San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Biden pushing legal status for 11 million
LOS ANGELES — During his first days in office, President-elect Joe Biden plans to send a groundbreaking legislative package to Congress to address the long-elusive goal of immigration reform, including what’s certain to be a controversial centerpiece: a pathway to citizenship for an estimated 11 million immigrants who are in the country without legal status, according to immigrant rights activists in communication with the Biden-Harris transition team.
The bill also would provide a shorter pathway to citizenship for hundreds of thousands of people with temporary protected status and beneficiaries of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals who were brought to the U.S. as children, and probably also for certain front-line essential workers, vast numbers of whom are immigrants.
In a significant departure from many previous immigration bills passed under both Democratic and Republican administrations, the proposed legislation would not contain any provisions directly linking an expansion of immigration with stepped-up enforcement and security measures, said Marielena Hincapi, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center Immigrant Justice Fund, who has been consulted on the proposal by Biden staffers.
Both Biden and Vice Presidentelect Kamala Harris have said their legislative proposal would include a pathway to citizenship for millions of immigrants in the U.S. without legal status, and the Times has confirmed the bold opening salvo that the new administration plans in its first days doesn’t include the “security first” political concessions of past efforts.
Hincapi, who was co-chair of the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force on Immigration — part of Biden’s outreach to his top primary rival, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, and his progressive base —
said that Biden’s decision to not prioritize additional enforcement measures was probably a result of lessons learned from the Obama administration’s failed attempt to appease Republicans by backing tighter immigration enforcement in hopes of gaining their support for immigration relief.
“This notion concerning immigration enforcement and giving Republicans everything they kept asking for … was flawed from the beginning,” she said.
Biden-Harris transition team officials declined to comment on the record.
Biggest plan since Reagan’s
Biden’s proposal lays out what would be the most sweeping and comprehensive immigration package since President Ronald Reagan’s Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which granted legal status to 3 million people who were in the country without documentation.
Under Biden’s plan, immigrants would become eligible for legal permanent residence after five years and for U.S. citizenship after an additional three years — a faster path to citizenship than in previous immigration bills.
But even with Democrats holding the White House and slender majorities in both chambers of Congress, the bill will probably face months of political wrangling on Capitol Hill and pushback from conservative voters and immigration hard-liners.
Several immigration activists who spoke with the Times praised the reported scope and scale of the bill and expressed surprise at its ambition. A number of legislators and analysts had predicted that the new administration, at least in its first months in power, would be likely to pursue immigration measures that would stir the least controversy and could be achieved by executive actions rather than legislation.
“I think this bill is going to lay an important marker in our country’s history,” said Lorella Praeli, an immigrant and longtime activist who has been talking with Biden’s staff, noting that the measure “will not seek to trade immigration relief for enforcement, and that’s huge.”
Praeli, president of Community Change Action, a progressive group based in Washington that advocates for immigrants, described the bill as “an important
opening act.”
“If there is a silver lining to the Trump era, it’s that it should now be clear to everyone that our system needs a massive overhaul and we can no longer lead with detention and deportation,” she said.
Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, said in a call with reporters Friday that in the meantime, he was working on a bill seeking immediate protection from deportation and a fast-tracked path to citizenship for undocumented essential workers.
“It’s time for essential workers to no longer be treated as disposable, but to be celebrated and welcomed as American citizens,” he said. “If your labor feeds, builds and cares for our nation, you have earned the right to stay here with full legal protection, free from fear of deportation.”
Harris goes on Univision
In an interview this week with Univision, Harris gave a preview of the bill’s provisions, including automatic green cards for immigrants with TPS and DACA status, a decrease in wait times for U.S. citizenship from 13 to eight years, and an increase in the number of immigration judges to relieve a significant backlog in cases.
President Donald Trump ignited international condemnation early in his administration when it separated more than 5,000 children from their parents starting in 2017 and ramping up in 2018 as part of a “zero-tolerance” policy on unauthorized attempts to enter the United States.
The policy was eventually stopped as a result of a national outcry, but not before many adults were deported to Central America, leaving behind hundreds of children, from toddlers to teens. Many are still separated from their parents.
Leon Rodriguez, who was director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services from 2014 to 2017, said that “the public attitude toward immigration enforcement is at a different place in 2021 than it was at any point prior to the Trump administration.”
“I think there just has been a lot of things about how immigration enforcement was executed under the Trump administration that didn’t sit right with a lot of Americans, and that just creates a different attitude toward these matters and a different political calculation,” he said.
Ruiz said that rather than simply adding more resources for immigration enforcement, the existing apparatus of federal agencies tasked with security should focus on going after guns, drugs and criminals.
“What we don’t want is to militarize the border,” he said. “We don’t want to demonize and dehumanize and criminalize an immigration process.”
But Lora Ries, acting deputy chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security under Trump in 2019 and now a research fellow for homeland security at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank, said granting most immigrants a pathway to citizenship would sow division and erode the country’s immigration system.
“Such rewards will attract more people to illegally enter the U.S. to await their eventual green card, undermining border security,” she said.