starting a long legal battle.
Any permanent change that Biden wants to implement will have to go through Congress.
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this Tuesday January 5 the two pending seats in Georgia are defined in the second round, where it will be known who will have the majority in the Senate, as the upper house is controlled by Republicans, while the House of Representatives is in the hands of Democrats.
With or without a related Congress the task is enormous, as during the Trump administration changes in the migration policy they occurred at a “frantic and unprecedented” pace, the Institute for Migration Policy (MPI) said.
According to this study center, the more than 400 executive orders signed by the outgoing president sought to “methodically dismantle and rebuild the system based on a global view of immigration as a threat.”
For Gabriela, her current immigration status remains a “patch” solution and is like “putting an umbrella on a population of millions of people,” relative to the total number of undocumented.
Jorge Benítez, who is also a “dreamer”, still harbors “fear”. During the Obama administration, in which Biden was vice president, there was a record of deportations.
A reluctance that also harbors William Martinez, who arrived from El Salvador with his family after the country was devastated by an earthquake in 2001. He is protected from deportation by the Temporary Protection Statute (TPS), a mechanism created for foreign countries affected by natural disasters or political instability.
Trump also tried to remove that protection, a battle that continues in court.
William, 28, expects “nothing” from Biden. He says any solution will come from a bipartisan deal so he plans to campaign in Georgia to make sure Democrats control the Senate.
One of the key issues will be asylum seekers on the Mexican border, but Biden adviser Juan Gonzalez has already warned CNN that “there will be no immediate changes.”