The 2020 presidential election will face two radically different views of immigration opposed to one, and the winner will retain or assume broad executive authority that has governed factor policy-making for decades in the absence of congressional action.
President Trump’s re-election would allow his administration to continue to take strong action against unauthorized immigrants by restricting legal immigration and reducing humanitarian protections for foreigners. so it has been blocked through federal courts.
If he wins, Joe Biden will inherit an immigration formula through many adjustments made through the Trump administration, adding a number of restrictive asylum policies, radical green card rules, broader deportation priorities, a decimated refugee program, and pandemic-era border restrictions.
Current and former Officials from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and others close to Biden’s crusade said the Trump administration’s immigration policy unraveling procedure can be a hard and lengthy effort.
“There has been such a demolition of our classic immigration formula under this administration that the biggest challenge will be to make a decision on where to begin reconstruction first,” said Leon Rodriguez, who led the president of the U. S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS). The time of Obama. CBS News’s term.
Biden’s senior adviser, Cristobal Alex, said the former vice president would take “immediate steps to undo Trump’s horrible immigration policies,” admitting that some “will take longer than others. “
Overriding Trump’s presidential executive orders, such as his travel ban to an organization of primarily African and Asian countries, will be less difficult than cutting off “public-dependent” wealth control on green cards and visas instituted through federal regulations. officials said. Other adjustments will require the appointment of an attorney general who decides to overturn precedent-setting decisions, such as the one made through Jeff Sessions in 2018 to limit asylum to victims of gangs and domestic violence.
“The stated policies are simple to reverse, from a practical point of view,” Rodriguez said. “Regulations provide a slightly more confusing case. Most regulations that would be scary for Biden’s administration are subject to demanding legal situations. Therefore, the prestige of these demanding legal situations will play a vital role in the strategy chosen by Biden’s management. “
Ken Cuccinelli, second in charge of DHS, expects the Trump administration’s immigration legacy to continue, even if the president loses his re-election. He added that regulatory progress is “very slow. “
“It’s not like someone showed up the first day and could stop Regulation A, B or C from being done,” Cuccinelli told CBS News. “Anyone who undoes all this will have a lot to do. “
Biden will be under pressure from progressives to temporarily oppose Trump, while separating himself from some of the Obama administration’s practices that are not popular with the immigrant rights community. enough, progressive activists warn.
“Biden wants to correct the error, move forward to lower the application point, and create other opportunities for others to gain status,” said Javier Valdés, co-CEO of Make the Road New York and a member of an executive organization of Biden and Bernie Sanders Supporters, who created a unified immigration platform. “When I say cancel the damage of the U. S. government to immigrant communities, I’m not just saying what happened under Trump. Yes, with steroids, but it’s an old problem.
In 2014, when Univision presenter Jorge Ramos pressured him on the largest number of deportations in his presidency and accused him of “destroying many families,” Obama was visibly frustrated.
Obama has vigorously defended his immigration record, mentioning his creation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) initiative for “Dreamers,” as well as his attempt to create some other deportation coverage program for undocumented parents of U. S. citizens and green card holders. He also blamed the Republican opposition in Congress for his inability to pass comprehensive immigration reform. However, the 3 million U. S. deportations of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE) executed in his presidency provoked the wrath of activists, who dubbed Obama ‘the deporting leader’.
More than 749,000 evictions were carried out in fiscal years with statistics under Trump. In the midst of Obama’s presidency, ICE deported more than 400,000 immigrants in an un married year, a record.
“I’m saying Trump is abusing the ICE deportation device Obama built,” Amy Maldonado, a Michigan-based immigration attorney, told CBS News. “And with maximum measures, Trump has been much worse than Obama, with the exception of his deportations. Obama, without a doubt, still holds the record for deporting leader. Even if Trump had two terms, I don’t think he’ll fit Obama because he’s not that competent. “
The Obama administration has issued several memos calling on ICE agents to use their discretion to exempt certain people, such as longtime permanent citizens and pregnant women, from law enforcement and deport immigrants with convictions of safe criminals, recent border crossings, and those who are reinstated. . US after being eliminated. In his first week in office, Trump has reversed those Obama-era policies, expanding deportation priorities and pointing out that no undocumented immigrant would be excused from U. S. deportation.
