San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Biden has raised hope, fear on border
President Joe Biden’s quick but cautious moves to undo the more draconian immigration policies of his predecessor spawn both trepidation and expectation in the lower Rio Grande Valley.
“I just pray Mr. Biden will be prudent and keep America safe,” said Debbie Schuster, whose family’s modern farm house sits within sight of where ex-President Donald Trump signed what could be a final fragment of his far-from-finished border wall. “I am very frightened.”
Fifty miles downriver, hundreds of migrant adults and children have huddled for more than a year in a fenced and forlorn Mexican field near a border bridge, awaiting a chance to plead for U.S. asylum.
“Let’s see if he keeps his word,” Luis Calix, 25, a former law student and social worker from the Caribbean coast of Honduras, said of Biden. “This has to be orderly. If
there is chaos, everything will be ruined.”
On his first day in office Wednesday, Biden signed orders pausing construction of Trump's wall, suspending the deportations of most immigrants and canceling orders that have sent tens of thousands of asylum-seekers back to Mexico to await court hearings.
Biden also granted protections for DACA recipients, covering hundreds of thousands of people brought illegally to the U.S. as children. And he proposed to Congress an eight-year path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants already living across the country.
“My administration is committed to ensuring that the United States has a comprehensive and humane immigration system that operates consistently with our nation's values,” Biden said as he put the temporary hold on border ramparts.
Still, leery of sparking a fresh surge to the border by desperate migrants from Central America, Biden and his aides have signaled not all of Trump's policies will be revoked quickly — and probably not entirely.
Those fears were punctuated last week as Guatemalan security forces turned back a thousandsstrong “caravan” of walking and hitchhiking Honduran migrants intent on reaching the U.S.
“They're trying to split the difference for changes in policy as soon as possible, but doing it in a way that won't create a rush to the border,” said Andrew Selee, president of the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. “I'm not sure how they do that.
“I don't think any of us know what is going to happen at the border. Now, the rubber meets the road.”
While they welcome short-term fixes, Selee and other experts say a more lasting solution depends on somehow bolstering the failed economic, public security and political systems driving many Central Americans northward.
To that end, Biden has proposed an initial $4 billion aid program for Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, from which most migrants are fleeing.
Biden also has named Roberta Jacobson, a State Department veteran with extensive experience in Latin America, to coordinate border policy on the National Security Council.
Jacobson resigned as U.S. ambassador to Mexico three years ago, amid widespread frustration with Trump's harsh policies among U.S. career diplomats.
Mexico never paid for the construction of the wall, as Trump long had vowed it would do. But under pressure from Washington and his own citizens, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in recent years has become a firm ally in turning back the Central American migrants.
Trump similarly forced cooperation from Central American leaders by threatening to cut off aid unless tougher enforcement was applied to the migrations.
“The fact that there is already a relationship on migration will help,” said Shannon O'Neil, a Mexico analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “There is room for cooperation.”
‘Carrot and stick’
Biden is well familiar with the fraught dynamics in play.
As vice president under Barack Obama — who won the derisive title of “deporter in chief ” by expelling some 3 million people during his two terms — he was dispatched to Central America in 2014 in an attempt to stop a surge of immigrants.
Some critics accuse both Obama and Biden of abetting the 2009 removal of an elected leftist president in Honduras, which they say spurred much of the recent migration. New leaders have taken power in the region, but little else has changed. U.S. strategy may have to.
“Trump was all stick — and a big one,” O'Neil says. “Biden will be both carrot and stick.”
Cooperation will have to be won as well with Congress. An indication of the challenge is Sen. Josh Hawley's quashing last week of a rapid confirmation of Biden's pick for Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas.
Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, said in a statement that Mayorkas “has not adequately explained how he will enforce federal law and secure the southern border given … Biden's promise to roll back major enforcement and security measures.”
Among those measures was Trump's Great Wall, which Biden on Inauguration Day called “not a serious policy solution” and a “waste of money.” The 450 miles built by the Trump administration
largely was replacement of old fencing with more formidable structures.
While pausing construction now, Biden's administration is reviewing existing contracts with an eye on canceling many of them.
“It's important to absolutely, completely and immediately halt construction,” said Scott Nicol, an environmental activist who has been a leading opponent of the wall in far South Texas. “But until contracts are canceled and we start to see wall torn down, I am not going to feel confident.”
“Stopping new construction is an important first step. But those walls do need to come down,” Nicol said. “They are tremendously destructive.”
The bit of recently finished barrier that Trump visited days before leaving office — high concrete walls topped by tightly packed 18foot steel bollards — hugs or tops a flood-control levee more than a mile from the Rio Grande. It's part of a few miles of wall whose construction was rushed to completion
in recent months, residents say. Gates have yet to be installed and huge gaps in the barrier remain.
The wall mostly is built on levees far from the border river, cutting off huge swaths of farmland and several small communities from the U.S. interior.
Among them is Jackson Ranch, homestead of an extended family descended from an Alabama farmer and his former slave wife who settled 5,550 acres before the Civil War and helped other slaves escape to Mexico.
Family members so far have succeeded in keeping the wall's construction from destroying a small cemetery where the community's founders and many of their descendants are buried. But the new wall Trump visited is a short distance away and construction machine engines grind nearby.
“This is part of our history. What is this wall doing here?” asks Paul “Pablo” Villarreal Jr., the Hidalgo County tax assessor-collector who is a Jackson family member. “You'd zone.”
Meanwhile, unknown thousands of asylum-seekers — most from Central America and Mexico, but others from Cuba, Africa and Asia — remain snared in precarious and often dangerous parts of Mexico.
Asylum applications at border crossings were curtailed sharply in mid-2018 and suspended altogether last spring as COVID-19 flared.
Some 70,000 asylum-seekers were returned to Mexico since the policy kicked in.
A study published in November by the Strauss Center at the University of Texas at Austin found nearly 16,000 migrants registered for asylum hearings in nine Mexican border cities. The report notes many asylum petitioners have returned home, crossed the border illegally or melted into Mexican communities.
think
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Running the gantlet
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The nearly 600 adults and children stubbornly holding out in Matamoros, across the border from Brownsville, are the remnants of 3,000 camped there a few years ago. Their tent camp now is surrounded by a high fence, with access in and out restricted. The local crime gangs prey upon them, some migrants say.
But Team Brownsville and other private volunteer groups continue supplying the camp with basic food, water, firewood and medical care. Some migrants have found jobs in local shopping centers, construction sites or factories.
Sandra, a 44-year-old single mother and street vendor from El Salvador who asked that her last name not be used, sobbed as she described fleeing gang extortion with her two daughters, ages 8 and 11, and paying smugglers $5,000 a head to get them to waiting relatives in New England.
After being forcibly held in a smuggler safe house, the family members instead were shuttled to the U.S. riverbank and advised to turn themselves in to the Border Patrol. They quickly were put back across the river in late 2019.
Last fall, she used more borrowed money to have her children smuggled across the river, Sandra said. Many others in the camp have used the same strategy, she and other migrants said.
Like others interviewed through the compound fence the day after Trump toured the border wall, Sandra said other migrants, many traveling by the thousands in caravans, are certain to come. Life simply is too untenable in their home countries.
But, she said, the travelers can't fathom the gantlet they'll run.
“I have suffered more on this journey than I suffered in my own country,” she said. “I don't recommend anyone to leave their country. If we tell the truth, no one will choose to make this trip.”
Still, Sandra said: “There is no going back for me. I am going to wait for President Biden.
“We are waiting for the change.”