Nation/World

Squeezed on immigration, Biden braces for border crisis

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden promised to restore the United States’ reputation as a “beacon for the globe” by reopening the nation’s doors to immigrants and refugees. But he has infuriated some supporters by expelling tens of thousands of migrants, restoring an unlicensed shelter for migrant children and struggling to implement policy changes without a full staff in place.

After barely a month in office, Biden is scrambling to explain to some Democrats that his “Day One” promises for a gentler immigration system will take more time with health and economic crises engulfing the United States.

The risks of an early political backlash for Biden are growing. Former president Donald Trump dispatched his deputies to the Hill on Wednesday to lobby against Biden’s immigration overhauls and Trump plans to blast those changes in a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Sunday.

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement email obtained by The Washington Post shows that the administration has already entered crisis mode on the southern border.

“We need to prepare for border surges now,” Timothy Perry, ICE’s new chief of staff, wrote in a Feb. 12 email. “We need to begin making changes immediately.”

The Biden administration is so worried about running out of shelter space for teenagers and children who cross the border without their parents that shelters have been authorized to purchase airplane tickets and cover other transportation costs for minors whose relatives are already living in the United States, according to an email from the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement — which runs the shelters — that was obtained by The Post.

HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Building pressures at the border haven’t stopped Biden from reversing Trump’s policies. On Wednesday the White House dumped a Trump order that shut the door to visa holders and other legal immigrants on the grounds that their arrival would hurt the U.S. labor market under strain from the coronavirus pandemic.

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The new administration notched a fleeting breakthrough this week when advocates for immigrants agreed to stand down on several crucial lawsuits involving migrant families and unaccompanied children, giving the administration 30 more days to put new policies in place.

“The word I would preach here is patience,” said Kevin Appleby, a board member at the Hope Border Institute, an immigrant aid organization in El Paso, Texas. “Everyone expects automatic results and automatic change. But it’s going to take time to reverse what Trump did.”

Biden’s 2020 election victory drew cheers from migrants stranded in squalid, freezing refugee camps in Mexico, and some rushed across a bridge in the border city of El Paso chanting his name. Unlike Trump - whose tough talk of an immigration crackdown led to record low border crossings in his first months in office — Biden has arrived as the numbers are rising.

And because the Trump administration issued a public-health order effectively blocking migrants from crossing into the United States, Biden inherited an infrastructure ill-prepared to handle a big influx in the middle of the pandemic. Federal agents have taken into custody more than 70,000 migrants a month for each of the past four months, the most for that period in at least 10 years.

A federal lawsuit last year highlighted how quickly the border situation can shift.

In November, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan in the District of Columbia blocked the previous administration from immediately expelling children and teenagers who arrived at the southern border without their parents. A trio of Trump-appointed judges in the District of Columbia Circuit overturned him in January, but the ruling backed Biden into an uncomfortable corner.

Forced to make the choice, Biden said he would stop expelling minors. Since then, the number of minors in federal custody has more than tripled to 7,000, prompting officials to reopen an overflow shelter in Texas to house them — even though it is not state licensed, as required — until officials can place them with a parent or guardian in the United States.

Some Democrats deplored the move, calling to abolish ICE and the warehouselike influx shelters.

“This is not okay, never has been okay, never will be okay — no matter the administration or party,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., tweeted.

“We should not go in this direction again,” said Julián Castro, the former presidential candidate and housing secretary during the Obama administration.

But an influx of migrant families — who have far outnumbered unaccompanied children — could create an even more dire situation for the Department of Homeland Security, because they are difficult to house during immigration processing and their cases have clogged the immigration courts. DHS hit a “breaking point” in fiscal year 2019 — when more than 500,000 migrant families presented themselves at the southern border, a record high. Unaccompanied minors also hit a record that year, numbering 80,000.

Immigration agents are expert at swiftly deporting single adults from the border. But the latest DHS statistics show that families and children are virtually guaranteed to stay at least a few years in the United States if they are allowed in.

