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Editor’s Note: Alice Driver is a writer who travels between Mexico and the United States. She is working on her book, The Life and Death of the American Worker, on workers’ rights and immigration. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and Oxford American. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion articles from CNN.
CNN
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Former President Donald Trump has redefined the nature of asylum in the United States and has made many decisions about immigration, including a diabolical family separation policy that separates children and infants from their parents waiting to be granted asylum or deported. spearheaded the brutal initiative of
As his successor arrived in El Paso, Texas, the border town that has become the epicenter of America’s immigration controversy, one question continued to haunt me and others watching the issue closely. I’m here. – Some departure from Trump’s reprehensible policies?
As a journalist covering the U.S.-Mexico border, I have seen firsthand how the Trump administration uses family separation to punish families who cross the border illegally.
By the time he resigned, the Trump administration had separated more than 5,000 immigrant children from their parents. Images of neglected, mourning children have been seared into our collective consciences. This clearly included Biden’s conscience as well. In June 2018, he criticized Trump’s family separation policy as “unconscionable.” Halfway through his presidency, more than 500 children were reunited. 2,291 children were reunited before Biden’s Family Reunification Task Force was launched, bringing his total to 2,837.
Trump’s atrocities on immigration weren’t limited to family separation. He also introduced the reprehensible Title 42 policy, the so-called Covid prevention policy, which was used as a justification to deport thousands of immigrants, many of them asylum seekers, to Mexico.
I watched them face the threat of organized crime for months, sometimes years, in tents on the Mexican side of the border. With 2022 border crossings surpassing his 2 million, a new record, Biden comes under attack from Republicans who accuse him of exacerbating the immigration crisis by not being aggressive enough at the border. is receiving Whether the Supreme Court will decide to uphold the controversial Title 42 policy is an open question.
There have been approximately 2.5 million expulsions under Title 42 provisions since March 2020, most of them during the presidency of President Biden. The policy continues to be enforced despite Biden saying he wants it repealed. Just last week, the White House pledged to “expand and facilitate legal channels for orderly immigration.”
The Biden administration’s journey to its current immigration policy has been a long and winding one. The government tried to scale back the Title 42 program last year, but a coalition of mostly Republican-led states successfully sued to prevent the end of enforcement by the Department of Homeland Security. Some states have appealed to the Supreme Court, ordering the court to remain pending legal challenges.
But despite publicly professing to end the program, Biden is actually imposing tougher immigration measures on citizens from certain countries who want to enter the United States.Homeland Security The Department of Security has proposed tougher asylum restrictions than Trump’s policy by requiring those who fled Cuba, Venezuela, Haiti and Nicaragua across the border from Mexico and had previously applied in countries they transited en route to the United States. bottom.
This policy demonstrates a lack of understanding of the nature of asylum. Those most in need of asylum are fleeing for their lives. Those in danger of assassination are less likely to survive the asylum process that sends them back down a dangerous path. Asylum exists to help the most vulnerable among us.
The Biden administration announced on Friday that it would expand a program to bring 30,000 monthly immigrants from Venezuela to Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua into the United States. However, Biden’s new policy requires asylum seekers to have a sponsor in the United States and undergo a background check.
Addressing immigrants from the above countries who want the difficult journey to the United States, the President said in his Jan. 5 address: Apply legally from wherever you are. This runs counter to decades of well-established asylum policies that have expanded the right to seek asylum for all immigrants at ports of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border. Biden said the new process was “orderly, safe, humane, and working.”
When I reported from the town of Reynosa, Mexico in April 2021, I met my mother from San Pedro Sula, Honduras. She is a climate change migrant who escaped the damage of Hurricane She Ita and Iota. She lived among hundreds of asylum seekers in tent-studded public parks, where her laundry hung to dry on tree branches.
The woman, who was unwilling to release her name for fear of legal repercussions, told me her 12-year-old son had crossed the border into the United States seeking asylum. Her immigration officers separated them, and when U.S. authorities later deported her, they were deported without her children.
She wrote a message for her son and gave it to me in the hope that one day I would be able to deliver the letter to him. I didn’t mean to break up with you It was a trick. Take care, son. ”
Immigration advocates have told me that reuniting torn families is one of the most important issues the administration must address. Julie Schwietert Collazo, co-founder and executive director of the nonprofit Immigrant Families Together, said: subsequent family separation.
For some people, immigration to the United States is primarily to make up for the lack of low-wage work, and in fact many people who come here are eager to work hard and lose weight. , inclusive immigration policies must recognize respect, dignity and humanity for all who are forced to flee danger and who find themselves within our borders.
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