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Saturday, January 23, 2021
Biden's lifting of Muslim Ban offers immigrants new hope - The Washington Post
Repeal of Trump’s ‘Muslim ban’ offers new hope to frustrated immigrants and long-suffering families
ISTANBUL — Danah Harbi went to another doctor's appointment this week without her fiance, as she has for most of her six-month pregnancy, as she has for all manner of appointments and engagements during their long, forced separation. Maybe they will be together when the child is born this spring, but the last few years have been cruel and capricious, and the future has been hard to predict.
Harbi, 38, lives in Falls Church, Va. Her fiance, Mashaal Hamoud, 34, a Syrian national who lives in Lebanon, has been unable to obtain a U.S. visa for several years because of the Trump administration’s 2017 ban on entry to people from a group of Muslim-majority countries, including Syria. The couple had done their best to work around the restrictions. Harbi, an optometrist, traveled to Lebanon several times but was forced to curtail those trips when she learned she was pregnant.
As one of his first acts, President Biden on Wednesday repealed what critics called the “Muslim ban,” offering hope to thousands of families affected by the Trump-era regulations, if not an immediate solution, given the enormous volume of visa and waiver cases that must be resolved.
But the ban’s legacy will remain. For many of those affected, there will be no regaining what was lost: the moments with loved ones, the money spent on visits to stranded partners or far-flung consulates, the opportunities to live in the United States that were dangled, then dashed or delayed.
“It takes a toll on you emotionally, financially to travel back and forth. Physically and mentally,” said Harbi, who took a leave of absence from her job last year to be with Hamoud in Lebanon and was unemployed for six months.
The ban initially applied to seven countries — Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen — but Iraq and Sudan were taken off the list after a court challenge. (Six Asian and African countries, including Sudan again, were added to the list last year.) The Trump administration said the measure was needed to combat terrorism.
Refugees, their advocates and many others around the world saw something else: anti-Muslim bigotry. The ban heaped hardship on people who had already had their fill, including survivors of conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. For a time, many of the ban’s victims — doctoral students, professionals and blue-collar workers — were stranded around the world, their lives upended.
Harbi met Hamoud in 2016, when Harbi went to Lebanon to deliver donations to a nonprofit organization helping Syrian refugees. Hamoud worked for that group, and before long, their relationship developed and Harbi began traveling to Lebanon regularly. In 2017, they decided to get married. As the fiance of an American citizen, Hamoud was entitled to apply for a visa to enter the United States.
“I didn’t think the travel ban was going to impact us,” Harbi said in a telephone interview this week. But from the beginning, Hamoud’s application process was beset by delays. After delivering the required documents, the couple said they heard nothing.
“As time went by, I realized that this isn’t about keeping us safe,” Harbi said. “As an American, I felt like we were being discriminated against.”
Now she is more hopeful. “He’s such an incredible person,” Harbi said of her fiance. “I can’t wait for him to prove that to everyone that prevented him from coming here because they thought he was a threat.”
Mohamed Abdo Ali Mohamed, a 49-year old Yemeni, has ferried his family around the world trying to obtain a U.S. visa. His lawyers reckon he has spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to secure a U.S. visa that would allow him to leave war-ravaged Yemen and join his father and his siblings in Buffalo, where they had lived for decades, according to Ibraham Qatabi, a senior legal worker at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which filed a lawsuit on Mohamed’s behalf.
Much of that money was spent during a fruitless trip from Mohamed’s home in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, to the East African country of Djibouti after U.S. officials granted him an interview and then told him, at long last, that he and his family would be issued visas, said Omar Mohamed, one of Mohamed’s sons.
They had risked everything to get there — traveling 300 miles across the war’s front lines just to get to an airport, then spending more than a year in Djibouti and thousands of dollars every month waiting for an answer. But the visas never came, held up because of the travel ban, said Omar, 31, who now lives in Malaysia and is still waiting for a visa.
“We told them our country is at war. We have to reunite with our family. They didn’t do anything,” he said.
Rand Mubarak, a 25-year old Iraqi refugee, recalled watching her father’s health deteriorate as her family waited in Egypt for the Trump administration to decide whether to admit them to the United States.
