By Brittany Bernstein
Saturday, January 02, 2021
Immigration hawks and analysts are warning that illegal
immigration at the southern border is likely to surge after President-elect Joe
Biden takes office, as a confluence of factors, both economic and
environmental, has pushed migrants to attempt to enter the U.S.
Already Biden’s team has begun to walk back some of his
campaign promises to undo a number of President Trump’s immigration policies on
“day one,” showing concern over an anticipated influx of migrants as natural
disasters and the coronavirus have wreaked havoc on a number of Central
American countries.
Ken Cuccinelli, deputy secretary of the Department of
Homeland Security, predicts just by virtue of immigrants seeing Biden as more
welcoming to migrants than Trump that the new administration is “likely to have
their first humanitarian crisis” caused by the Democrat “effectively telling
people he’s going to have an open borders policy.”
As the Trump administration winds down, DHS officials are
working to safeguard a number of the president’s regulatory changes and to
continue making progress on the southern border wall, Cuccinelli says.
“We continue to build wall at a furious pace,” he said in
a recent interview with National Review. “We’re at about 415 miles and
counting. The contracts are in place to go beyond January 20 so that will
continue until it is somehow legally stopped.”
He expects the Biden administration to face some
difficulty in attempting to undo Trump’s executive orders.
“They can’t just automatically be done as we’ve seen when
this president has tried to do that,” he said. “He was sued and stopped
frequently. So, they now have to live with all that case law all those
left-leaning activist judges put in place.”
Judges have kept Trump from discontinuing DACA, carrying
out a new rule on welfare use by prospective legal immigrants and not renewing the
Temporary Protected Status work-permit program for certain illegal immigrants.
“I think you can fully expect to see a lot of litigation,
if a Biden administration attempts to undo substantial parts of the Trump
agenda, and I think you’ll see us succeed in court, again, largely because of
the precedents put in place during the Trump administration. The tables will be
turned in the courts,” Cuccinelli said.
He added that the president has achieved “the greatest
level of cooperation from the biggest illegal immigration countries: Mexico,
Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador.”
Jake Sullivan, Biden’s pick for national security
adviser, told Spanish
wire service EFE that the Democrat “will work to promptly undo” Trump’s
deals with Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador that allow U.S. authorities to
transfer asylum seekers to those countries.
Should that relationship go away, the government would
face a “sudden inability of the system” to house migrants.
“People don’t realize that more than 2,000 people a day
are coming across our border illegally,” Cuccinelli said. “The reason nobody
really notices it is because we can repatriate 85 or 90 percent of them very
quickly right now under Title 42.”
Title 42 is the public health order that allows U.S.
agents to forgo normal asylum procedures and quickly return most migrants to
Mexico, a policy designed to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus inside
border stations and detention centers.
The order has kept facilities from being overcrowded, but
after a judge ruled recently that the Trump administration cannot apply the CDC
order to unaccompanied child migrants, a backlog has begun to form, Cuccinelli
said.
“When you combine that possibility, with what is likely
after the holidays to be a flood of what amounts to Joe Biden illegal
immigrants, that’s going to cause very serious problems for the whole system,”
he said.
Border crossings had been on the decline through most of
2020, but recently detentions of unauthorized migrants along the Arizona-Mexico
border has begun to tick up. Detentions in October were up 30 percent over
September.
Sarah Pierce, a U.S. immigration program policy analyst
at the Migration Policy Institute, told National Review that while she
and most other experts are predicting an uptick of immigration at the southern
border, the current upward climb is more indicative of repeat tries than
increased migration.
“Before the CDC order was in place, for example, if you
had migrants arriving at the southern border from El Salvador, and they came in
and didn’t qualify for asylum, they would be placed under expedited removal,
which means they be quickly deported back to El Salvador,” she said.
Title 42, which has allowed the U.S. to expel roughly
300,000 migrants since it was put in place in March, has also increased
recidivism.
“So part of that optic that’s happening at the southern
border is a little bit artificial, because it’s just individuals who have been
pushed back to Mexico under the CDC order, and they’re trying to get across the
southern border and get detained again,” Pierce said.
But she added that if she were part of the new
administration, her first immigration priority would be to prepare for a surge
at the southern border.
“For many years now, we’ve seen increasing numbers of
humanitarian arrivals at the southern border, especially families and children
and we’ve seen time and time again, how our resources and procedures at the
southern border are ill-equipped to handle these populations,” she said.
She added that there is a “more alarming” uptick of
unaccompanied child migrants due to the Title 42 court order.
“We already saw an uptick in children arriving before
that, now that they can’t be expelled and instead have to be treated under the
TVPRA, which allows them into the country to apply for asylum to apply for
different benefits, it’s very likely that we’re going to continue to see them
arriving at the southern border.”
Lora Ries, a senior research fellow for homeland security
at the Heritage Foundation, echoed this prediction, telling National Review
a Biden administration could easily find itself slammed by surging immigration,
reminiscent of what the Obama administration faced in 2014 and 2016 when an
influx of migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras made their way to
the border.
