Biden Takes The Dare

After Republicans rejected the immigration bill proposed by Democrats earlier this year, Republicans said Joe Biden needed to do more with his executive power by means of executive orders. Today, he did.

Biden announced executive action that will allow qualifying undocumented spouses and children of U.S. citizens to apply for lawful permanent residency without first leaving the country. That’s important because it avoids family separation, even permanent disruption, that can happen if a person leaves the country to apply for residency and is denied reentry. The move could provide deportation protection to hundreds of thousands of people. To qualify, an applicant must have been in the country for ten years and be able to pass a criminal background check. The cut-off date for determining eligibility was last Monday.

In February, when legislation stalled in the House, Representative and Vice Presidential hopeful Elise Stefanik (R-NY) tweeted, “Biden has the power to end the border crisis without Congress. He just doesn’t want to.”

Today’s action by President Biden was widely received as the most significant action on immigration since President Obama announced Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, DACA. It gave temporary relief from deportation (deferred action) and work authorization to young undocumented immigrants who were raised here and identified as Americans. The DREAM Act, which would have provided a path to citizenship, has never passed. Today’s action, if it remains in place, will expand on protections provided to undocumented spouses of members of the military and, in Biden’s words, provide a “common sense fix” for people who have lived here a long time. “It avoids,” the President said in an announcement today at the White House, “tearing families apart,” a reference to the horrific events Americans observed during the Trump administration, where families were separated at the border, including some babies who were so young that they had to be cared for by other children and could not tell officials who their parents were or where they came from.

One of President Biden’s first steps after taking office was to enter an Executive Order that created a family reunification task force. In it, he wrote, “My Administration condemns the human tragedy that occurred when our immigration laws were used to intentionally separate children from their parents or legal guardians (families), including through the use of the Zero-Tolerance Policy.”

The families who have faced separation, whether at the hands of a policy vigorously implemented by Donald Trump’s first Attorney General and anti-immigrant zealot Jeff Sessions, or because a family member made the difficult decision to leave the country to try and pursue a path to legal residency aren’t just numbers on a page. They are real people. Seeing today’s news made me think of an experience I had over a decade ago when my office—I was the U.S. Attorney for North Alabama at the time—was deciding whether to challenge HB 56, an anti-immigration measure adopted by the Alabama Legislature that they referred to as a “deport yourself” measure, designed to make conditions so difficult for undocumented immigrants that they would leave voluntarily.

We did listening meetings across the community to hear people’s views. At the end of one meeting, I was approached by a couple with their young son Javier, who was seven at the time. He had waited patiently through a long event to speak with me. His Dad explained that Javier had an uncle who was two years older than him and wasn’t documented. He told me that they used to take the kids to the zoo together once a week, but that because of HB 56, they couldn’t take them anymore. The risk of him being deported was too great in their judgment. Javier was afraid they were going to take his uncle, his best friend, away, and he asked me to try to fix it.

We were able to in a sense, although it took time to get there. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals found much of Alabama’s law unconstitutional. But the sense of insecurity in the undocumented community here has remained palpable. I was thinking about Javier and his uncle today, and hoping the measure approved by the President means that they and their families are able to have secure, happy lives in this country.

Meanwhile, at a rally in Wisconsin, Trump supporters chanted, “Send them back,” when he raised the topic of immigration.

They don’t seem to understand that Trump’s proposed mass deportations would have a dramatic effect on our economy and our daily lives. After Alabama passed HB 56, there weren’t enough workers to bring in the tomato crop the following spring. Prices skyrocketed and supply was limited. Construction crews were hit hard. We were having work done on our house and our contractor told us he’d lost two of his three crews—there weren’t replacement workers available. The wait times for getting work done were lengthy. Schools lost funding. Alabama is a “head count” state, funded based on the number of students at school on the day the count is taken. Immigrant kids weren’t there that year, even those who were American citizens, because Alabama required them to reveal their parents’ citizenship status to start school that fall. The unintended consequences when immigrants disappear cascade far beyond the intended consequences. It’s a case of, “be careful what you ask for.” The folks at this rally don’t understand the consequences of forcing out immigrants who lack legal immigration status or how their own lives will benefit from the steps Joe Biden took today. A rising tide lifts all boats.

So Joe Biden took the dare today and did, using executive action, what Republicans declined to do in Congress earlier this year and said he could do on his own. It’s not just good human rights work; it’s smart political strategy, too. It will counteract some of the disappointment after Biden, earlier this month, took action that restricts people who enter the country illegally from seeking asylum when immigration surges above certain levels. It lets Biden receive credit for a measure that cable TV hosts today were reporting garnered something like 70% approval from Americans. We have a do-nothing Congress, but the President is at work. Even if the courts reject it, because there are sure to be legal challenges, or if Trump dismantles it, Biden tried. And that matters. It will be a part of his legacy. Put simply, it was the right thing to do but also politically savvy.

Immigration plays a big role in Trump’s Project 2025. The word is used over 150 times in 920 pages, and a disproportionate number of people listed as advisors on the project have a background or expertise in immigration. Some of the examples include:

• In a section on “dismantling the administrative state,” this reference to the Department of Homeland Security bears no resemblance to reality: “Bureaucrats at the Department of Homeland Security, following the lead of a feckless Administration, order border and immigration enforcement agencies to help migrants criminally enter our country with impunity.” (pg. 8)

• This odious statement, which manages to entirely ignore the fact that we are a nation made of immigrants while suggesting that no Republican would ever benefit from cheap immigrant labor (what was that reporting about Trump’s employees at Bedminster?): “That’s why today’s progressive Left so cavalierly supports open borders despite the lawless humanitarian crisis their policy created along America’s southern border. They seek to purge the very concept of the nation-state from the American ethos, no matter how much crime increases or resources drop for schools and hospitals or wages decrease for the working class. Open-borders activism is a classic example of what the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer called ‘cheap grace’—publicly promoting one’s own virtue without risking any personal inconvenience. Indeed, the only direct impact of open borders on pro-open borders elites is that the constant flow of illegal immigration suppresses the wages of their housekeepers, landscapers, and busboys.” (pg. 11)

• Denying permission to enter the country to people who aren’t highly skilled, the antithesis of the melting pot of America: “The incoming Administration should spearhead an immigration legislative agenda focused on creating a merit-based immigration system that rewards highskilled aliens instead of the current system that favors extended family–based and luck-of-the-draw immigration. To that end, the diversity visa lottery should be repealed, chain migration should be ended while focusing on the nuclear family, and the existing employment visa program should be replaced with a system to award visas only to the ‘best and brightest.’” (pg. 145)

• A provision to require prosecutors to act on every immigration crime, whether it involves a serious, violent offender or not. This sort of misallocation of resources would force prosecutors to cut back on prosecutions in other areas. Perhaps that would be okay with Donald Trump who is certainly no fan of prosecuting people who support coup attempts or retain classified material they aren’t entitled to possess, but this sort of focus would put our communities at risk: “Prosecutorial discretion. Congress should restrict the authority for prosecutorial discretion to eliminate it as a ‘catch-all’ excuse for limiting immigration enforcement.” (pg.150)

Project 2025, if implemented, would leave us all worse off.

A final note: my first Civil Discourse tee-shirt was promptly stolen by one of the kids. My replacement showed up in the mail today, and I’m very happy to have it.

If you missed out on the newsletter’s second anniversary celebration, you can still get mugs, shirts, stickers and even a flag—fly it upside down if you must—in the Civil Discourse Store.

We’re in this together,

Joyce