Her father, Mubarak Mubarak, had worked as a translator for the U.S. military in Iraq, she said. The family fled their country after receiving death threats during the violent era that followed the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. By 2017, they had reached Egypt’s coastal city of Alexandria and received news from the International Organization for Migration, or IOM, that they could soon travel to the United States.
Then came Trump’s announcement and, with the stroke of his pen, their dreams of a fresh start were in doubt. Mubarak developed a heart condition. The doctor said a simple operation would help him, but he would need to leave Egypt. Rand called the IOM weekly, telling them her father needed to be transferred to an American hospital.
“He worked for the Americans, after all,” she said. “They just told us that they had strict instructions not to process applications.” The freeze was in place even though Iraq had been officially removed from the travel and immigration ban.
Mubarak died in July. Now, Rand said, her mother is sick too.
“It’s the most hideous feeling, a feeling of being let down, a feeling of being left behind,” Rand said.
Days before Biden’s inauguration, Pamela Raghebi, who lives in Seattle, misplaced her driver’s license. It should not have been a big deal, she said, but she panicked. It was one of those ordinary moments when her Iranian-born husband, Afshin Raghebi, would have known exactly what to do.
“I’m not as young as I was,” Raghebi, 75, said. “Afshin would say to me, ‘Sit down, relax, think about it.’ He protects me. He recognizes that when I get flustered, I get frightened.”
But he had been gone since 2018, trapped overseas after traveling to the United Arab Emirates for an interview to finalize his petition for a green card, the couple said in separate interviews.
The two had met at the retirement home where she worked when he came to install windows. They’ve been married for a decade and now jointly own a window installation business. Afshin had entered the United States illegally in 2006 but was granted a legal waiver to apply for U.S. permanent residency after they were married. Following his interview at the U.S. Embassy in Abu Dhabi, the couple learned that Afshin would not be allowed to reenter the United States because of the travel ban.
Afshin, now 52, settled in southern Turkey, which was relatively inexpensive. He had some money in a bank account and to help support him, Pamela sold her car. At the beginning, Afshin went to the beach to pass the time or socialized with other Iranian exiles, but both pastimes had become “boring,” he said.
When Biden took office on Wednesday, Afshin splurged on a bottle of wine to celebrate.
“The U.S., I loved that country. I still love it,” he said. “They’re playing with our lives.”
Opinion | The potential charges against Donald Trump - The Washington Post
"The question came out of the blue and has haunted me ever since. It was Jan. 17, 2017, three days before Donald Trump’s swearing-in, and my wife and I sat with him in the near-empty main cabin aboard the Trump Organization’s Boeing 757 en route to Washington for a pre-inaugural gala.
So, asked the president-elect: Should he retain or fire Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the powerful Southern District of New York? I gave what I thought was an obvious, anodyne answer: All other things being equal, it’s better to have your own people in place. Within two months, Bharara was gone.
George T. Conway III, a Post contributing columnist, is a lawyer and a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump super PAC.
To the charge of naivete that night, I plead guilty: I didn’t consider then that Trump might have had his personal legal interests in mind. But it is impossible to escape the self-interested intent behind his question. From the earliest days of his administration, it became painfully apparent that in all matters — including affairs of state — Trump’s personal well-being took top priority. Four years and two impeachments later, he has managed to avoid the full consequences of his conduct.
But now that run of legal good fortune may end. Trump departed the White House a possible — many would say probable, provable — criminal, one who has left a sordid trail of potential and actual misconduct that remains to be fully investigated.
As Trump himself well understands. Long-standing Justice Department opinions hold that presidents can’t be prosecuted while they are in office. Given that any such protection was temporary, some of Trump’s advisers believed that one reason he decided to seek reelection was to avoid criminal exposure. Indeed, in the weeks leading up to November’s election, Trump reportedly confessed to advisers that he was worried about being prosecuted."
Friday, January 22, 2021
Trump and Justice Dept. Lawyer Said to Have Plotted to Oust Acting Attorney General - The New York Times
Rand Paul outraged by the wrong part of Biden's inaugural address
Rand Paul outraged by the wrong part of Biden's inaugural address
Rand Paul heard Joe Biden denounce political extremists, and for reasons he did not explain, the senator took offense.
