Despite Joe Biden’s promise to stop his predecessor’s immigration policy, Ijeoma “Golden” Kouadio is increasingly afraid that Biden will not save her family’s suspended American dream.
In 2019, Kouadio’s family won the diversity visa lottery, which is intended to increase the diversity of immigrants to the US. But just before their visa interviews, Donald Trump introduced an immigration ban that runs until March 31. If the president does not act, Kouadio’s family will lose their visas.
“I do not even know how to feel,” Kouadio told her Guardian home in Ivory Coast. “I stopped working because I thought I was moving in January.”
Biden has taken a series of actions to reverse or review Trump’s anti-immigrant policies, but activists say Biden needs to do more to prove his commitment to meaningful change.
Anxiety builds on certain policies, such as Proclamations 10014 and 10052, the ban on immigrant and non-immigrant visa holders keeping Kouadio and her family out of the US.
Attorney Jesse Bless, who is involved in litigation against the ban, estimated that it would take about ten minutes before Biden revoked it. “If President Biden lets this visa ban go until it expires on March 31, he will have ended the opportunity for diversity visa holders forever,” Bless said.
Bless, director of federal litigation at the American Immigration Lawyers Association (Aila), is also involved in the lawsuit over the Trump-era health insurance proclamation, which requires immigrants to prove they will have health insurance within 30 days of entering the U.S. , or that they have financial resources to pay for any foreseeable costs.
This is similar to the rule for public indictments, which wanted to punish immigrants who use public benefits, and what Biden’s team said they were against.
Bless said that although the Biden White House has repealed the travel ban, which has blocked people from mostly Muslim countries, by putting these proclamations in place, people do not see the benefits of the withdrawn travel ban.
“The executive actions that have been signed so far are just the beginning,” a White House spokesman said. “President Biden has been very clear about restoring compassion and order in our immigration system and redressing the divisive, inhuman and immoral policies of the past four years, which are our focus in the coming weeks and months.”
A complication for Biden has led to the agencies responding to immigration policy, particularly immigration and customs enforcement (ICE), having to comply with it.
A court has blocked Biden’s 100-day deportation moratorium and Ice has attempted to resume deportation flights, defying guidelines set by the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Ice also sought to violate the guidelines by deporting asylum-seeking families detained in Texas, but this was halted after a coalition of 110 advocacy groups, including Amnesty International USA, stepped in.
Amnesty International’s refugee and migrant rights researcher Denise Bell said the confirmation of Alejandro Mayorkas last week as DHS secretary would hopefully improve compliance with the guidelines known as the Pekoske memo and the agency’s culture. will change.
“Immigration enforcement agencies are more encouraged to detain and deport people, and that is in line with rhetoric and an agenda that is very much based on anti-immigrants, anti-asylum, anti-refugee people dehumanizing people,” Bell said.
Although Bell said much more change was needed, including a drastic reduction in immigration detention, she was encouraged by what has happened so far, including the refugee protection order issued last week.
“Those are there because of lawyers, because the public is saying we have to do differently, we have to do better, we have to turn back what has happened over the last four years,” Bell said.
An early test for Biden is his response to the expected increase in unaccompanied children at the border. Lawyers oversee the opening of two facilities to prepare for the expected increase.
Lawyers are also waiting for the government to take a stand in a lawsuit in which the government is accused of denying the children, some as young as four, who cross the border themselves, the right process.
These children came to the border with their families, but were repulsed by Trump’s policy Remain in Mexico, which forces asylum seekers to wait in northern Mexico before processing their case instead of waiting in the US, as the policy in the past.
“Many of these children have passed on their own, sometimes their parents send them off because they are afraid they will not be able to protect their children on the Mexico side of the border,” said Esther Sung, a lawyer in the case. said. “I’ve heard older children choose to leave themselves.”
Unaccompanied children are supposed to be excluded from the program, officially known as Migration Protection Protocols (MPPs), but it is enforced against them, said Sung, a senior lawyer at the Justice Action Center. “What we have with these MPP children is still family separation,” she said.
They hope the Biden government will resolve the matter or get it right, but while they wait, the influence of the Trump administration hangs over the children.
Maleny Delgado, who grew up in the US without documentation, said she was pleased that Biden had put immigration reform first, but that she would not be satisfied until there was a path to citizenship and the deportations stopped.
Delgado, a member of the immigrant group, Casa, not only knows the tension that has not been documented, but is also afraid to see her mother deported in early 2015.
Ice agents came to her home in Pennsylvania one night and tried to take everyone inside, including Delgado, then a citizen, and her sleeping six-year-old daughter. Her nine-year-old son is still struggling with separation anxiety disorder and is always on the side of Delgado, afraid she will disappear like his grandmother.
With a new president in office, Delgado is determined to fight to make sure no other family has to go through what she did. Delgado said: “This is not something I will be able to erase or erase the government, but I want my story not to happen to anyone else.”