On the path of the crusade, Biden admitted that the Obama administration “took too long” to reorganize its repression priorities, and called the number of deportations a “big mistake. “He promised to institute a 100-day freeze for deportations. After that, Biden would have him oversee a “pretty significant adjustment” to the deportation policy and order ICE on threats to national security and those convicted of felonies, according to Alex, his senior adviser.
Under Trump’s leadership, ICE has improved its ability to stop immigrants, expanding the world’s largest civilian detention formula for immigrants through contracts with for-profit criminal firms and county jails. immigration criminals.
Biden promised to avoid the detention of asylum seekers for the duration of his case, and Alex said he would also end the detention of for-profit immigrants. “No company deserves the suffering of other desperate people fleeing violence,” Alex said, adding that Biden’s leadership would expand the systems that would serve as opportunities for detention, such as case control initiatives.
If elected, Biden will also face calls from the immigrant network to end the detention of the circle of migrant relatives, a practice that expanded enormously through Obama’s management in 2014, when he faced an increase in unauthorized border crossings of central American youth and families.
Through various asylum rules, the Trump administration has given border officials the strength to temporarily return migrants from U. S. soil, ending a formula that the president and his aides have called “capture and release. “
More than 60,000 asylum seekers have been returned to Mexico and forced to wait for their hearings in the United States, while thousands of others have been excluded from asylum under a new rule because they have crossed a third country to succeed on U. S. soil. it has also negotiated agreements with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras that allow the United States to divert asylum seekers to the southern border to those countries.
While most of these systems were suspended by the coronavirus pandemic, the Trump administration used a public aptitude board issued in March to deport tens of thousands of people crossing the border, adding 8,800 unaccompanied children, without allowing them to apply for asylum.
Biden has promised to cancel Trump’s asylum programs, adding the policy called “Staying in Mexico,” but has still said whether it will continue, replace, or eliminate existing border restrictions in the pandemic era. His crusade responded to requests to set out his position on these policies.
Lora Ries, a former DHS official who supports the president’s schedule and helped put it into effect between 2017 and 2019, said Trump’s dismantling would further fuel the border crossing. “If you eliminate the consequences, more illegal activities will be generated. immigration,” Ries, now principal investigator of the Conservative Heritage Foundation, told CBS News.
When asked how Biden management would cope with an increase in the number of border crossings, Alex said he would deploy more immigration judges and asylum and support staff for non-profit teams assisting migrants.
Texas Democratic Rep. Veronica Escobar, a member of the Biden-Sanders working group, said she hopes Biden will “aggressively lean” over Sanders’ asylum policies. Trump supports allowing asylum seekers to wait for their hearings in the United States than Mexico, as well as repealing the pandemic-era deportation policy.
However, Escobar said the key will be for Central America to curb the main drivers of migration to the United States, adding political instability, gangs and widespread violence, poverty and displacement caused by climate change. Alex said Biden would devote $1 billion a year to foreign aid for Trump suspended him last year before partially restoring it after Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador accepted the “safe third country” asylum agreements.
“This will be just an increasingly serious challenge,” Escobar told CBS News, referring to the migration to the southern border of the United States. “And look, those are families who don’t need to leave their home country. They are Americans who run for their lives, escaping persecution or hunger as a result of the climate crisis. “
In a recent interview, Cuccinelli defended immigration restrictions instituted through the Trump administration, saying they were mandatory to reduce fraud and abuse. He said the administration only enforced the legislation passed by Congress, which Cuccinelli called an “almost new” concept.
“For the first time in the immigration space, we have a preview that did what he said he was going to do. And he’s so new to this space, especially in the Republican aspect of the hallway,” Cuccinelli later said, adding: “He just tracked everything he said he was going to do, whether it’s the wall or a competitive measure as a component of the law to involve illegal immigration. “
More than three hundred miles of barriers were built along the U. S. -Mexico border, Trump; Maximum update of ruinous and low barricades, according to figures from the U. S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
Theodore Wold, one of the White House’s most sensitive immigration policy officials, echoed Cuccinelli’s comments and said Trump could be re-elected and enduring even if Biden wins.
“The overwhelming majority of other Americans are committed to strengthening the U. S. country for other Americans,” Wold, an adjunct assistant to the president for house politics, told CBS News. “The left’s war cry ‘no borders, no walls’ is just a shortcut to more drug-related violence, more human trafficking, more intergenerational poverty, and, in the end, organizing fewer jobs and fewer opportunities for American workers.
