NOORANI'S NOTES

 

 

Immigration was a large part of President Biden's first hours in
office. We'll get to that below.  

First, some important new data from our friends at the Public
Religion Research Institute (PRRI). They released a new report
 today, "Immigration
After Trump: What Would Immigration Policy That Followed American Public
Opinion Look Like?" Key takeaways: There's strong support for a path
to citizenship for the undocumented and clear opposition to a host of
hardline Trump policies.  

"The new immigration priorities and policies favored by the Biden
administration will bring U.S. policy more in line with long-standing
American public opinion, which has consistently reflected a more
compassionate and pragmatic approach to these complex issues," says
Robert P. Jones, PRRI's founder and CEO. 

Now, on to the new administration's six immigration-related
executive orders, plus a Homeland Security memo and a legislative
package (which, notably, has been welcomed
 by
the George W. Bush Institute).  

Welcome to Thursday's Noorani's Notes. If you have story to
share from your own community, please let me know
at [email protected]
. 

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**ENDED** - President Biden took swift action to end
 Trump's
Muslim travel ban, Joel Rose reports for NPR
.  Elizabeth Neumann,
senior advisor to the Forum on national security matters and author
of a new report
 on
the impact of the ban, told Rose: "These bans damaged our nation's
reputation. They were an unnecessary distraction from the actual
security enhancements that were needed." Hear more from Elizabeth,
including her recommendations for a smarter approach to national
security, on our latest episode of Only in America
.  

**REINSTATED** - In March of 2019, the Trump administration ended
 Deferred
Enforced Departure (DED) for Liberians. President Biden reinstated
 the
program on day one for this community. The move provides some
stability for some 4,000 Liberian DED recipients until June 2022,
Nicole Narea at Vox
 notes.  

**SUSPENDED** - Last night the Department of Homeland
Security (DHS) suspended
 new
enrollments in the Trump administration's Migrant Protection
Protocols program, also known as "Remain in Mexico." This keeps
migrants currently waiting at the border in limbo pending further
developments, but keep in mind
 that such
limbo is nothing new for them: Many have already been waiting for months
or longer. Watch for more to come on this in the week ahead (and for
a deeper dive into this policy, check out our Only in America
 explainer
episode).  

**PRESERVED** - As a court case continues to wind its way through the
judicial system, the lives of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals
(DACA) recipients remain in flux. Biden's executive order
 "preserving
and fortifying" the program is a welcome step forward - and
critically, as Aishvarya Kavi points out in The New York Times
, it
also "calls on Congress to enact legislation providing permanent status
and a path to citizenship for those immigrants." 

**COUNTED** - One of the final immigration-related pushes by the
Trump administration was to exclude undocumented immigrants from the
2020 census apportionment count. President Biden issued a detailed
order
 directing
the Census Bureau to include all persons living in the U.S., noting that
"[a]t no point since our Nation's Founding has a person's
immigration status alone served as a basis for excluding that person
from the total population count used in apportionment." NPR's
 Hansi
Lo Wang reports that the order did not address the
standing directives from former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross "to
generate anonymized, block-level data about the U.S. citizenship status
of every adult living in the country. It is not clear what will happen
to the records the bureau has compiled and any data it has produced." 

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**PRIORITIZED** - In order to utilize valuable immigration
enforcement resources, Biden issued an executive order
 to
"reset the policies and practices for enforcing civil immigration laws"
in order to "protect national and border security, address the
humanitarian challenges at the southern border, and ensure public health
and safety." To begin this process, DHS Acting
Secretary David Pekoske issued a memorandum
 directing
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), U.S. Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE), and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration
Services (USCIS) to review their enforcement priorities. The memo also
"sets interim policies during the course of that review, including a
100-day pause on certain removals to enable focusing the Department's
resources where they are most needed." 

**HALTED** - Calling Trump's border wall "not a serious policy
solution," President Biden halted
 all
new construction of the wall along the US-Mexico border. Ricardo Solis,
president of Laredo College - whose campus is set to be dissected
by border wall construction - told Border Report's
 Sandra
Sanchez that the halt in construction "is quite significant and comes
as a relief to Laredo College and our community."  More perspectives
from the border: In an op-ed for the San Antonio Express-News
, Dennis.
E. Nixon, chairman and CEO of IBC Bank in Laredo and Woody L. Hunt,
senior chairman of Hunt Cos. Inc. in El Paso lay out four border policy
measures they believe the Biden administration should take.  

**PROPOSED** - President Biden is reshaping the immigration
debate in Congress with his legislative proposal to reform the
nation's immigration system. Vox's
 Nicole
Narea digs deep into the details, writing that the proposed legislation
"marks both a symbolic and substantive break with
the restrictionist immigration policies that have defined the last
four years." The Washington Post
's
Greg Sargent lays out the political strategy ahead, pointing
out that a number of Republicans are already on board with some of
the proposals, particularly the one that would provide a path to legal
status for Dreamers: "Some GOP senators who just won re-election, such
as John Cornyn of Texas
 and Thom
Tillis of North Carolina
,
did so while advocating for this, and others, such as Lindsey Graham of
South Carolina and James Lankford of Oklahoma, have also backed the
idea
." 

Thanks for reading,

Ali

 

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