HOUSTON (AP) – The Trump administration has been trying to deport the mother and daughter from El Salvador for almost 17 months. The administration of Biden can complete the work.
They are being held in a family detention center in remote Dilley, Texas, but have been repeatedly deported. The Friday before Christmas, both were driven to the airport in San Antonio and put on a plane, only to be picked up when attorneys working for immigrant groups filed new appeals.
“I believe first of all in God and in the new president who has taken office, that he will give us a chance,” said the mother, nicknamed ‘Barbi’. Her daughter was 8 when they crossed the U.S. border in August 2019 and will be ten in a few weeks. ‘It was not easy.’
It probably won’t get any easier anytime soon.
President Joe Biden rushed to send the most ambitious overhaul of the country’s immigration system in a generation signed to Congress and nine executive actions to erase some of the most difficult measures of its predecessor to strengthen the border between America and Mexico. But a federal court in Texas has suspended Biden’s moratorium on 100-day deportation, and the immigration bill is likely to be scaled down as lawmakers wrestle with key legislation to alleviate the coronavirus pandemic, as well as a second trial for the former president Donald Trump.
Even if Biden gets most of what he wants with immigration, the kind of drastic changes he promised will fully carry out weeks, months – maybe even years.
This means that, at least for now, there is likely to be more overlap between the Biden and Trump immigration policies than many of the activists who supported the Democrat’s successful presidential campaign. hoped.
“It is important that we implement policies that are not only transformative, inclusive and permanent, but also that they are policies that do not increase the growth of deportation,” said Genesis Renteria, program director for membership services and involvement at Living United for Change in Arizona, said. , who helped mobilize Democratic voters in the critical battle state. “Our organizations will continue to hold the administration accountable.”
Under federal law, immigrants facing credible threats of persecution or violence in their home country can apply for U.S. asylum. Biden ordered a review of Trump policies that sent people from Central America, Cuba and other countries to Mexico while their cases were being processed – which often forced them into a temporary tent camp, just steps from American soil off. He also formed a task force to reunite immigrant children separated from their parents and halt federal funding to expand the walls along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Biden’s government said on Saturday it was withdrawing from agreements with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras restricting the ability of people to seek US asylum.
But these assignments are unlikely to help Barbi and her daughter. They asked for asylum but were refused because of a Trump administration banning such protection for people who crossed another country to reach the U.S. border – in their case Guatemala and Mexico.
The measure was overturned by a federal appeals court, which has so far protected them from deportation.
Yet Barbi and her daughter, like others who have been detained in Dilley for months, could be removed from the province at any time, perhaps even in the coming days. Elsewhere in the facility run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a dozen Hondurans have been told to pack up in the past week, but have not actually been deported yet.
“It’s very traumatic,” said Barbi, who left two other children in El Salvador and asked that her real name not be made public in order not to attract the attention of criminal gangs there. “My daughter weeps and says, ‘Why won’t they let us out? ‘”
As a candidate last summer, Biden suggested He will do so, declaring, “Children should be released immediately from their ICE detention center.”
Lawyers who originally praised Biden for reforming immigration reform are now worried that not enough will be done. Omar Jadwat, director of the Immigrants ‘Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, calls it’ worrying ‘that Biden’s efforts’ do not include immediate action to dismantle the illegal and inhumane policies that this government has inherited and now possesses and to withdraw. ‘
“As Latinos and immigrants, we are tired of always having a different priority,” said Héctor Sánchez Barba, CEO and CEO of Mi Familia Vota. This led to the polls in Spanish communities before the November election. “Immigration must remain the highest priority, especially given how our community has been devastated, attacked, separated.”
Antonio Arellano, interim executive director of Jolt Action, which wants to build the power and influence of young Latinos in Texas, said political pressure was already mounting as conservative forces mobilized to retake the House and Senate for Republicans in 2022.
“There will be election consequences if we do not deliver,” Arellano said.
Biden administration officials have called for more time, saying Trump’s policies are too broad to be repealed overnight. But simply returning to pre-Trump practices – if Biden is capable of it – will not be enough for many activists.
President Barack Obama has been called the “deporteur-in-chief” for the removal of a record number of immigrants during his eight years in office. His administration also built the detention center where Barbi is being held, as well as a similar facility in Karnes City, Texas, just as rural, about 15 miles east.
Biden has banned private prisons, but his order does not apply to locks like those in Dilley and Karnes City. Biden had not previously advocated their closure, Biden flew to Guatemala as vice president during a 2014 uprising of minor minors on his way to the U.S. border and personally warned that his country would increase the detention of families – which the Obama administration did afterwards.
During the presidential campaign, Trump tried to seize the issue and let Biden know because he was part of a government that originally ‘put children in cages’.
Biden responded that the White House of Obama took ‘too long’ to get immigration policy right, citing the reform policy that was later implemented. As president, Biden has already taken steps to preserve some of them, including Obama-era legal protection for immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, while legislation promoting the president will provide a way to citizenship for the estimated 11 million people living in the country illegally.
Both the Karnes City and Dilley facilities were used to reunite families who separated the Trump administration. But after the outbreak of the coronavirus, the Karnes Center became an area for families from Haiti and distant lands who wanted to oust the Trump administration under public health emergency – more policies that the Biden government has yet to address.
The date to March last year, when Vice President Mike Pence, then head of the White House Coronavirus task force, ordered the implementation of emergency health measures. who have tried to engage immigrants effectively – or to remove them quickly from the United States – to prevent the spread of the virus. These restrictions have remained despite immigrants’ pending asylum and little evidence that border sealing is delaying the pandemic.
Some immigrants were sent to Karnes City due to the health order. But many others, especially from Central America, were expelled to Mexico. Federal authorities have now used pandemic health restrictions at the border to remove more than 183,000 immigrants since October. The number would have been even higher if a federal court had not banned the removal of children without immigrants from the US in November.
Expulsions below health limits at the border continued unabated under Biden. A White House spokesman said the goal was to return the entire U.S. asylum process “as much as possible” to Trump before Trump, but noted that “we live within the bounds of the pandemic”, which specifically “intake and processing ”of asylum seekers at the border.
Kennji Kizuka, a senior researcher and policy analyst for refugee protection at Human Rights First, said ‘with people at risk, the US has a legal obligation not to send them back to a place where they are being prosecuted or torture or other harm. . ”
“This is not something you can postpone because it is uncomfortable in your policy plan,” Kizuka said. “This is both U.S. law and our treaty obligations, so you can not succeed in doing so while thinking about how to reform the system.”
Biden’s promises to make rapid improvements have raised hopes that are now fading along the border. The day before his inauguration on January 20, immigrants staged a rally in the Mexican city of Nogales that ended with some on their way to a border crossing to Arizona asking to be processed for American asylum.
A customs and border protection official said no, but added: “Try again tomorrow.”
“We went back the next day,” said Joanna Williams, director of education and advocacy for the Kino Border Initiative, which provided humanitarian aid to immigrants and participated in the protest. “Of course they didn’t process it either.”
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Weissert reported from Washington