At the time, Obama received criticism from both sides:
human-rights groups blasted the Democratic administration for locking up
families and children and accelerating deportations, while immigration
hard-liners disapproved of the allowance of tens of thousands of migrants to
enter and remain in the country while their asylum cases made their way through
the courts, which can be a years-long process.
Ries predicts immigration under a Biden administration
will “largely resemble that under Barack Obama.”
“In which case, numbers of every category [of
immigration] would go up,” she said. “Illegal immigration would increase.”
“Word has gotten out that Joe Biden would be much more
lax in immigration enforcement and so smugglers use that to lure their next
customers to cross the border illegally,” she said. “You also have other
factors in place, including COVID, which has wracked the economies of Central
American countries and Mexico. So many will be coming here to look for jobs.”
All of these factors have created the perfect storm and
left the country facing “another potential southwest border crisis,” she said.
The question of when Biden will end the Migrant
Protection Protocols, or “Remain in Mexico” program, will play a big role in
how quickly migration will surge. Since the policy was introduced last year it
has left some 67,000 asylum seekers to wait for their immigration hearings in
Mexico.
The program has helped reduce the number of migrants
attempting to cross the border and has encouraged thousands of migrants already
at the border to instead head back home.
As the MPP is not codified by regulation, Biden would
have the power to immediately repeal the policy.
“If he were to immediately end that it would certainly
restart the caravans, and his homeland security would be overwhelmed,” Ries
said. “He doesn’t want that. I don’t think he wants the visual and nor does he
want the operational headache of dealing with that.”
Though Biden had promised on the campaign trail to undo
the MPP on “day one” in office, top advisers to the president-elect said last
week they will not immediately roll back asylum restrictions at the Mexican
border and other Trump immigration policies as it would take time to undo the
“damage” wrought by the current administration.
Sullivan told EFE that Biden will not immediately move to
end MPP, saying that while it has been “a disaster from the start and has led
to a humanitarian crisis in northern Mexico,” that putting the new policy into
practice would take time.
“If and when he ends it, I think we would see tremendous
numbers at the border,” Ries said. “And then therefore asylum numbers quickly
jump because of it. So, I think we’ll see gradual increases up until the point
he removes MPP, and then it would jump considerably.”
Susan Rice, Biden’s incoming domestic policy adviser,
recently told EFE that the president-elect will not immediately end Title 42,
either, due to public health concerns.
“Our priority is to reopen asylum processing at the
border consistent with the capacity to do so safely and to protect public
health, especially in the context of COVID-19. This effort will begin
immediately, but it will take months to develop the capacity that we will need
to reopen fully.”
“Processing capacity at the border is not like a light
that you can just switch on and off,” she said.
Migrants and asylum seekers “absolutely should not
believe those in the region peddling the idea that the border will suddenly be
fully open to process everyone on Day 1.”
“It will not,” Rice said.
While the administration plans to “take some steps to
change policies right away,” she said, “others will take time to put in place.”
“The situation at the border will not transform overnight
due in large part to the damage done over the last four years. But we are
committed to addressing it in full.”
This follows a report from NPR that many on team Biden
believe immigration activists have become too “adversarial” with policy demands
that make the team “uncomfortable.”
Biden’s transition team denied
the report.
“This starts with restoring order, dignity and fairness
to our system and day-one actions to restore due process to give families the
opportunity to seek asylum, reinstate DACA, and introduce immigration
legislation that includes a pathway to citizenship,” the transition team said
in a statement, adding that Biden is “committed to having an open dialogue with
groups across a wide spectrum to ensure his administration is meeting the needs
of the community.”
Ries cautioned that DACA “undermines the rule of law” and
“stirs up the next group of illegal immigrants,” as does Biden’s promise to
pass a general amnesty for the full population of undocumented persons who are in
the U.S., a group that could be anywhere from 11 million people to over 20
million, she said.
“That just kind of rings the bell for future illegal
immigrants, who then know that if they just can get into the U.S. and wait,
they will eventually get a green card also,” she said.
Rice and Sullivan told EFE that Biden will make good on
his promise to immediately introduce legislation to create a path to
citizenship for those in the U.S. illegally.
Officials from Biden’s transition team said in December
the president-elect will suspend deportations from the U.S. interior while it
“sorts out” new policies for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Additionally, Biden has said he wants to increase the
annual refugee admissions ceiling to 125,000 in one year, higher than President
Obama, who raised that figure to 110,000 during the height of the Syrian
conflict.
Ries said raising the ceiling would loosen vetting
standards as government staff would struggle to hit that number operationally.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has lowered the refugee ceilings each year.
It now sits at its lowest point, at 15,000.
“A Biden administration would have to make a difficult
choice: if they are going to end MPP, the caravans will resume, the asylum
claims will jump, the backlog will balloon. He cannot also raise and meet a
refugee ceiling to 125,000,” she said. “It’s just operationally not feasible.”
“He would need to find a middle ground that’s manageable
and that doesn’t forego good security vetting and doesn’t water down the
benefit to just reach an arbitrary number that sounds good, but you’re not
really helping those truly in fear,” she said.
No comments:
Post a Comment