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Guest Essay
President Biden, the Clock Is Ticking to Rescind a Trump Immigration Policy
Mr. Ramos is a contributing opinion writer and an anchor for the Univision network. He has covered immigration issues for three decades.
MIAMI — In the eyes of Betty Mejía, President Biden and former President Donald Trump are one and the same: Both have deported her. In the last year Ms. Mejía, who is from Honduras, tried six times to cross into the United States illegally with her son and daughter, only to be detained and deported back to Mexico each time. For her, and many other immigrants like her, nothing at the border has changed between administrations.
“In June [2020] I tried to cross three times because I was told that people were getting across. Then I got there, and nothing,” a tearful Ms. Mejía told a Univision reporter in Roma, Texas, shortly after her last attempt to cross the border a sixth time on May 25.
In a video, Ms. Mejía’s young daughter’s feet are muddy, her shoes lost during the dangerous trip across the Rio Grande in a small inflatable raft.
One of the Trump administration’s most unfair and arbitrary deportation policies, known as Title 42, is still being applied today along the southern border, although the Biden administration has begun to admit children into the country. Invoked as a health measure to prevent the coronavirus from spreading in holding facilities, the order allows border agents to turn away migrants without allowing them a chance to apply for asylum. According to reporting in The New York Times, almost 550,000 people have been expelled by the Department of Homeland Security during this fiscal year. It’s time for Mr. Biden to put an end to this cruel legacy.
Sixty-three percent of the adult population of the United States has now received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine. President Biden’s stated goal is to have 70 percent of the adult population vaccinated by July 4. This means that the health emergency that might have justified Mr. Trump’s hard-line deportation policies is over.
Enforcement of Title 42 rules should therefore end immediately, and border crossings between the United States and Mexico should return to normal status with normal rules for asylum applications. It would also help if the United States were to donate millions of vaccines to Mexican border communities.
In addition to Title 42, Mr. Trump’s immigration policies were defined by their cruelty; now Mr. Biden has a moral obligation to at least listen to what immigrants like Betty Mejía have to say when they arrive at the border. Mr. Biden’s $4 billion investment plan for Central America, designed to combat northbound migration at its roots, will require several years before it yields results. In the meantime, we urgently need a humane system to deal with Central Americans who are fleeing conditions of extreme poverty, violence and gang intimidation. This is the responsibility of the United States, both as a superpower and as the undisputed economic leader in the Americas.
And, just as urgent, we must legalize the residential status of millions of undocumented migrants, some of whom have been living in the United States for decades. This is a promise that has gone unfulfilled since amnesty was granted during the Reagan administration in 1986, when the Immigration Reform and Control Act legalized the status of most immigrants who had arrived in the United States before 1982. But the excuse for doing nothing since then is always the same: Republicans say they are unwilling to consider any legalization proposal until the southern border is secure. Yet it is almost impossible to entirely secure a shared border that is more than 1,900 miles long and where the U.S. Border Patrol detained more than 178,000 people attempting illegal entry in April alone. Naturally and historically, the border is porous.
Asked recently why no real progress had been made in bipartisan talks on immigration, Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Senate Democrat, replied simply: “The southern border.” And that is not changing any time soon. Republicans are very likely to reframe the debate over the border — and the plight of thousands of refugees and unaccompanied children crossing it — in their bid to retake control of Congress in the 2022 midterm elections. This means that President Biden and the Democrats are left with but one option on immigration reform: Do it now, without bipartisan support. Or it will never happen.
I’m certain that Mr. Biden wants to solve this problem, and I’m sure that if Congress were to send him an immigration bill legalizing the presence of more than 10 million undocumented residents, he would sign it immediately. But time isn’t on his side. And waiting can be risky.
Years ago, immigration talks between President George W. Bush and Vicente Fox, then the president of Mexico, went on for too long, and after the attacks of Sept. 11, any hope of reaching an agreement was shattered. President Barack Obama failed to introduce his immigration reform proposal in 2009, when his party controlled both chambers of Congress and the country was facing a severe financial crisis; later, he didn’t have enough votes to pass it. President Biden shouldn’t take these kinds of risks. He should hurry.
To demonstrate that the issue is important to him, Mr. Biden recently met with a group of “Dreamers” at the White House. The meeting was extraordinary in and of itself. These young people were brought into the United States by their parents illegally, and are exempted from deportation through the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals program. A meeting like this during the Trump era would have been unthinkable.
María Praeli, 28, is one of the Dreamers who met with Mr. Biden. She was 5 years old when she was brought to the United States from Peru. The United States “is my home,” she told me. “Feeling so American, having so many memories in this country, and yet not knowing if I will be able to make a future for myself here is really hard. I just hope this is the year something happens.”
One of Mr. Biden’s first acts upon taking office was sending a comprehensive immigration proposal to Congress. And according to a Quinnipiac University poll published in February, most Americans support a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented. But this proposal and similar bills remain stuck on Capitol Hill.
Democrats still lack the votes to overturn the current Senate rules, which effectively require proponents of most bill to muster 60-vote supermajorities to advance them. The only way out is to end the minority party’s power to stall legislation — the filibuster — and pass very concrete laws for the benefit of Dreamers and migrant farm workers through a procedural budget shortcut called reconciliation. Both issues are politically aggressive and would face huge Republican opposition. But it’s about time we made radical decisions to protect the lives of millions of immigrants like María.
President Biden, the clock is ticking. Please don’t wait much longer. We can’t afford to repeat the mistakes of the past.
Jorge Ramos (@jorgeramosnews) is an anchor for the Univision network, a contributing opinion writer and the author of, most recently, “Stranger: The Challenge of a Latino Immigrant in the Trump Era.”
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