WHEN WILL BIDEN LIVE UP TO HIS PROMISE TO BE THE ANTI-TRUMP?
President Joe Biden is facing criticism from across the political spectrum for his immigration policies, which some see as too lax and others see as cruel. Below, two immigration activists say Biden must commit to a much more humane approach, while a huma
Anti-immigrant extremists were handed defeat after defeat across the country in last month’s midterm election, despite burning tens of millions of dollars on ads that peddled vile, xenophobic and flat-out racist messages. As it turns out, most voters see past the vitriol and support a more humane approach to immigration. Everyday people recognize immigrants not as political props, but as human beings — real people with families, hopes and dreams.
That’s part of the reason why it’s become increasingly puzzling — and infuriating — to watch President Joe Biden continue to double down on his predecessor’s now twice-rejected agenda.
That’s not hyperbole. Despite assuming office with an unprecedented moral mandate on immigration matters, Biden has used federal courtrooms to leave much of Donald Trump’s immigration legacy intact.
Take for example the Biden administration’s decision to team up with GEO Group, a massive private prison company, to defend the private prison industy’s stake in the deeply immoral business of locking up immigrants.
You read that right. Despite the president’s repeated promises to end for-profit immigration detention, the Biden administration teamed up with GEO last year in an attempt to overturn California’s groundbreaking private prison ban. Instead of simply dropping the case it inherited from Trump as demanded by advocates and members of Congress, Biden’s DOJ actively fought to overturn the private prison ban our communities fought so hard to win.
Biden again backed the industry when he excluded immigration detention facilities from his 2021 private prison executive order. To be clear, all detention centers, regardless of whether they are privately or publicly operated, should close. For decades, however, the private prison industry has played an integral role in entrenching and expanding the immigration detention system, building a multibillion-dollar business off of incarcerating mostly Black and Brown immigrants. Today, roughly 80 percent of all people detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement are held in private detention facilities.
Meanwhile, these lucrative (and tax-funded) detention contracts have only resulted in abuse. As documented in the amicus brief filed by Freedom for Immigrants, Immigrant Legal Resource Center and Human Rights Watch, detained immigrants are routinely subject to unconscionable abuses, including fatal medical neglect, racism and sexual assault.
But it’s not just detention where Biden has failed to live up to his word in courtrooms across the country.
Early on, Biden keeled over and dropped his deportation moratorium without a fight. The administration then repeatedly squashed or backed out of lawsuits brought on by families impacted by Trump’s horrifying family separation policy. And advocates had to fight tooth and nail for 18 months before Biden finally extended Temporary Protected Status for many.
Now consider Biden’s shameful fight to preserve Title 42, a Trump-era pet project of then-adviser Stephen Miller that has effectively closed the border and denied hundreds of thousands of Black, Brown and Indigenous migrants their right to seek asylum. As Biden has fought for continued use of Title 42, more than 10,000 documented cases of abuse have occurred under his watch as migrants languish in streets and shelters.
Instead of working to restore and expand humane avenues to asylum, Biden is pumping life into Title 42 and other Trump anti-asylum policies.
These actions are a far cry from the unrelenting, unified agenda of conservative officeholders who work in tandem with their federal counterparts to ram through their agenda.
In an era when the previous president would drag out lawsuits and respond to losses by trying over and over again — bringing dizzying policy changes like Muslim bans 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 — Biden’s unwillingness to fight in the trenches signals an unwillingness to fight for his own stated agenda and, by extension, our communities. Simply put, Biden seems to abandon us at precisely the time we need bold action.
Immigration detention and draconian policies like Title 42 are ultimately animated by xenophobia, racism and hate — the very forces President Biden vowed to fight against upon taking the White House. But under Biden, Black migrants continue to face disproportionate levels of abuse and racism both in detention and along the border. Meanwhile, the number of people in detention has doubled, and the number of migrants surveilled by digital forms of incarceration has skyrocketed.
Biden must reverse course. In the face of the courtordered ending of Title 42, he must expand, not narrow, avenues to asylum. He must then begin to phase out all immigration detention contracts, beginning with the private contracts he promised to cut.
After a year and half of double speak, enough is enough. It’s time President Biden fights for us — not against us.
Razavi