President Joe Biden’s growing avalanche of executive orders continued this week. On Tuesday, he ordered the creation of a task force to reunify migrant families separated at the border. Biden also ordered a review of “Remain in Mexico,” a program that has forced nearly 69,000 migrants, including children, to wait outside the U.S. while their asylum claims are pending. A third executive order calls for another review of Trump-era policies that stonewall immigrants from accessing green cards and U.S. citizenship.

But immigration attorneys and advocates say the orders don’t go far enough.

Although the new administration has stopped adding asylum seekers to the Remain in Mexico program, thousands of migrants are still stranded on the other side of the border. “That is not fair to them – pain, suffering, hunger and violence will continue while the administration reviews what to do next,” Linda Rivas, executive director of Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, told BuzzFeed News. “We continue to urge them to act as quickly as they can. These people cannot continue to wait."

And some advocates want the Biden administration to do more for families separated under former President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy. Biden’s task force will aim to locate the parents of about 600 children who still remain separated from their parents. But ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt, who has led legal efforts to reunify families since 2018, said the families need “an immediate commitment” that includes restitution and permanent legal status. “Anything short of that will be extremely troubling, given that the U.S. government engaged in deliberate child abuse,” he told The Washington Post.

In an interview with Democracy Now, my colleague Aura Bogado said Biden’s task force so far “rings hollow” for many of her sources. For one thing, the task force will be led by the Department of Homeland Security, the same agency that separated families. And the task force will focus on a specific scope of families separated in the summer of 2018. But we now know that family separations under Trump happened as early as July 2017 and also occurred under former President Barack Obama. Last year, Aura followed the case of a girl who had spent the last six years in U.S. custody after being separated from family members at the border in 2013, when she was 10.

“I do wonder if we can also take a moment and think about what truth and reconciliation means in other examples, what we hold other nations to, and whether we’ll ever be able to really reconcile the violence that’s happened to migrant families at the border for years,” Aura said.

Meanwhile, hundreds of immigrants were deported in recent days after a federal judge last week blocked Biden’s 100-day deportation freeze. According to NBC News, immigrants were deported to several countries, including Jamaica, Guatemala and Honduras. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported a 40-year-old to Haiti, even though he wasn’t born there and had never visited the country. The agency also removed an undocumented woman who witnessed the 2019 Walmart shooting in El Paso, Texas.

In a briefing with reporters this week, White House press secretary Jen Psaki defended the government’s slower approach to its immigration plan.

“We want to act swiftly,” she said. “We want to act promptly, but we also need to make sure we are doing that through a strategic policy process.”

Fact-based journalism is worth fighting for.

THE STATE OF IMMIGRANT DETENTION UNDER BIDEN

Biden has yet to announce major changes to the network of detention centers that currently hold nearly 15,000 people, almost all of whom could simply be released by ICE if the agency chose.

During his campaign, Biden pledged to “end the federal government’s use of private prisons,” and his campaign suggested that change could include ICE detention. “He will make clear that the federal government should not use private facilities for any detention, including detention of undocumented immigrants,” the campaign wrote. But Biden’s Jan. 26 order ending new contracts with private prisons did not apply to ICE.

ICE uses a network of county jails and detention facilities, many of them run by private contractors, to house immigrants in its custody. Before the pandemic hit, detention numbers had soared under the Trump administration. It sent far more asylum seekers into prolonged detention than ever before.  

Advocates now want the administration to go further and end ICE’s use of private prisons and commit to keeping far fewer people locked up. Just this week, I’ve gotten calls from two Cuban asylum seekers detained in Louisiana. They told me that they’re growing desperate after nearly two years of detention and want to know what the Biden administration is going to do to help them. 

Biden officials “have a lot of room here. We think it is a historic opportunity to dismantle this system of massive incarceration,” ACLU senior advocacy and policy counsel Naureen Shah told NBC News. ICE, meanwhile, has spent the last few years signing 10-year contracts with The GEO Group and CoreCivic that could undermine any attempts to shut them out of the detention business. 