Trump Crusade spokeswoman Samantha Zager said the president would win in November because he “effectively fulfilled” his immigration promises.
Despite the many restrictions enacted during his presidency, Cuccinelli said Trump deserves to be recognized as an immigration advocate. “As hard as this president is with illegal immigration, and as sensitive as he is to protective American workers, he also fully supports the fact that our legal immigration formula is pulling at all levels,” Cuccinelli said.
Many of the Trump administration’s policies have limited the bureaucracy of legal immigration, making it difficult for immigrants to obtain residency, asylum and refugee status cards. Public royalty rules, on the one hand, give immigration officials and consulates more strength to deny permanent visas and applicants. that the government determines, or may depend on, on public benefits, such as food stamps, housing vouchers, and Medicaid bureaucracy.
The refugee ceiling, which Obama set at 110,000 before leaving office, has been particularly reduced through Obama. Trump, who set the current limit of 18,000 people. With about 11,000 admissions, the United States is on track to receive the least number of refugees in fashion history in the fiscal year, which ends on Wednesday.
Citing the economic effect of the coronavirus pandemic, Trump also issued proclamations restricting immigrant visas and guest employee programs.
Biden said he would end public workplace regulations and set a limit of 125,000 posts for refugees in his first year in the workplace, a promise that experts say is an ambitious goal. “This is not possible,” a former senior DHS official who called for anonymity. to speak freely told CBS News. ” The voluntary agencies that manage the resettlement once someone was given here, their infrastructure devastated. They don’t have other people to manage that kind of population.
Cuccinelli stated that the definition of his administration of “public office” consistent with congressional intent when he codified the popular in 1882, the same year he instituted an absolute ban on Chinese immigrants. Discounts on the refugee ceiling, Cuccinelli added, do not reflect the overall picture of the administration’s humanitarian immigration work.
“If you climb the refugees and asylum seekers who come to our country, we are through the highest beneficiary country in the world year after year – adding up to the recent maximum number of refugees,” he said.
Biden pledged to work with Congress on the law that puts DACA beneficiaries and the rest of the country’s 11 million unauthorized immigrants on the road to U. S. citizenship.
But he would like to get enough in a Congress that has failed to commit to comprehensive immigration spending for more than a decade and can continue to be divided in January 2021. immigration policy, adding systems to protect “dreamers” and other immigrants from deportation, experts said.
Former DHS officials warned that the immigration movements of a Biden administration would likely face demanding legal situations and could also be hampered by federal courts, which have blocked many of Trump’s policies. that he thought unfavourable judicial decisions tended to move to a “one-way sequence. “
“There are no serious conservative militant judges, like the left-wing judges we see at war with this president,” Cuccinelli said.
But with the help of the Republican-led Senate, Trump installed more than two hundred conservative federal judges, cementing a center-right shift in america’s justice formula and reshaping the balance of forces in key courts, such as the one that was once – reliable ninth largest liberal. Circuit Court of Appeals. With the recent death of Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Trump also has the opportunity to appoint his third Supreme Court judge and the superior court in a solidly conservative establishment for a generation.
Over the following year, Trump’s court appointments supported him in decisions that allowed management to implement, among other measures, public order, extensive asylum restrictions for those crossing the border and end deportation protections for some 400,000 immigrants. I’ve been living in the United States for years.
Ries, the former DHS officer, said a period of time under Trump could allow management to prioritize work-based immigration over immigration from the family circle and end the birthright, an effort aimed at youth of undocumented immigrants born in the United States that some legal mavens violate Constitution.
“Ending citizenship by birthright is more of an executive action. That’s an interpretation of the 14th Amendment, so far it’s been misunderstood,” Ries said. “For a more merit-based immigration system, Congress would want to be.
Four more years would also give the Trump administration a moment-by-moment opportunity to end the DACA program, as well as more time to put into effect the proposed regulations to further restrict those eligible for asylum in the US. An agreement to detain migrant families indefinitely and restrictions. on visas of transitional paintings.
Valdés, co-executive director of Make the Road New York, said he feared Trump would present himself as a justification for his administration’s uncompromising immigration program.
“Trump has declared an open war against our communities, and he will be encouraged to move on, to attack our communities,” Valdés said. “It’s a wonderful fear for all of us, that he can feel that, in many ways. , the policies he advocates have the general public. “
Nicole Sganga and Fin Gomez contributed to this report.