Of the more than 1 million migrants who arrived as part of family groups between 2014 and mid-2020, just 6% have been returned home, while 4.7% have been granted asylum or some form of legal status, DHS data shows. Of the remaining 89% whose legal claims remain unresolved, 67% had cases pending in U.S. courts, while 20% have received deportation orders or an offer of voluntary departure, the statistics show.

Behind the scenes, the administration has made clear in emails and court records that it is gearing up for a much broader influx at the border.

A Feb. 12 email sent to senior ICE officials describes DHS’s plans for coping with a building crisis. The tone was urgent.

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told senior officials “to prepare for border surges now,” Perry wrote to colleagues. “We need to begin making changes immediately. We should privilege action over cost considerations; do what is needed, and the department will work on funding afterward.”

According to Perry’s email, which was first reported by the Washington Times, Mayorkas wants to “reduce pressure on the border” by getting ICE to help transport migrants northward so they can be processed and released.

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“We should not hesitate to modify and cancel contracts as necessary,” Perry wrote, relaying Mayorkas’s instructions. “Enter into sole source contracts if necessary and available.”

Officials have also been negotiating with advocates for immigrants to stall a pair of key lawsuits that officials fear could have triggered a new border surge: an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit seeking to stop the administration from expelling migrant families, as it already has with migrant children, and another governing the detention of children.

The talks put Biden administration officials in the awkward position of having to defend a Trump order, under Title 42 of the public health code, that allows them to expel migrants from the southern border. In recent court filings they called the expulsion authority a critical tool.

“Second-guessing the CDC’s determination here risks increasing the transmission of COVID-19 to DHS personnel, migrants, and the American public, which, in turn, may overtax the limited health care resources and hamper DHS’s operational capacity in performing its law enforcement, immigration, and other important functions,” the Biden administration said in a Feb. 17 filing.

Their worries persuaded the ACLU to give them a month-long extension in the fight to stop the expulsion of migrant families. “We hope that in this month we can convince the Biden administration that Title 42 is unlawful and unnecessary and that they should not retain an inhumane Trump administration policy,” ACLU lawyer Lee Gelernt said in an interview.

Biden administration officials also persuaded lawyers representing minors in a federal consent decree known as the Flores Settlement Agreement to give them a month before pushing for a new ruling in that case.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki acknowledged the growing worry Wednesday and said officials are working quickly to move minors away from the border and are treating them humanely. But she said the administration cannot legally release unaccompanied children to unvetted adults, a past practice that has led to abuses.

She said the children are being transferred from cramped border stations — where some remained longer than the typical 72 hours in recent days because of a major winter storm in Texas — to Department of Health and Human Services shelters.

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“And our objective is to move them, move these kids quickly from there to vetted sponsored families and to places where they can safely be,” she said. “This is a difficult situation, and it’s a difficult choice. That’s the choice we’ve made.”

She added: “What we are not doing is dividing these kids and separating [them] from their parents at the border, which is what the last administration did.”

A border influx could imperil the Biden administration’s efforts to pass an immigration bill this year focused on legalizing the 11 million undocumented immigrants - many of whom have lived in the United States for years, even decades.

The ousted Trump administration is attempting to stave off efforts to pass a bill, banking on the possibility that Democrats will lose seats in the midterm elections next year. Then they would have another chance to float hard-line policies in the 2024 presidential race.

Stephen Miller, who briefed GOP members this week on the Biden administration’s immigration changes, has urged Republicans to continue hammering away at the issue.

Miller told them that the Democrats’ 2010 midterm defeats were the result of President Barack Obama focusing on health-care reform instead of economic anxiety.

“I said: If you think Obama focusing on health care during the recession was a misalignment of priorities, that is nothing compared to opening America’s borders and shutting down enforcement during economically ravaging pandemic,” Miller said in an interview. “From a purely political standpoint, this is a recipe for Democrats to have an historic drubbing in the midterms if we can make it even as big an issue or bigger than Obamacare.”

The Washington Post

Washington Post News Service

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