Underscoring the dangers of ICE detention, more than 500 people held by the agency are under isolation or monitoring for COVID-19. That includes dozens of people at CoreCivic’s Stewart Detention Center in Georgia, which has been a particularly deadly place during the pandemic. In late January, 57-year-old Felipe Montes became the fourth person detained at Stewart to die from the disease. 

Meanwhile, Customs and Border Protection is preparing new tent facilities “to house an increase in unaccompanied migrant children” in two South Texas cities, according to Border Report. The agency said the government anticipates an increase in migrant children crossing the border alone because of the impact of COVID-19. These facilities are meant to house children for less than 72 hours, but the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which houses children for weeks or months before releasing them to their families, has also relied on remote tent cities when its shelters are over capacity. As we reported in 2018, some children spent months in those emergency facilities and had limited access to medical and legal help.
 

3 THINGS WE’RE READING

1. They were separated at the border and then reunited. Now, the government is tearing some of these migrant families apart once again. (The Washington Post)

After families separated under zero tolerance were reunited, many parents still had removal orders against them, putting them at risk of being separated from their children once again. Out of about 2,000 cases of parents and children who were separated, roughly 13% have removal orders, according to the National Reunited Families Assistance Project, a legal cooperative. Among the affected families are Antonio and his 10-year-old daughter, Maily. Separated for 30 days in the summer of 2018, the father and daughter were reunited, only to be separated again six months later when ICE arrested Antonio at a scheduled check-in. He was deported to Honduras; Maily remains in New Orleans with family.

The kicker: Antonio and Maily speak on video calls a few nights a week. Antonio asks Maily how her English is progressing. Maily asks Antonio if he’s safe. Her first court date is scheduled for December 2022. During their years apart, she had tried to come up with ideas of how to get her father back to the United States. Last month, in her latest effort to reunite the family, she scribbled a letter to then-President-elect Joe Biden. “Congratulations on your new job as president,” she wrote in Spanish. “My reason for writing is to ask you to please help bring my dad and mom and sister to the United States. If you’re able to do this I’ll be the happiest girl in the world.” She drew a picture of her family, a wide space between herself and everyone else.

2. Thousands of migrant youth who qualify for special juvenile status are at risk of deportation. (The Marshall Project)

Nearly 26,000 migrant youth have pending applications to receive legal relief under special immigrant juvenile status, which offers a pathway to permanent residency for youth who are abused or neglected. A new analysis shows that most of them will wait three or more years for green cards because of yearly limits on green cards and court delays due to COVID-19.

The kicker: With the court's ruling, she got approval from a federal immigration agency to request a green card that would allow her to live and work in the U.S., but almost four years later, she's still waiting for the card to come. “I was able to go to school, but I couldn’t work,” said the girl, whose name we are withholding due to her vulnerable situation. “I couldn’t do all the things others kids can do, like get jobs and study abroad.” Because she doesn’t have a green card, she does not qualify to work legally or to receive federal public assistance. Her mother – who is undocumented – was paying for college. But her mother’s work hours were cut due to COVID-19. Unable to pay the tuition and falling behind on rent, the teenager had to drop out of college and start working to help support her family. Her mother said they now owe their landlord $14,000.

3. For one grandfather recently deported to Mexico, Biden’s immigration executive orders came too late. (Reuters) 

For the last 30 years, Felipe Ortega lived in the U.S., where he raised his family and opened his own home-remodeling business. But the day before Biden’s inauguration, ICE officers arrested Ortega on a 15-year-old pending removal order. While Ortega was on his way to Mexico, Biden had reversed a Trump-era policy “that had targeted more immigrants living in the country illegally for arrest and deportation, including those with no criminal records like Ortega.”

The kicker: On Tuesday, Jan. 19, Ortega asked border agents before he was sent across the border if there was anything else he could do to continue fighting his case, but he says he was told no. “I think that what they wanted was to kick me out before Biden signed what he signed,” Ortega told Reuters in a series of phone interviews after his deportation. ICE did not respond to a request for comment on Ortega’s case. His wife, Maria Ortega, a U.S. permanent resident, and three adult daughters, one a U.S. citizen and the other two permanent residents, drove four hours to cross into Ciudad Juarez and meet him on the other side. The family embraced, weeping.

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– Laura C. Morel and Patrick Michels