By Tanveer Kaur
President-elect Joe Biden faces a course of decisions to make regarding immigration policies, especially those put in place by the Trump administration. Immigration policies implemented by the incoming Biden administration will affect millions of lives.
A symbol of America’s anti-immigrant shift is the wall at the southern border. Biden has pledged to stop construction on the wall once he takes office. This pledge to stop construction could save the federal government 2.6 billion dollars.
DACA recipients are going to be at the forefront regarding immigration policies. Some of the recipients have never been back to their countries of origin. To some, America is all that they’ve ever known. Biden has promised to send Congress a bill that would help permanently secure the future of the DACA recipients as Americans. The question looms, though: will this bill garner enough bi-partisan support to be passed?
Biden has promised to raise the annual refugee admissions cap to 125,000 in stark comparison to the Trump administration’s 15,000. However, Biden still faces the challenge of rebuilding the refugee resettlement system after four years of policies aimed primarily at preventing refugees from coming into the U.S.
The Biden team has said that rolling back Trump administration changes to the asylum process will take months. The administration would first seek to restore protection for asylum seekers at the border by terminating the November 2018 asylum ban, the Migrant Protection Protocols, the July 2019 third-country transit ban; the Asylum Cooperative Agreements with Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador; the Prompt Asylum Claim Review (PACR) and Humanitarian Asylum Review Process (HARP) procedures that block people from seeking relief. Biden plans to then halt the family separation policies at the southern border and restore the practice of releasing asylum-seekers from detention while their immigration court proceedings are pending. Lastly, Biden plans to get rid of all Trump-era immigration policy.
