In less than seven weeks, Joe Biden is scheduled to be sworn in as the 46th president of the United States. And these next four years will be riddled with monumental challenges: climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic response, the economy.

And then there’s immigration. On the campaign trail and debate stages and in TV interviews, Biden has promised to dismantle President Donald Trump’s restrictionist immigration agenda and create more humane policies at the border and beyond. And on our immigration team, we’re gearing up to keep his administration accountable.

The road to reverse Trump’s anti-immigrant legacy won’t be easy. As The Washington Post pointed out this week: “Biden’s administration will inherit an enforcement system cracking under the strains of the coronavirus pandemic, a crippling immigration court backlog and a demoralized workforce at the Department of Homeland Security, where leadership instability and administrative chaos have been signatures of Trump’s tenure.”

Here are some of the stories around Biden’s upcoming immigration actions – and the myriad of obstacles he’ll face – that we’re following closely:

Trump is pushing to further limit immigration. Since Election Day, the government has lengthened the citizenship test immigrants must pass in order to be naturalized, from 100 to 128 questions, reports Politico. Officials also have moved to further reduce the kind of jobs immigrants can apply for under H-1B visas, which are temporary work permits filed by companies that want to hire high-skilled immigrants when there’s a shortage of American workers. Sources have also told CNN that the Trump administration wants to enter into more “safe third country” agreements before Trump’s term ends. The agreements require asylum-seeking migrants to first claim asylum in another country along their journey to the U.S. border. That means migrants must wait in countries that lack the proper resources and infrastructure to help them. And if asylum seekers arrive at the U.S. border before first seeking protection somewhere else, they’re subject to being deported and sent back to the conditions they fled in the first place. Only one such agreement currently exists, with Guatemala. 

Biden selects an immigrant to lead the Department of Homeland Security. Alejandro N. Mayorkas, deputy homeland security secretary under President Barack Obama, would be the first immigrant and first Latino to lead the federal agency. Mayorkas helped established Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama-era program that has shielded about 650,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children from deportation. He also led the agency’s response to the Ebola and Zika outbreaks, experiences that would help him navigate his new role during the COVID-19 pandemic. Noah Kroloff, a former chief of staff for the Homeland Security Department who worked with Mayorkas, told The New York Times that the department is going to have to heal after the last four years: “Mayorkas, because he has experience at the highest levels of DHS, is very well positioned to do that.”

Refugee ministries are laying the groundwork for a rise in admissions under Biden. When Trump significantly lowered the Obama-era cap of 110,000 refugee admissions in a year to just 15,000, many refugee resettlement organizations either reduced their capacity or completely shut their doors. But on the heels of Biden’s announcement that he will increase the cap for refugee admissions to 125,000, the agencies that remain are working quickly to establish new partnerships and recruit volunteers. “To be sure, returning to such a high level of resettlement after several years of historic lows will be very challenging,” Scott Arbeiter, president of World Relief, told Christianity Today.

Fact-based journalism is worth fighting for.

HUNDREDS OF MIGRANT CHILDREN ARE ARRIVING AT THE BORDER

Border agents apprehended nearly 1,000 migrant children in six days in November, according to CBS News. U.S. Customs and Border Protection processed 997 unaccompanied children who arrived at the border between Nov. 18 and Nov. 23, a dramatic increase from the 741 children who arrived in all of April, the first full month of the pandemic. 

The border agency also projects that within the next 120 days, arrivals of migrant children will continue to rise – increasing by 50%. The government disclosed these figures in a court case over the legality of the Trump administration’s attempts to immediately send children back to their home countries during the pandemic. 

Earlier this month, Judge Emmet Sullivan ruled that the expulsions violate legal protections that guarantee migrant children will be placed in shelters licensed in child care while their immigration cases are pending. If the increases at the border continue, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which oversees the care of migrant children, said it would run out of space at its shelters by early January.

Meanwhile, border agents have also held dozens of children at intake facilities longer than they are supposed to. CNN reports that more than 60 children, some as young as 1 month old, were held at the border for more than three days over the last two months. Under federal law, migrant youth cannot be held at Border Patrol stations for more than 72 hours before they’re transferred to shelters for unaccompanied children.

The number of children held at the border was included in court documents filed in the decades-old Flores case, which resulted in a court settlement that has protected the rights of migrant children for the past 20 years. These are the same facilities that came under scrutiny last year, when lawyers and doctors spoke to the media about what they observed inside, including older children taking care of toddlers, lice infestations and children in soiled clothes with no regular access to showers.

Lawyers representing the children in the Flores case said the government has “steadfastly refused to disclose the reasons they detain children for prolonged periods in unlicensed Border Patrol facilities,” the filings read.
 

