ABOUT BIDEN AND THE WALL

Amid his first wave of actions after his inauguration Wednesday, President Joe Biden took direct aim at the nation’s dysfunctional immigration system by rescinding some of the Trump administration’s more extreme approaches to enforcement and pushing Congress to finally adopt comprehensive reforms.

… The executive directives halt further construction of President Donald Trump’s vanity wall along the U.S.-Mexico border; reinvigorate the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that Trump sought to end; end the ban on people from about a dozen predominantly Muslim countries; and withdraw an order that ramped up immigration sweeps in the interior of the country.

Separately, the Department of Homeland Security announced a 100-day suspension of deportations as it reviews procedures and a freeze on new enrollments in the program that requires border-crossing asylum seekers to remain in Mexico, though it did not offer relief for the 60,000 asylum seekers currently stranded along the border.

In a sense, the new directives reset federal (policies) to those of the Obama administration, which is good enough for now. Biden’s more ambitious efforts lie within the bill he proposed to Congress this week, the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021. Among other things, the measure would let some 11 million people now living in the shadows apply for temporary legal status and provide them an eight-year path to citizenship. That is both the strength of the proposal and its major friction point.

… The specifics of Biden’s proposed legislation will emerge and be debated … and we fervently hope the reform effort doesn’t get caught up in the same web of resistance that has doomed previous efforts.