WASHINGTON – Joe Biden’s immigration reform push received a boost yesterday when the Senate confirmed his pick to head the Homeland Security Department, as the US president seeks to roll back Donald Trump’s hardline policies.
Cuban-born Alejandro Mayorkas, confirmed on a modestly bipartisan vote, becomes the first Latino and the first immigrant to head up the department.
His approval gives the expansive agency its first permanent leadership in nearly two years, and came ahead of Biden’s signing of three executive orders aimed at streamlining immigration, including an effort to reunite children separated from their parents at the border with Mexico.
They are a follow-up to executive orders that Biden signed on his first day in office as he takes aim at US immigration policy after four years of Trump's “America First” vision.
“I'm not making new law, I'm eliminating bad policy,” Biden said as he signed the orders.
The latest measures do not address the status of some 11 million undocumented immigrants living in legal limbo, which hinges on whether Biden can persuade enough congressional Republicans to back a bill offering them a path to citizenship.
The new action by the Democratic president is aimed at streamlining the US immigration process, officials said, with Biden to order a review of all legal obstacles to immigration and integration put in place under Trump.
“The review will likely lead to dramatic changes in policies,” according to a senior government official, who said the goal is “to restore faith in our legal immigration system, and promote integration of Americans”.
“President Trump was so focused on the (Mexico border) wall that he did nothing to address the root cause of why people are coming to our southern border,” the official said.
“It was a limited, wasteful, and naive strategy, and it failed.”
In line with campaign promises, one of the orders puts in place a working group tasked with reuniting migrant families separated by Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy installed in 2018.
That policy allowed officials to prosecute and deport adults who had entered the US illegally. Their children were then placed into federal custody.
Faced with international outcry, and even criticism from within his own party, the Trump administration scaled down the policy. But hundreds of migrant children have still not been returned to their parents.
“We are going to work to undo the moral and national shame of the previous administration that literally, not figuratively, ripped children from the arms of their families... with no plan, none whatsoever, to reunify the children and their parents,” Biden said. – AFP, February 3, 2021
