Immigration Under the Biden Administration.
Biden isn’t doing enough to “fully break from the harmful deportation policies of both the Trump and Obama presidencies.”
Even though President Biden signed an executive order to halt deportations for the first 100 days of his administration more than 100,000 people have been deported in the first 60 days of Biden’s Presidency, and record-high numbers of children continue to remain locked up in cages at the border.
The Associated Press reported that following the Biden executive order to halt deportations, Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge, Drew Tipton “argued the moratorium violated federal law” and “indefinitely banned” the Biden administration from enforcing its deportation moratorium. The Biden administration never fought to appeal Tipton’s ruling. Regardless, The Associated Press also reported that “The Biden administration has also continued expelling immigrants under a separate process begun by Trump officials, who invoked public health law due to the coronavirus pandemic.”
According to a report by the group United We Dream, 127,457 confirmed deportations have occurred so far under President Biden.
The group says that regardless of Judge Tipton’s ruling, Biden has the authority to stop all deportations because:
“Although DHS and ICE create policies on enforcement prioritization, it retains prosecutorial discretion, and because of this authority, it can choose whether or not to deport people on a case-by-case basis. So even though President Biden’s moratorium on deportations has been halted by a Texas court, his agency, ICE, can still decide not to deport people.”
The Washington Post also recently reported that “the first migrant child facility [has] opened under the Biden administration,”. The facility in Colorado Springs, Texas was used by the Trump administration to incarcerate immigrant kids in cages and it’s now “being reactivated to hold up to 700 children,” under President Biden. Earlier this month CNN said that the number of children being held in Border Patrol custody has reached “dramatic highs” and the facilities these children are being held in “are akin to jail cells and not intended for kids,”. They also said there were only about 500 beds for more than 3,200 children.
Outside of his executive order that was subsequently shot down by a U.S. District Judge, the Biden administration has done little to change harmful immigration policies that were implemented under previous administrations. In response to Biden issuing new rules for ICE to limit arrests and deportations, the senior advocacy and policy counsel for the ACLU said that Biden isn’t doing enough to “fully break from the harmful deportation policies of both the Trump and Obama presidencies.”
For example, reports have surfaced that immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been subjecting asylum seekers to COVID-19, and undocumented immigrants are being left out of qualifying for COVID-19 assistance.
According to a report by The Intercept, guards at two different ICE detention centers have threatened to expose immigrants seeking asylum to COVID-19 if they didn’t accept deportation. One of the asylum seekers coming forward with these allegations, Clovis Fozao, told The Intercept that if asylum seekers didn’t submit, guards told them that “they were going to put all of us into Bravo-Alpha, which is for quarantine, where they keep everyone with coronavirus.”
At the beginning of February, the Senate voted to pass an amendment to a bill that prevents undocumented immigrants from receiving survival checks. Every Republican supported the amendment, along with eight Democrats. The Democratic senators who voted for the amendment include John Hickenlooper, Joe Manchin, Jon Tester, Maggie Hassan, Mark Kelly, and Krysten Sinema. After the amendment passed Senator Dick Durbin said, “Neither Biden nor any Democrat is proposing in this package to give any money to any undocumented person,”. Everyone who supported this amendment thinks that undocumented immigrants deserve to go without relief, even though many of them are essential workers who’ve suffered the most abuse throughout this pandemic.
Undocumented immigrants bring in more than $11 billion into the economy annually, including nearly $7 billion from sales and excise taxes and $3.6 billion from property taxes. That’s more than 91 billion dollar corporations who consistently evade taxes contribute, but those corporations got bailed out to the tune of more than $4 trillion while undocumented immigrants have received nothing.
Even though Democrats use lofty rhetoric when it comes to immigration the stimulus being proposed by the Democratic Party prevents undocumented immigrants from qualifying to receive survival checks, ICE is continuing to abuse people and hold record-high numbers of kids in cages, and tens of thousands of deportations have been allowed to proceed.
Matt Dougherty is an independent journalist and managing editor at The Bull-Moose Note. You can subscribe here to get our articles delivered directly to your inbox. If you’d like to support our work, which is always made available for free, you can give a one-time donation through Venmo or become a monthly supporter for $3, $6, or $12 per month through Patreon.