Early on in President Joe Biden's inaugural address, he took stock of the many profound challenges facing the United States, referenced the "once-in-a-century virus," the millions of jobs lost, the need for racial justice, and the climate crisis.
But in the next breath, Biden added, "And now, a rise in political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat."
As the Lexington Herald-Leader noted, it was apparently a line Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) had a problem with.
"If you read his speech and listen to it carefully, much of it is thinly-veiled innuendo calling us white supremacists, calling us racists, calling us every name in the book, calling us people who don't tell the truth," Paul said on Fox News Primetime.
I will confess to being surprised. Biden's speech was not exactly subtle or reliant on oblique metaphors. It wasn't partisan or ideological. The address included no name-calling. Biden pointed no fingers and made no effort to associate dangerous radicals with elected U.S. officials.
But Rand Paul was apparently insulted anyway. The Kentuckian heard the new president denounce extremists, white supremacists, and domestic terrorists, and for reasons he did not explain, the senator interpreted the comments as some kind of attack on Republicans.
What's more, he's not alone: a Washington Post analysis noted this morning, prominent voices in conservative media pushed the same complaint in response to the inaugural address.
As we recently discussed, I've long been fascinated by instances of political figures needlessly pushing back allegations that weren't specifically directed at them.
It was 12 years ago, for example, when the Department of Homeland Security released reports about domestic ideological extremists, alerting law enforcement officials to potentially violent groups and organizations. (The relevance of those findings never really went away.) At the time, Republicans and conservative activists were furious -- even though the report was commissioned by the Bush administration -- because much of the right feared that concerns about dangerous radicals applied to them or their allies directly.
In effect, some on the right heard officials' concerns about potentially violent militants, and responded, "Hey, they might be talking about us."
More than a decade later, the problem apparently persists."
Thursday, January 21, 2021
Pentagon faces scrutiny over response to Capitol riot - The Washington Post
Pentagon faces scrutiny over response to Capitol riot
The Defense Department is facing scrutiny over its role in the events at the Capitol last week, after the D.C. government and Capitol Police accused Pentagon officials of slow-walking an emergency call for National Guard reinforcements as rioters threatened to breach the building.
The search for answers about why the security breakdown took place, leaving the Capitol all but defenseless against a marauding group of pro-Trump rioters, has taken on increased urgency as Washington prepares for the Jan. 20 inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden and possible new threats from extremists trying to keep President Trump in office despite his loss.
Up to 15,000 National Guard members could be deployed in Washington during the inauguration, senior defense officials said Monday, part of a rapidly expanding response following the deadly insurrection.
The unprecedented breach last Wednesday has been followed by a descent into bureaucratic finger pointing and blame shifting, as local and congressional police have accused the Defense Department of declining to send in Washington, D.C., guardsmen in fast enough, while Pentagon officials have blamed city and congressional police for failing to prepare and request sufficient military help in advance.
The Defense Department has said the Capitol Police, the law enforcement body that protects the U.S. Capitol and reports to Congress, declined multiple offers of help from the D.C. Guard before Jan. 6, and only called with an emergency request after it was too late to get part-time soldiers capable of handling a riot to reach the scene urgently. The Pentagon has also underscored that federal and local law enforcement, not the Defense Department, are responsible for warning about urgent domestic threats.
Steven Sund, who stepped down in recent days from his post as chief of the Capitol Police, said in an interview with The Washington Post that he personally didn’t have any knowledge of outreach to the Capitol Police from the Pentagon offering help from the D.C. Guard ahead of the planned Jan. 6 protests. But a civilian Pentagon official said in a Jan. 3 email obtained by The Post that a U.S. Capitol Police official had circled back and articulated “no requests for DOD support.”
“The Department of Defense approved every request for assistance it received regarding the mob riot at the Capitol,” Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Rath Hoffman said. “And we approved every offer of assistance from others.”
Criticism of the Pentagon by the D.C. and Capitol Police officials has centered on a phone call around 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday, when Army Staff Director Lt. Gen. Walter E. Piatt allegedly told a pleading Sund that there were concerns about sending the D.C. Guard into the Capitol in response to what was a mounting emergency.
Sund recalled Piatt saying: “I don’t like the visual of the National Guard standing a police line with the Capitol in the background.”
