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President Biden’s administration is defending two key Trump-era immigration policies involving pandemic-related border restrictions and family separations.
“The Department of Justice is actively fighting in federal court for border restrictions that have barred most asylum seekers from entering the US. In separate federal cases, it has argued that the policy of separating migrant families under former President Donald Trump was lawful, and has fought against payouts for those families,” Vox reported, characterizing these policies as some of President Trump’s “more inhumane immigration policies.”
CBS News reported last week that the Biden administration “vigorously defended a Trump-era emergency order that U.S. border authorities have used to expel hundreds of thousands of migrants without screening them for asylum, arguing the unprecedented policy is still needed to control the spread of the coronavirus.”
“The government’s goal is to get back to a state of orderly immigration processing for everyone, but currently, in CDC’s view, the public health realities don’t permit that,” said Justice Department lawyer Sharon Swingle, who cited the recent rapid spread of the Omicron variant, according to the network.
The ACLU and other open-border groups are exploiting U.S. courts to seek compensation for families who were separated while breaking our immigration laws.
The migrant expulsion policy, enacted in March 2020, is known as Title 42, and when running for office, Biden’s campaign website called these policies “a moral failing and a national shame,” falsely claiming that Trump “has waged an unrelenting assault on our values and our history as a nation of immigrants.”
Under Trump, 400,000 expulsions were carried out citing the authority. That number surged to 1 million under Biden, CBS reported.
Vox claimed that the administration’s attempts to justify Title 42 as a public health tool “obscure what it really is: a means of avoiding the politically damaging perception of a border crisis at the expense of migrants’ safety.”
Karla Marisol Vargas, an attorney with the open-border group Texas Civil Rights Project, played the race card, naturally.
“It is shameful that an administration that ran on a belief in science and welcoming people with dignity continues to manipulate an obscure public health rule to violate the basic human rights of asylum seekers,” Vargas said in a statement. “Scapegoating Black, indigenous, and other migrants of color as vectors of disease just serves as an example of the ongoing racism entrenched in our immigration system.”
As for the payouts, Vox said that even though Biden has previously said separated migrant families deserved some form of compensation, settlement talks have since fallen apart.
“Earlier this month, the DOJ also urged two federal courts in California and Pennsylvania to dismiss cases brought by migrant families who had been separated by the Trump administration and are seeking compensation,” the article said, before adding that “DOJ lawyers are now claiming that the Trump administration was within its legal right to separate families, meaning that those affected aren’t eligible for compensation.”
The administration was considering paying illegal immigrants up to $450,000 per person and as much as $1 million per family, which created a firestorm of pushback.
It seems clear that Democrats are concerned about Republicans using Biden’s disastrous immigration record as campaign fodder in the upcoming midterm elections — with nearly 2 million illegal immigrants entering the country with almost zero pushback from the president, how could the GOP not capitalize on such a harmful record. Biden is seeing record-low approval ratings, and the border crisis is one of the key issues going against him.
Writers and editors can be contacted at [email protected] with feedback, tips, or corrections.
Tom Tillison grew up in Maryland before moving to Central Florida as a young teen. It is in the Sunshine State that he honed both his passion for politics and his writing skills. Tillison also contributes to BizPac Review.
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