What Would a President Biden Immigration Plan Look Like

During his first weeks in office, Joe Biden and his Democrat administration are expected to quickly start dismantling President Trump’s incredibly effective immigration agenda.

Biden has promised that his administration will move to fully restore the Obama-era program that shields 640,000 undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children from deportation, even expanding the program to allow new applications. He also intends to rescind President Trump’s travel and immigration restrictions on 13 countries who are known backers of international terrorism.

Biden has promised to also implement a 100-day freeze on deportations while his administration issues guidance narrowing who can be arrested by immigration agents. And as reported by CBS, a source familiar with Biden’s plans said new guidance would be designed to curb the mythical so-called “collateral arrests,” which are apprehensions of immigrants who are not the target of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement but are apprehended because they are in the country illegally.

At the border, Mr. Biden has pledged to discontinue the Trump administration’s policy of requiring migrants to wait in Mexico for the duration of their U.S asylum cases. A source familiar with the Biden team’s planning, according to CBS, ‘said the incoming administration will also withdraw from the three bilateral agreements Mr. Trump brokered with Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras that allow the U.S. to send rejected asylum-seekers to those countries and have them seek refuge there.’

Mr. Biden’s team is also planning to begin the process of terminating the extremely effective “public charge” rule the Trump administration implemented to deny green cards and immigrant visas to applicants who U.S. officials determine to rely on taxpayer-funded benefits like Medicaid, food stamps, and Section 8 housing vouchers.

Biden has also promised to dramatically increase refugee admissions, moving away from the 15,000 spots set by Mr. Trump and raising the cap to 125,000.

In addition, Jennifer Molina, a spokeswoman for the Biden campaign, said the projected incoming administration will also create a “task force” to help locate and reunify “separated families.” “President-elect Joe Biden will restore order, dignity, and fairness to our immigration system. At its core, his immigration policy will be driven by the need to keep families together,” she speciously stated.

“The Trump administration had an extraordinary preoccupation with immigration issues and they invested an enormous amount of attention and single-minded focus on immigration,” Meissner, who is also a senior fellow at the “non-partisan” Migration Policy Institute, told CBS News. “An administration that wants to undo those changes would have to devote a similar amount of time and effort — and arguably more, because you don’t want to just be undoing things. You want to be moving a proactive agenda as well.”

Finally, CBS reports that “Biden has promised to introduce legislation that would allow the nation’s estimated 11-14 million undocumented immigrants to legalize their status, but such an effort — which has proved elusive for two decades — would need to be approved by a divided Congress.”

For the complete story, please visit CBS News.