City officials said they were flabbergasted by what they interpreted as Piatt fending off their urgent request, even as lawmakers and staff fled a pro-Trump mob that had fought its way into the Capitol building.
Piatt, in a statement issued Monday, denied making such a comment and said he never declined to deploy the D.C. Guard. The three-star general said Army Secretary Ryan C. McCarthy left the room to obtain approval for the Guard’s full activation from acting defense secretary Christopher C. Miller as soon as McCarthy heard the urgent request from the Capitol Police. The D.C. Guard technically answers to the president because the District is not a state, but the Army and defense secretaries oversee the force on the president’s behalf.
“While the two secretaries were meeting, I continued with the call and made clear to the participants of the conference call that I was not the approval authority but that Secretary McCarthy was working the approval,” Piatt said. “I told the assembled group on the call that we need to work together to develop a plan on how to use National Guard Soldiers if their participation was approved.”
Piatt said those plans included the option of dispatching members of the D.C. Guard to free up local D.C. police, who could then assist Capitol Police in fending off the attack on Congress. It also included using the National Guard to set a perimeter at the Capitol so that law enforcement could conduct clearing operations, Piatt said.
“It’s important that in the midst of a dire situation we have a clear plan and understand the task, purpose, and role of our Guardsman before we employ them,” Piatt said. “Creating shared understanding will prevent a complex and potentially dangerous situation from getting worse.”
Piatt said the approval to activate the full D.C. Guard came about 40 minutes after the call.
But the Guard didn’t arrive until later that evening to help establish a perimeter, after D.C. police and federal law enforcement helped the Capitol Police clear the rioters out of the building.
In a recent call, McCarthy told Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), a former U.S. Army Ranger, that because local and congressional authorities didn’t articulate additional needs ahead of the event, the D.C. Guard was not prepared for other contingencies, such as the need to respond swiftly to an insurrection at the Capitol, according to notes on the call that Crow released Sunday.
McCarthy also said that due to a lack of coordination and preparation, there wasn’t a functioning operations center at the Pentagon to manage the small Guard presence that was on the streets of the District on Wednesday and direct additional resources if needed, according to Crow. On Monday, a defense official said a separate state operations center was not required for the limited mission D.C. authorities had requested.
“Substantively, you know, by 8:00 a.m. Wednesday morning, it was largely too late,” Crow said in an interview with The Post. “You can’t mobilize effectively a large force in less than eight hours. Because you have to call people in, and you have to equip them, you have to get them into the armory, you’ve got to transport them, you’ve got to brief them.”
The Pentagon had massed a small quick-reaction force comprised of 40 D.C. Guard members at nearby Andrews Air Force Base to send out in the event that the Metropolitan Police needed additional help beyond the few hundred guardsmen provided for traffic control. But that group didn’t immediately respond when the rioters entered the Capitol, because no contingency operations had been planned with the Capitol Police.
By the morning of Jan. 6, “a lot of the die was cast,” Crow said. “The opportunity had been missed. The planning that would have had to have occurred to respond in the way that we needed to respond, that window had already passed.”
Critics of the Pentagon have said defense officials were happy to carve out a narrow role for the National Guard ahead of the events, and didn’t push for additional involvement or contingency planning, in part because they wanted to keep the military out of the political fray and avoid the backlash the Defense Department faced last summer.
In June, Trump strong-armed city officials and militarized Washington in response to racial justice protests and looting, flooding the streets with Guardsmen and unmarked federal agents and threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act to bring in active-duty forces — and proving how aggressively the federal government could respond to a perceived threat without city sign-off.
The president made no such demands ahead of the planned protests by his supporters on Jan. 6. According to defense officials, Trump told Miller and Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a meeting three days before the event that they should activate the D.C. Guard as they see fit. One of the officials said the president didn’t interact with Miller regarding the response on Jan. 6 itself.
The blowback the military received last June overshadowed officials’ approach to last week’s planned protests, because the Pentagon came under intense scrutiny for its involvement in Trump’s heavy-handed response, which included a D.C. Guard helicopter flying low over protesters as a show of force.
