Migrant groups are hopeful
They expect Biden to undo Trump rules
President-elect Joe Biden’s pick to lead the Homeland Security Department was instrumental in providing protections for young undocumented immigrants and was second in command at the agency when a wave of more than 68,000 unaccompanied minors arrived at the U.S. border in 2014.
Now, immigration stakeholders are counting on him to undo many of President Donald Trump’s policies.
Alejandro Mayorkas would be the first Latino and first immigrant to serve as head of the agency, which was created in 2002 in response to the 9/11 attacks.
Homeland Security, with a budget of $51.7 billion, is the umbrella for more than a dozen agencies, including the Coast Guard, Secret Service and the Transportation Security Administration.
It also oversees a host of immigration functions, including Customs and Border Protection, the country’s largest law enforcement agency with 20,000 Border Patrol agents and 24,500 CBP officers.
“I’m really excited about what he can bring and the people around him, but there’s going to be really, really difficult choices, hard choices. There has to be some major house
cleaning of the leadership” within Homeland Security, said Gil Kerlikowske, a former Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection who worked closely with Mayorkas under President Barack Obama during the 2014 migration surge.
He expects Homeland Security career personnel to welcome Mayorkas with open arms.
“I hate to say things like ‘over the moon’ — but I really am over the moon about that nomination,” he said.
Kerlikowske traveled to Cuba with Mayorkas in 2014 when Mayorkas was deputy Homeland Security secretary. It was his first time returning to the country since his family fled the island as political refugees when he was an infant.
One of the rapid changes will come in the refugee settlement program. Biden has said he will increase refugee admissions to as high as 125,000 a year — a 730 percent increase compared with admissions under Trump, who capped the number at 15,000 this year.
Catholic Charities, a designated refugee-resettlement agency, already has begun initial preparations.
“It’s going to be a huge increase,” said Antonio Fernandez, president and CEO of Catholic Charities of San Antonio.
He said Biden’s plan exceeds the goal of 90,000 refugees set by resettlement agencies, adding: “It’s going to be a lot of work for us, and we’re ready to do it.”
Some immigration lawyers and experts said they’re also anticipating an increase in immigration once Biden takes office.
Others, though, said there’s too many factors — international conflict, the economic stability at home and abroad, climate change, the pandemic — to assume that Biden’s presidency would provoke a wave of new arrivals.
Kerlikowske said the greatest success in history to curbing migration has not been through a deterrence strategy — a central platform of the Trump administration — but foreign aid that improves the migrants’ countries of origin.
He said Mayorkas and Secretary of State nominee Antony Blinken will be working closely together — “joined at the hip.”
After watching four years of Trump test and expand the norms of presidential power, some advocates want Biden to take advantage of those powers to flip Trump policies and push forward with novel, progressive ones.
For DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, that means expanding its eligibility requirements and creating a path of citizenship for its recipients.
“DACA was a solution to a big problem, and it’s great and it’s helped me tremendously in life, but the goal is to make sure this reaches other families, people who didn’t qualify the first time,” said Diego Mancha, 26, who was brought to the U.S. undocumented when he was 8 years old.
Granted a work permit through DACA, Mancha today is a Northwest Vista College academic adviser.
He and his sister both are DACA recipients, which means they entered the country illegally under age 16 and before June 15, 2012. The permit has granted relief from deportation for more than 645,000 people. An estimated 1.3 million are eligible for DACA, the Migration Policy Institute says.
Biden has said he would pursue immigration reform that would provide a pathway to citizenship for more than 11 million undocumented people within his first 100 days of office.
Sara Ramey, executive director of the Migrant Center for Human Rights, wants to see former President Barack Obama’s case management program reinstated, an alternative to detention that assigned caseworkers to asylumseekers and guided them through the court process.
The 2016 pilot program, which served nearly 1,000 people, successfully avoided absenteeism: 99 percent of immigrants showed up to appointments with federal officials and 100 percent attended court hearings, an Office of the Inspector General report says. It was terminated once Trump took office.
“One of the big changes we’re excited for is the change of tone in the administration. I think people will feel like they’ll be listened to and have a chance, and they’re even more likely to show,” Ramey said.
Immigration experts said one of their concerns about the president-elect’s policies is the future of family detention centers. The largest two of the three facilities in the U.S. are located south of San Antonio, in Dilley and Karnes County. They both were built under the Obama administration in 2014.
“We will be looking at the administration’s policy on family detention on Day 1 of the administration as a sort of miner’s canary,” said Jonathan Ryan, executive director of RAICES, a San Antonio nonprofit that provides legal and educational aid to undocumented immigrants.
The detention centers house parents and their children. They aren’t licensed for child care by the state of Texas, and children frequently are detained long past the 20-day maximum permitted in the federal Flores agreement.
The facilities have emptied out significantly during the pandemic, under a public health provision that has allowed the Trump administration to routinely deny asylum cases.
According to Proyecto Dilley, there still are eight children who are 5 years old or younger at that facility. Two families there have been detained for eight to 10 months, and the rest for more than a year.
“I think the Biden administration’s guidance to it might be different (than Obama’s) — might be in favor of releasing these families who have been detained for months and months, but I’m not sure about it and I’m not too optimistic,” said Mackenzie Levy, a staffer at Proyecto Dilley, which provides legal aid to families detained at Dilley’s South Texas Family Residential Center.
Over the summer, Biden tweeted that he opposed any efforts to release children from the facilities without their parents, stating “families belong together.” He also pledged to end private prisons for detention.
Ryan of RAICES still is wary. He described the detention of these young children and families “as damaging and erosive and tormenting as family separation.”
“Biden spoke about his campaign as one to restore the soul of the nation,” he said. “The choices he makes with respect to family detention will reveal the soul of our next president.”