The Washington Post reported immediately after Joe Biden was projected to have defeated impeached president Donald Trump that among the president-elect’s Day One priorities will be actions fully reinstating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, as well as repealing the discriminatory “Muslim ban.” CBS News now reports the incoming administration’s overall plans to begin reversing the outgoing administration’s anti-immigrant and anti-asylum policies are also taking shape.
Among the Biden administration’s early actions will also reportedly be starting the process of repealing the “public charge” rule, yet another discriminatory policy that punished working families and racked up numerous losses in federal court. In another monumental victory for immigrant families and their advocates, CBS News reports the new administration will look to put in place a 100-day hold on deportations as it reexamines Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) priorities.
“Mr. Biden will look to implement a 100-day freeze on deportations while his administration issues guidance narrowing who can be arrested by immigration agents,” the report said. “Obama-era memos that prioritized the deportation of immigrants with criminal convictions, recent border-crossers and those who entered the country illegally more than once were scrapped in 2017 by Mr. Trump so that no unauthorized immigrant would be exempted from being arrested and removed from the country.”
Among the first immigrants targeted by the new Trump administration as it threw out Obama-era priorities was Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos, an Arizona mom who had been swept up a workplace raid by disgraced former sheriff and noted racist Joe Arpaio. For years she’d been considered low priority for deportation, and checked in regularly with ICE—until 2017. In a last-ditch effort to stop her deportation that February, the supporters formed a ring around the van removing her from an ICE facility as her children, both U.S. citizens, cried. She was deported anyway.
Her deportation to Mexico was “the first public sign in Arizona of President Donald Trump's executive order expanding his priorities for deportation,” KPNX reported at the time. If we can hold the new Biden administration to account on this 100-day freeze as it reexamines current policies, it could be monumental in preventing further suffering and tragedies.
The need for legislation securing permanent relief for undocumented communities has also been repeatedly stressed by the Biden campaign (which also shines an even brighter light on the importance of the two U.S. Senate seat races in Georgia). But in the meantime, as it reimplements the DACA program and opens it up to potentially thousands of new applicants, the new Biden administration may also use its authority to enact other forms of temporary relief to protect immigrant communities, CBS News continued.
“Asked about the possibility of extending temporary protections from deportation to certain undocumented immigrants in the absence of congressional action, a source familiar with Mr. Biden's planning said the president-elect would consider all ‘legally available’ options,” the report continued. That must include protections for the undocumented workers deemed “essential” during the pandemic but who’ve continued to remain vulnerable to deportation (not to mention despicably excluded from federal relief), National Immigration Law Center Executive Director Marielena Hincapié told CBS News.
"We can't at the same keep applauding all these essential workers who we are relying on and not recognize them legally," she said. “And so, providing them with some kind of protection and work authorization so that they can do the work without the fear of detention or deportation, and to actually be able to work within the law, is also really critical."
But like Daily Kos and others have noted before, rolling backing some the hundreds—hundreds—of immigration policies the outgoing administration put into place with the assistance of White House aide and noted white supremacist Stephen Miller will be no easy task, and as sloppily as it implemented some of those policies, the new administration must be as careful rolling them back. You know, trying to follow the rules. What a concept.