While then-Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper pushed back behind the scenes against Trump’s desire to call in active-duty troops, Esper came under widespread criticism for describing U.S. cities as a “battlespace” in a White House call with governors. Milley issued an unusual public apology for appearing alongside the president after personnel forcibly cleared protesters from Lafayette Square outside the White House.
The repercussions of those events increased Pentagon leaders’ skepticism of Trump, who since his first day in office has bucked norms for presidential interactions with the military.
“The lesson they took away was: ‘We got caught in the middle of a political firestorm and how do we keep ourselves out of that? The best thing to do is be on the low down, keep a low profile, let’s not get in the mix and let the civilians handle it,’ ” said Risa Brooks, a professor of political science at Marquette University, who studies the U.S. military.
The Pentagon’s impulse to shy away from missions injecting the military into a charged partisan debate backfired in the case of the Capitol riot, Brooks said, because the absence of the military became a political statement in itself for many Americans.
“All they see is: where is the Guard? The Guard was out there with the Park forces out in Lafayette Square ready to come after us, and we weren’t out trying to breach the Capitol . . . that’s what they see,” Brooks said. “And one understands why they see it that way.”
In memos issued ahead of Wednesday’s events, which defense officials provided to The Post, D.C. leaders outlined their request for limited assistance from the D.C. Guard, including traffic control, and specified that military personnel should remain unarmed and refrain from surveilling or arresting protesters.
On Jan. 4, Miller issued a memo to McCarthy placing limits on the D.C. Guard during that mission. The following day, McCarthy issued a memo reiterating the limits to Maj. Gen. William J. Walker, the commanding general of the D.C. Guard.
The directives specifically prohibited the D.C. Guard from receiving ammunition or riot gear for the current mission, using helicopters or surveillance assets, and engaging in searches, seizures, arrests or other law enforcement activity. The directives said the quick reaction force should be deployed only as a measure of last resort.
Mike DeBonis and Dan Lamothe contributed to this report."
Biden pledges to defeat extremism and culture of lies as he confronts Trump’s legacy
Biden pledges to defeat extremism and culture of lies as he confronts Trump’s legacy
"The inauguration of President Biden marked the traditional transfer of power that has taken place every four years through two centuries of the nation’s history. This year the day was far more than that, a moment both somber and hopeful in a country reeling from a pandemic and economic distress in a capital city locked down by threats of violence from far-right extremists.
For Biden, Wednesday’s ceremonies represented the fulfillment of decades of personal ambition to serve as president. But if it was a day for him to celebrate that achievement, it was also a day to reckon with what the four years of Donald Trump’s presidency have done to the country and the monumental task of repair and restoration that is now the new president’s responsibility.
Biden ran for president with a pledge to rebuild a sense of normalcy after the chaos and divisiveness of the Trump presidency. But the shocking attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 underscored that a return to normalcy will require presidential resolve in the face of white supremacist threats to democracy as much as or more than customary calls for unity and bipartisan cooperation that long have been central to Biden’s makeup.
The 46th president did not shrink from the duality of what he called this moment of “crisis and challenge,” the urgency of confronting immediate problems that threaten people’s health and welfare as well as the deeper, embedded problems of racial injustice and domestic terrorism by those who fear a changing America.
One measure of how much the attacks of two weeks ago could affect Biden’s presidency was the degree to which he confronted those threats directly and repeatedly. “Here we stand,” Biden said, “just days after a riotous mob thought they could use violence to silence the will of the people, to stop the work of our democracy, to drive us from this sacred ground. It did not happen. It will never happen, not today, not tomorrow, not ever. Not ever.”
Rarely has a nation needed the renewal that is promised with every inauguration. The absence of the president, who became the first in more than a century not to attend his successor’s swearing-in, along with the tableau and pageantry on a socially distanced West Front of the Capitol, signaled an eagerness on the part of many, though not all, to move past the Trump years.
As expected, unity was Biden’s principal theme. But there was nothing soft-edged about the meaning of his words. Instead the appeals for America to come together came with a rhetorical determination to confront the existential threats that rose up under Trump. Kate Masur, a historian and professor at Northwestern University, emailed during the speech that she was hearing echoes of Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural address in 1861, a time when seven states already had seceded from the union and the nation was heading toward bloody war.