3 THINGS WE’RE READING

1. Millions of migrants who settled in new countries are now displaced in the wake of the pandemic. (The New York Times)

The International Organization for Migration estimates that at least 2.75 million migrants have been displaced by the pandemic. Among the hardest-hit groups are Venezuelans who settled in Peru and Colombia, only to lose their jobs in the early months of the pandemic. More than 100,000 Venezuelans alone left Colombia in the spring. Among them is Jessika Loaiza and her 6-year-old son, Sebastián. After fleeing Venezuela, she had found work in Colombia at a florist shop. But when the pandemic hit, the shop closed.

The kicker: It is June – 32 days and 250 miles since they left – and Jessika’s T-shirt stretches thin over her balloon of a belly. Sebastián is skinnier, browned by the sun. They are in Bucaramanga, 120 miles from the Venezuelan border. Hundreds of families – all pandemic migrants – crowd the edge of a park, anxious to get home. Smugglers offer rides to the border in exchange for telephones, clothing. There, Jessika’s mother, Peggy, makes a call and learns that their house in Venezuela has been taken over by the same criminals that ran them out the year before. Peggy begins to cry. “We can’t go back,” she says.

2. Immigrant advocacy groups are optimistic that the Biden administration will make strides in creating more humane immigration policies. (Politico)

Many advocates are hopeful they will see significant changes in U.S. immigration policy in the next four years. But they also plan on holding the new administration accountable to the promises it makes, as immigration is just one item on a long list of policy areas that Biden will have to prioritize, including the pandemic response and climate change.  

The kicker: “Hell yeah, I’m optimistic. I don’t know what the hell we were going to do if Trump won again,” said Marisa Franco, executive director of Mijente, a grassroots Latinx advocacy group. “But then the other side of me is like, ‘I know how this works.’ Nothing is going to be enough that (Biden) does and that’s the same issue that folks in the crime-and-justice movement have and folks in policing (reform) have. I think it’s very possible for things to get lost and that’s what our job is: To make sure it doesn’t,” Franco added. Biden must move quickly to prove he has learned from President Barack Obama’s mistakes on immigration. Obama – despite creating DACA – was dubbed “deporter in chief” and is known for expanding the detention of immigrant families and dragging his feet on major immigration legislation.

3. The border processing facility that became the symbol of the Trump administration’s mistreatment of migrant families will be closed until 2022. (The Washington Post)

With its chain-link partitions, the Central Processing Center in McAllen, Texas, has been touted widely by immigrant advocates as evidence that Trump officials were holding children and families in cages. Border agents have held migrants here since the Obama years, most notably during the “zero tolerance” crackdown of 2018 that led to hundreds of family separations. Now the warehouse is undergoing a redesign that will provide migrants held here with more humane conditions. The renovations are expected to take about 18 months. 

The kicker: During pre-pandemic times, migrant families and children who were taken into custody in the Rio Grande Valley after crossing illegally into the United States typically were taken to the CPC warehouse. Their personal and biometric information was recorded into government databases, and they would sometimes spend several days or more inside the facility, sleeping on mats as they waited for authorities to determine whether they would be transferred to a longer-term detention facility, returned to Mexico or released into the United States. The partitions were used to separate different demographic groups – such as keeping teenage boys apart from mothers with infants. The renovation is likely to replace the chain link with clear plastic dividers, and officials said the new facility will provide more recreation and play areas for children, as well as more permanent kitchen, infirmary and shower facilities.

NEWS BREAK: ZILLOW SURFING

Need a change of scenery? Try scrolling through real estate listings and imagine yourself living in a multimillion-dollar home with an airplane-themed theater room. “Zillow surfing has become a primary form of escapism for those who want to flee not just their homes but the reality of 2020,” writes Taylor Lorenz. 

From The New York Times story:

After Ariel Norling, 29, a designer in Oakland, made a name for herself on Zillow Twitter by identifying unique, enviable listings around the country, she started a weekly house-hunting newsletter on Substack called I Know A Spot. “I’ve always been a Zillow scroller,” she said, “but it’s been a big activity for me as a part of quarantine. I felt like I was running out of things to do, Zillow felt like a different kind of outlet.”

Ali Zaidi, 40, an attorney in Boston, prefers Redfin over Zillow, and has made checking the site part of his morning routine, despite the fact that he has no plans to buy a house. “It’s part of my morning,” he said. “I log into my work email, check different media outlets, then one of the websites I open up is always Redfin.”

He compared the serotonin rush of seeing beautifully staged homes to checking social media and seeing pictures of people’s private lives. “I get the same sort of joy from looking into Redfin as I do on Facebook or Instagram,” he said. “I find it interesting and almost voyeuristic.”

What makes Zillow different from those social networks, though, is the absence of people, the writer Brian Feldman noted in his newsletter, BNet, this summer. “It has no engagement loop, no social interactions, no real network effects to speak of,” he wrote. “It is a giant canvas onto which people project their desires and insecurities, and a constantly evolving document not just of the housing market, but of how people lived.”

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– Laura C. Morel