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BIDEN’S PLAN ON IMMIGRATION. President-elect Joe Biden gave his first post-election interview on Tuesday. Discussing his plans with NBC News, he ran through a strategy to handle coronavirus that sounded remarkably like a continuation of what the Trump administration is already doing. Plus, Biden will benefit from the introduction of vaccines — plural — created as a result of President Trump’s Operation Warp Speed program. The Biden plan might be called — not by Democrats, of course — Continue What Trump Started.
But the virus aside, what are Biden’s top priorities for his presidency? “Tell me about day one in the White House,” NBC’s Lester Holt said. “And day one through 100, your first 100 days. What are your priorities going to be in those first days?”
What would Biden mention first? The order in which he listed his priorities would be revealing. And the first thing he said was: Immigration. “Some of it’s going to depend on the kind of cooperation I can or cannot get from the United States Congress,” Biden said. “But I am going to make a commitment in the first 100 days, I will send an immigration bill to the United States Senate with a pathway to citizenship for over 11 million undocumented people in America.”
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Trump has made tremendous progress ending some of the incentives for people to cross illegally into the United States. He ended the so-called “catch and release” policy by which a person who entered the U.S. illegally was given a court date and then allowed to enter the country with only a promise to appear in court. Trump replaced that with a policy in which would-be migrants were required to wait in Mexico while their cases were considered. Trump also made huge steps forward in pressuring Mexico and Central American countries to stop illegal immigrants before they reached the U.S. border. Biden is likely to put an end to that and instead emphasize foreign aid with the hope of improving conditions in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and other countries that send the most illegal crossers to the United States. It appears to be a blueprint for more illegal crossings.
Biden will also likely institute a 100-day freeze on deportations. There is no good policy reason to do so, but it was a popular pledge on the Democratic campaign trail, and Biden committed to it back in March. Also, the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force, the effort to reconcile Biden’s programs with rival Bernie Sanders’ at the end of the Democratic campaign, committed to a 100-day deportation moratorium.
Trump failed in his effort to end DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, begun by President Obama. Even though Obama instituted the program using only his executive authority, courts stopped Trump from using his executive authority to end it, arguing that the Trump administration had not done all the paperwork, had not dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s, to get it done. That was clearly an act of judicial activism, but it has kept DACA alive for the next Democratic administration to revive. The Biden team has said it will reinstate the full DACA “on day one” of the new administration.
Then there is the wall. Trump was elected in 2016 partly on a promise to build a wall on roughly 1,000 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border. He got a very slow start, but finally got going despite the opposition of a Democratic House of Representatives. Right now, Customs and Border Protection says that 402 miles of the wall have been completed. That number is expected to rise to 450 miles by the end of next month, with around 200 more miles under construction. Much of that involves the replacement of dilapidated and inadequate old barriers, but some also involves putting new wall where none has been before. It is not all that Trump promised, but it is a significant accomplishment.
What happens now? During the Democratic primaries, some candidates vowed to tear down the wall. But Biden has said he will not do that. Instead, he plans to stop the project cold. “There will not be another foot of wall construction in my administration,” he told the Dallas Morning News last August. Biden plans to say what opponents of a physical barrier have always said — that he wants to emphasize high-tech surveillance measures — a “virtual wall” — to stop illegal crossings. It won’t work, but it is sure to get support in Congress.
Biden pledges to do all that, and more, to dismantle Trump’s immigration program. Republicans believe, with good reason, that Biden’s arrival in the White House will likely lead to a “surge” of people trying to cross illegally into the United States. The countdown is on.
