The border comes to Baltimore
The Biden administration is experimenting with new border policies, and asylum-seeking families headed to Baltimore are about to serve as its test subjects.
This month, the administration began implementing a range of sweeping new policies at the Southern border. The centerpiece of the new approach is an asylum ban that blocks most migrants from accessing asylum if they traveled through a third country without seeking protection there.
But tacked on to this major policy change — which mimics similar, Trumpera restrictions — is a set of lesser-known programs that could also fundamentally reshape how our nation treats people seeking refuge at our borders.
One of these programs, called
“Family Expedited Removal Management” or “FERM,” would subject some asylum-seeking families to “continuous monitoring” as the government processes their applications for humanitarian protection.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is rolling out FERM in four “destination cities”: Chicago, Newark, Washington, D.C., and our own Baltimore.
What will continuous monitoring of Baltimore’s newest residents look like? As first reported by the Los Angeles Times, continuous monitoring means curfews for the families and ankle monitors for one of the parents. If families enrolled in FERM flunk initial asylum screenings, ICE plans to swiftly deport them.
What about support for asylum-seeking families as they navigate the notoriously labyrinthine immigration system? Or connecting these families, many of whom fled their homes with little more than the clothes on their backs, with supportive services? FERM, which is heavy on command-and-control immigration enforcement, is silent on how we might set our newest community members up for success.
Continuous monitoring and swift deportation are policy choices the Biden administration needn’t have embraced. Certainly, FERM is preferable to family detention, which the administration apparently considered. But amid all the tough-on-asylum-seekers political posturing, we shouldn’t lose sight of the alternative policy choices that were available and that the administration rejected.
In an alternative universe, President Biden would make good on his campaign promise to create a fairer and more humane immigration system. In an alternative universe, the federal government would equip asylum-seeking families with the resources they need to survive and thrive in this country.
For those concerned about the costs of such alternative programming, ask yourselves why you don’t have similar concerns about the new surveillance regime that the administration just unveiled, which surely comes with its own hefty price tag. Why not at least also test out a more humane approach and see how it works?
We shouldn’t assume that a kinder, gentler approach will lead to less compliance with our immigration laws. In fact, there’s good evidence that continuous monitoring of the type FERM envisions is less effective than supportive, community-based programming and use of a “case management model.”
Under that approach, migrant families who could benefit from additional support are connected to community-based organizations that provide wraparound social and legal services. One of the reasons why such a model works is because it embeds people in their communities, where they receive legal support and help accessing social services. In 2016 and 2017,
ICE briefly experimented with something approximating this model, until the Trump administration shut it down.
As it responds to the latest developments at the border, the Biden administration doesn’t seem to have any plans to reinvest in this model. Instead, the administration is about to bring more security theater to a community near you.
As I’ve been pondering FERM’s implications for our city and our nation, I keep returning to a speech that President Obama made nearly a decade ago. In that speech, he argued that our deportation system should target “Felons, not families. Criminals, not children. Gang members, not a mom who’s working hard to provide for her kids.”
At the time, some advocates worried that the distinctions President Obama was drawing were harmful because the people he was writing off as “felons” were also fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, daughters and sons. Other advocates warned that the president’s rhetoric would only serve to entrench a deportation bureaucracy that would ignore the fine-grained distinctions he was making.
Those warnings proved prescient. Today, it has become routine for the federal government to openly target families, children and moms working hard to provide for their kids. It doesn’t have to be this way.