President Joe Biden will on Tuesday announce his latest round of actions on immigration, including the federal task force dedicated to reuniting families separated at the southern border throughout the entirety of the previous administration. That task force will be led by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) nominee Alejandro Mayorkas, who is also expected to be confirmed by the Senate, finally, that same day.
“This task force will work across the U.S. government, with key stakeholders and representatives of impacted families, and with partners across the hemisphere to find parents and children separated by the Trump administration,” the White House said in a fact sheet. “The task force will make recommendations to the president and federal agencies regarding steps that they can take to reunify families. Further, the task force will report regularly to the President and recommend steps to prevent such tragedies from occurring again.”
However, other immigration actions expected on Tuesday will not immediately reverse anti-asylum policy put in place by the previous administration, like the Migrant Protection Protocol policy, or “Remain in Mexico.”
While Biden had at one point during his campaign pledged to end the policy on day one of his presidency, the White House fact sheet says that he will instead direct DHS to review the draconian program, which since 2018 has forced tens of thousands of asylum-seekers to wait out their U.S. immigration court dates in dangerous regions of Mexico. While the Biden administration has announced that it will no longer enroll new asylum-seekers in the program, children and families continue to languish in Mexico, many of them in a squalid border camp, and at continued risk of extortion and cartel violence.
“The situation at the border will not transform overnight, due in large part to the damage done over the last four years,” the White House fact sheet said. “But the President is committed to an approach that keeps our country safe, strong, and prosperous and that also aligns with our values.”
It’s not immediately clear what’s next for other Stephen Miller-led policies, like his politically motivated order quickly expelling asylum-seekers, including children, from the U.S. under supposed COVID-19 concerns. While the Los Angeles Times reports the policy is going under review alongside Remain in Mexico, the White House fact sheet doesn’t specifically name it. “The president’s latest orders also leave intact the emergency pandemic measure known as Title 42 that allows border authorities to rapidly ‘expel’ back to Mexico,” The Washington Post reported.
Like we’ve previously written, the Associated Press had reported last fall that a top Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had initially refused to sign off on the policy, saying there was no valid public health reasoning for it. Unsatisfied, Miller bullied Mike Pence into bullying former CDC director Robert Redfield into signing it, which he did. “That was a Stephen Miller special,” the AP quotes a former Pence aide saying. “He was all over that.”
“The decision to halt asylum processes ‘to protect the public health’ is not based on evidence or science,” Dr. Anthony So, an expert with Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told Redfield in a letter last year. “This order directly endangers tens of thousands of lives and threatens to amplify dangerous anti-immigrant sentiment and xenophobia.”
That policy, along with Remain in Mexico and hundreds of other xenophobic actions implemented by the previous administration, don’t need more review. They weren’t implemented with a good-faith effort to improve our nation’s inhumane immigration system. They were implemented by a notorious white supremacist. His sole goal was to make it more inhumane, difficult, or outright impossible for certain people, specifically Black and brown people. The policies need to go, because families are suffering.