That Lincoln speech is often remembered for his appeals for unity, for his summoning up of America’s “better angels,” his invocation of the “mystic chords of memory” and his plea that the passions of the day not “break our bonds of affection.” Much of the speech, however, was a condemnation of the secessionist movement and a steely promise to defend the Constitution and preserve the union.
“In some ways the combined force of right-wing authoritarian and white supremacist tendencies in the United States, plus the media climate and disinformation and people’s suffering and resentments, combine to form a more existential threat than we’ve seen in a very long time,” Masur said.
America is not at a point today that it was when Lincoln spoke weeks before the Civil War began, but the “uncivil war” that Biden described is a reminder that what exists today goes beyond familiar talk of political polarization or legislative gridlock to what could be the biggest long-term challenge of Biden’s presidency — a country in which a minority of the people reject many truths, hold to Trump’s words and, in the extreme, are prepared to fight.
No president in modern times, perhaps ever, has inherited the collective set of problems that greeted Biden as he took the oath of office on a clear and cold day, and in a few words, he captured all that afflicts the country: “anger, resentment and hatred, extremism, lawlessness, violence, disease, joblessness and hopelessness.”
In his inaugural address, Biden sought to follow the example of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who, in 1933 during the depths of the Great Depression, said, “This nation asks for action, and action now.” Biden said, “We will press forward with speed and urgency, for we have much to do in this winter of peril and significant possibilities. Much to repair. Much to restore. Much to heal. Much to build. And much to gain. Few people in our nation’s history have been more challenged or found a time more challenging or difficult than the time we’re in now.”
Emblematic of that promise to move swiftly were the 17 executive orders awaiting Biden’s signature after his swearing-in, with more to come in days ahead. More difficult than signing those orders will be showing that he has a strategy to slow the spread of the coronavirus and to produce and deliver vaccinations to enough people quickly enough to return the country to something resembling life before the virus arrived a year ago. How effective the American people judge that response to be will go far in coloring broader perceptions of Biden’s leadership.
The new president also has outlined the $1.9 trillion package to deal with the coronavirus and provide economic assistance to struggling Americans, businesses and state and local governments, to be followed next month by a sizable economic recovery package. On these legislative priorities, he faces a stern test: Can he persuade Republicans to support the package — and how much is he prepared to compromise to win that support — or will he decide to stand his ground and turn to the budgetary process known as reconciliation to push it through with a simple majority vote of his own party?
In addition, there are his commitments to an ambitious strategy to combat climate change and the promise to redraw the nation’s immigration system, including a path to citizenship for those here without documentation. And mindful of who helped to make him president, and the swearing-in of Kamala D. Harris as the first female, Black and South Asian vice president, he also noted that cries of racial justice “400 years in the making . . . will be deferred no more.”
As he noted Wednesday, almost any of these individual challenges would consume a new administration. He does not have the luxury of ignoring any of them.
The desire for national renewal and rejuvenation also comes with demands for accountability — for those rioters who stormed the Capitol and for a president who, as Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) said, provoked the mob by feeding it lies. Trump’s impeachment trial will hover over the early days of Biden’s presidency, and while he will not be an active participant, it, too, will color attitudes of Americans about the state of the nation.
On the day the Capitol was overrun, Biden said the attack and the efforts to undermine the results of the election meant that work of the coming four years must be the restoration of democracy. Presidential historian Robert Dallek, noting the significance of the moment Biden assumed the presidency, said, “What helps him a lot is the villainy of Donald Trump and that Trump has fallen into a ditch. There is nothing like having a failed predecessor to give you a running start.”
Timothy Snyder, a historian and Yale University professor, said that until the country is freed from the fear of mob rule in all its forms, whether from violence or intimidation or threats of either, the freedoms that all Americans take as part of the country’s basic values will not exist.
Snyder called this a moment of possible restructuring over which Biden will preside.
“That’s the only upside of Trump being president and a failed coup,” he said. “It opens a window to do things that are more far-reaching. That window’s going to be open, it’s going to be open for a little while.”
Biden said Wednesday’s ceremonies symbolized the triumph not of a candidate but of the cause of democracy. But if democracy met the stress test between November and Inauguration Day, the system remains under duress. Biden’s task, and that of the nation he seeks to unify, is to ensure that the forces that threatened democracy are confronted and defeated."
