Democratic nominee Joe Biden plans to reverse many of President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, restoring a program that shields more than 600,000 illegal aliens from deportation, and rescinding Trump’s travel ban on visitors from mostly Muslim countries, according to a new report.
“Mr. Biden will look to implement a 100-day freeze on deportations while his administration issues guidance narrowing who can be arrested by immigration agents,” according to CBS News, which cited “people familiar with the plans.”
Biden also plans to end the “remain in Mexico” border policy, increase the number of refugee admissions, and end the travel ban from Muslim countries. In addition, Biden will move to reinstate an Obama-era program that allows at-risk children in central America to request refugee or parole status, a program Trump nixed in 2017, the report said.
“A source familiar with Mr. Biden’s plans said new guidance would be designed to curb so-called ‘collateral arrests,’ which are apprehensions of immigrants who are not the target of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations but are nevertheless taken into custody because they are in the country without legal status,” CBS News wrote.
Biden is also reportedly planning to reverse Trump’s executive orders on immigration. “All that stuff was done administratively through the [president’s] executive authority, and so a new executive can basically reject those and start from scratch,” a source familiar with Biden’s plan told CBS News.
Trump made immigration a central theme of his 2016 campaign, calling for construction of a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border. Over his four years in office, Trump overhauled the U.S. immigration system with more than 400 policy changes. The changes spanned “everything from border and interior enforcement, to refugee resettlement and the asylum system, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the immigration courts, and vetting and visa processes. This report offers a comprehensive catalog, by topic, of those actions, including their dates and the underlying source materials,” the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) wrote in July.
“The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 gave the administration new openings to push forward many of its remaining immigration policy aims. This period has seen bans on travel and a pause on visa issuance for certain groups of foreign nationals and a further closing off of the U.S.-Mexico border that has effectively ended asylum there,” the MPI wrote.
The most current travel ban list includes Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen, as well as Venezuela and North Korea.
“The Travel Ban has been very successful in protecting our Country and raising the security baseline around the world,” Trump campaign spokesman Hogan Gidley said in July. “[C]ommon-sense and national security both dictate that if a country wants to fully participate in U.S. immigration programs, they should also comply with all security and counter-terrorism measures – because we do not want to import terrorism or any other national security threat into the United States.”
Related: Trump Considering Dramatic Expansion Of Nations Added To Travel Ban List