Trump Tries To End Four Restrictions On His Own As His Rival Detaches Himself From The Obama-Era Deportation Legacy
Migration has acquired a symbolic character with a view to the presidential elections on November 3 in the United States. The hardening of immigration policies imposed by the Administration of President Donald Trump has been a “moral embarrassment” for the country, according to his Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, aware however that these Trump policies against illegal migration they were facilitated precisely by the man he served, Barack Obama.
“Donald Trump has done nothing but abuse the machine that Obama built,” explains immigration lawyer Amy Maldonado to CBS. The numbers speak for themselves. Trump has deported nearly 750,000 people since he came to power four years ago. By the middle of Obama’s term, more than 400,000 were deported in a single year. “Barack Obama continues to be the ‘deporter-in-chief’ and I doubt very much that Trump could match him even if he won the elections, because he is not as competent,” adds Maldonado.
Biden, therefore, faces a problem that is not strictly limited to Donald Trump and his regressive policies. “Biden must undo the damage created,” says the member of the political platform on migration created by the former US vice president, Javier Valdés. “When I say ‘damage’ I do not mean only what has happened during Trump. It is true that he has injected steroids, but we are facing a historical problem,” he points out to the same chain.
The Democratic candidate’s response has yet to be defined. While he has shown signs of “leaning very slightly to the left” on this issue, according to criminal justice expert panel The Marshall Project, in part thanks to the addition of senator and former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders to his social policy intervention committee. Biden has yet to confirm whether he will implement some of the more immediate proposals, such as declaring a 100-day moratorium on deportations if he reaches the White House.
In fact, the committee’s proposals ignore one of the great demands of the American left: the abolition of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE), at least in its current form; an agency that Trump has used as executor of the most criticized aspects of his immigration policy, beginning with the separation of minors from their parents when they set foot on US soil.
This measure, considered by its critics as an example of cruelty by the Trump Administration, has caused that 545 children separated at the border have still not been able to find their parents, according to a court document presented Tuesday by the Justice Department. of the United States and the American Civil Liberties Union.
SOLO PROMISES
Nothing represents Trump’s immigration policy better than the separation wall with Mexico, a barrier that Trump has reinforced, rather than expanded – the Administration has worked on approximately 443 kilometers of wall, but most of these works have occurred on structures existing–.
However, it has been an initiative that the White House has developed practically alone, to the point that it has resorted to military parties to complete the project given the lack of cooperation from the US Congress; an irregular funding model that will come up for scrutiny next year in the Supreme Court.
The Administration denounces in this sense the lack of cooperation around it, from the Democratic bench to the Police departments of the country’s “sanctuary cities” that refuse to apply federal policies against illegal migration, according to the director in 2019. Acting ICE, Matthew Albence.
That is why Trump has applied this policy by means of an executive order, like the one he imposed last July and which suspended the issuance of new work visas, preventing almost 200,000 foreign workers and their families from reaching the United States; a decision that, according to the Brookings Institution, has cost the nation’s top 500 companies more than $ 100 billion in profits.
From the Administration it is perceived as the price to pay for the preservation of law and order in the face of chaos and violence that, according to their words, accompany the phenomenon of migration.
From the Administration it is perceived as the price to pay for the preservation of law and order in the face of chaos and violence that, according to their words, accompany the phenomenon of migration.
“The overwhelming majority of the American people are committed to strengthening the American nation for the American people,” White House adviser on home affairs Theodore Wold told CBS. “The left’s rallying cry of ‘no borders, no walls’ is actually an alibi for hiding more drug violence, more human trafficking, more intergenerational poverty and, ultimately, fewer jobs and fewer opportunities for American workers, “he adds.
Based on this argument, the White House intends to tighten the restrictions until the last moment. In recent weeks, the Administration has imposed time limits for foreign students to complete their studies, DNA requirements in some cases to obtain immigration benefits and a new rule for donors of programs for the entry of migrants to present their history of credits, bank statements and additional financing.
BIDEN AND THE LEGACY
“I think it was a big mistake,” Biden acknowledged about Obama’s deportation policy in a February interview on Univision television. “And we have taken too long to understand it,” added the candidate, who was forced to admit that in 2006 he voted in favor of a specific expansion of the separation wall because “in some places it makes sense, but the notion that it was about the same thing that Trump is doing now with the separation wall is ridiculous. “
However, Biden, who on his website declares his proposals to be “an attempt to reclaim the values ​​of an America as a nation of migrants,” has taken specific positions on only some immigration issues – particularly those that refer to immigration. expansion of the conditions of legal migration – while offering to work with Congress on issues with no solution in sight, such as police incursions into migrant communities.
“The communion between police intervention and immigration policy is something extraordinary that will survive Trump,” Hiroshi Motomura, professor of Immigration Law at the University of California, told the Los Angeles Times.
Nor has the Democratic candidate been particularly predisposed to tear down the new segments of the separation wall erected by the Trump Administration, offering instead to paralyze the project. Although he has assured that he will improve protections for “dreamers” (illegal migrants who arrived in the country as minors), he has remained silent on the possibility of canceling other questioned Trump measures, such as those that force migrants to remain in Mexico while they await the entry permit, in an unsafe situation; other regulations that will be subject to scrutiny by the Supreme Court.
All this occurs at a time when migration seems to have taken a back seat when it comes to the interests of Americans. According to a CNBC / Change Research poll in early October, only 15 percent of voters said immigration was a major problem, compared to 39 and 40 percent who favor the economy and the pandemic of COVID-19, respectively.