Biden administration to pause deportations, curtail arrests
Biden administration to pause deportations, curtail arrests
"The Biden administration has ordered U.S. immigration agencies to focus their energies on threats to national security, public safety and recent border crossers, ending a four-year stretch during the Trump administration that exposed anyone in the United States illegally to deportation.
Acting Homeland Security Secretary David Pekoske issued a memo hours after President Biden’s inaugural Wednesday setting strict limits for arresting and deporting immigrants while the department reviews its policies and practices. He also imposed an “immediate” 100-day pause on the deportations of certain noncitizens, to take effect no later than Friday. Pekoske is in charge as the Senate considers the nomination of Alejandro Mayorkas, the former deputy DHS secretary during the Obama administration.
The memo is the first step in a broader plan to find a different solution for the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, many of whom have lived here for years and have U.S.-citizen children. Many are essential workers — delivery workers, caregivers, even physicians — but Congress has not passed a major citizenship bill since 1986.
Biden has unveiled legislation that would allow millions to apply for citizenship, following in the footsteps of former presidents George W. Bush (R) and Barack Obama (D), who attended his inauguration Wednesday, and also advocated, albeit unsuccessfully, for immigration reform.
Trump took a starkly different approach, often characterizing immigrants as criminals and winning praise from his team for taking the “shackles” off immigration agents and allowing them to deport anyone, including immigrants arrested for traffic offenses.
Despite spending billions of dollars to jail record numbers of immigrants, Trump did not deport as many people as his predecessor, in part because of major resistance from immigration lawyers and “sanctuary” jurisdictions that refused to hand over immigrants to the federal government for deportation after they were arrested for state or local crimes.
In the memo, Pekoske ordered DHS’ chief of staff to review the agency’s immigration policies over the next 100 days and recommend revisions.
The memo applies to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which enforces immigration laws in the interior of the United States, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which patrols ports and borders, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which handles applications for immigration benefits such as green cards and citizenship.
During the review, the agency said it will impose “sensible priorities” for enforcing civil immigration laws. Starting Feb. 1, immigrants eligible for deportation will fall into three categories: National security threats, such as spies or terrorists, border crossers who arrived on or after Nov. 1, and aggravated felons currently serving time for crimes such as murder or drug trafficking, after they are released from prison.
But the memo contains an escape clause, saying that “nothing in this memorandum prohibits the apprehension or detention of individuals unlawfully in the United States who are not identified as priorities herein.” And immigrants who voluntarily waive their rights to remain in the United States, after seeking legal counsel, may be deported.
Biden has said it was a “big mistake” to deport as many people as the Obama administration did, when Biden was vice president.
The Obama administration also attempted to focus on recent border crossers and people convicted of a broader array of crimes, but the immigration agencies took years to adjust, with attempts to limit enforcement in 2011 and again in 2014. Some of the language in the Obama-era memos is similar to Pekoske’s.
Monitoring the system from the outside is difficult because, unlike the criminal and civil court systems, immigration arrest and court records are not public, and ICE and the border patrol have labor unions that endorsed Trump.
The acting secretary said he will conduct a “periodic review” of enforcement actions to ensure they are followed.
The memo is in addition to a slew of new executive orders and proclamations that Biden issued Wednesday on issues such as immigration, the border wall and climate change.
DHS also suspended the Migrant Protection Protocols on Wednesday, ordering that no new migrants are to be added to the program, which requires Mexico to host asylum seekers as they await their hearings in the United States. But covid-related travel restrictions remain in place, so asylum seekers are unable to immediately enter the United States, officials said Wednesday.
“All current MPP participants should remain where they are, pending further official information from U.S. government officials,” DHS said in a statement.
But the Pekoske memo signaled that the new administration is focused on expanding asylum processing at the southwest border, which has been paralyzed during the pandemic.
In the memo, Pekoske signaled that the department intends to “surge resources to the border” to secure the boundary with Mexico and to “rebuild fair and effective asylum procedures that respect human rights and due process.”
DHS intends to “fairly and efficiently” process asylum claims while adhering to health protocols to prevent the spread of covid-19, the memo said.
Biden is expected to announce additional immigration actions on Jan. 29."