Immigration crisis: Families inhabit the streets of El Paso 2:03
Editor's Note:
Alice Driver is a writer who divides her time between Mexico and the United States.
She is working on a book on labor rights and immigration, "The Life and Death of the American Worker."
Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and Oxford American.
The opinions expressed in this article belong solely to its author.
(CNN) --
Former President Donald Trump has redefined the nature of asylum in the United States, ushering in a series of cruel immigration initiatives, including a fiendish family separation policy that ripped children and babies from their parents while they waited for them to be found. granted asylum or deported.
As his successor arrived Sunday in El Paso, Texas, the border city that has become the epicenter of the immigration debate in the United States, one question continues to plague me and others who closely follow the issue: why should the President Joe Biden hasn't made a decisive 180 degree turn away from Trump's reprehensible policies?
As a journalist reporting on the US-Mexico border, I saw firsthand how the Trump administration used family separation to punish undocumented families who crossed the border.
By the time he left office, the Trump administration had separated more than 5,000 immigrant children from their parents.
Images of minors alone and crying burned into our collective consciousness, including, it seems, Biden's.
In June 2018, she criticized Trump's family separation policy as "unconscionable."
Halfway through his presidential term, more than 500 minors have been reunified (prior to the launch of Biden's Family Reunification Task Force, 2,291 minors had been reunified), bringing the total to 2,837.
Trump's cruelty on immigration was not limited to family separation.
He also implemented the reprehensible policy of Title 42, supposedly to prevent covid, which served as justification for expelling thousands of immigrants to Mexico, many of them asylum seekers.
The possible scenarios of keeping Title 42 in force to quickly expel migrants
I witnessed how they lived for months or even years in tents on the Mexican side of the border, often facing threats from organized crime.
With crossings that exceeded two million in 2022, a new record, Biden is being attacked by Republicans, who accuse him of aggravating the immigration crisis by not acting aggressively enough at the border.
Whether the Supreme Court will decide to uphold the controversial Title 42 policy remains anyone's guess.
Border chaos amid Title 42 uncertainty 3:06
Since March 2020, there have been nearly 2.5 million removals under the provisions of Title 42, most of them during the Biden presidency.
The policy is still in place, despite the fact that Biden has said that he wants to end it.
Last week, the White House promised to "expand and expedite legal avenues for orderly migration."
The road that has led the Biden government to its current immigration policy has been long and tortuous.
Last year, the administration tried to end the Title 42 program, but a coalition of states, mostly led by the Republican Party, sued to stop the Department of Homeland Security from ending its enforcement.
Some states turned to the Supreme Court, which has ordered that it be maintained while current disputes are resolved.
But despite wanting to end the program, Biden has imposed stricter immigration measures on nationals of certain countries hoping to enter the United States.
The Department of Homeland Security has proposed stricter asylum restrictions than Trump's policies, requiring people fleeing Cuba, Venezuela, Haiti and Nicaragua and crossing the border from Mexico to have previously applied for asylum in a country through which they have traveled en route to the United States.
This policy demonstrates a lack of understanding of the nature of asylum.
Those most in need of asylum flee for their lives.
People who are in danger of being killed are unlikely to survive an asylum process that returns them to danger.
The asylum exists to help the most vulnerable among us.
Biden presents new border plan that includes accepting up to 30,000 migrants per month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela
The Biden government announced Friday that it would expand a program that allows 30,000 immigrants a month to enter the United States from Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua.
But Biden's new policies — which require asylum seekers to have a U.S. sponsor and undergo a background check — seem designed to ensure that only the most privileged, those with family or friends already in USA, can access it.
In a speech delivered on January 5, the president said, addressing migrants from the aforementioned countries who were hoping to make the arduous journey to the United States: "Don't just show up at the border. Stay where you are and legally apply for asylum from there." ".
This goes against decades of established asylum policy that has extended the right to seek asylum to all migrants at ports of entry along the US-Mexico border.
Biden said the new process "is orderly, it's safe and humane, and it works."
When I reported from the city of Reynosa, Mexico, in April 2021, I met a mother from San Pedro Sula, Honduras: a climate change migrant who had fled the destruction of Hurricanes Eta and Iota.
She lived among hundreds of asylum seekers in a public park filled with tents and where clothes hung from tree branches to dry.
The woman, who did not want her name released for fear of legal repercussions, told me that she had crossed the border into the United States with her 12-year-old son seeking asylum.
An immigration official separated them, and when US authorities later deported her, they did so without her son, whom she has yet to locate.
Analysis: Current Immigration Crisis and Title 42 4:44
He wrote a message to his son, which he gave me in the hope that one day I would be able to get it to him: "I love you, son. You know I didn't mean to leave you. It was a trick. Take care, son."
Reuniting and caring for families separated at the border should be a priority for Biden, according to HRW
Immigrant advocates tell me that reuniting separated families is one of the top issues the government needs to address.
"We get calls or emails at least several times a week from families who have been separated from a child at the border," Julie Schwietert Collazo, co-founder and CEO of the nonprofit group Immigrant Families Together, told me, referring to the continued family separations.
For some people, immigration to the United States is all about filling low-wage labor shortages, and in fact, many of the people who come here are willing to contribute their hard work and do their part.
But above all else, comprehensive immigration policies must recognize the respect, dignity, and humanity of all who are forced to flee danger within our borders.
Illegal immigration United States