President Biden's First Week

FAIR's Preston Huennekens, Matthew Tragesser, and Spencer Raley talk about President Biden's first week in office when he issued more immigration executive orders than those addressing COVID-19 and our weakened economy.

Show Notes

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The Federation for American Immigration Reform's podcast bringing you the most important updates about U.S. immigration. Featuring special guests including members of Congress, journalists, and experts in the field.

Intro:
Today on Understanding Immigration, President Biden's first week. Welcome back to another episode of FAIR’s Understanding Immigration podcast. This is Preston Huennekens with FAIR’s lobbying team and I’m joined as always by Matthew Tragesser from our media shop and Spencer Raley, our research director. Today we're going to discuss the rapid changes to immigration policy made during President Joe Biden's first week in office and broadly discuss what immigration reform looks like during the first 100 days of this new presidency. Now normally at this point in the podcast we would discuss some sort of recent news that happened in the immigration sphere. On today's episode we're not going to do that instead we're just going to dive right into the topic at hand which is Biden's first week in office. We've got plenty to talk about and I know that we are excited to discuss everything that's happened since January 20th. So, after 33 years of trying Joe Biden has finally achieved his childhood dream of becoming president of the United States, but a lot has changed since 1988 when he first ran for president and today. Yet immigration remains an issue that no president has been able to solve, instead most of the time presidents simply make the issue more complicated and leave a greater mess than they found. On Biden's first day in office, just hours after Chief Justice John Roberts administered the oath of office, the new president issued six executive actions addressing immigration and two additional agency directives that went out as well. So, Matthew, I want to start with you could you start off by addressing the first three of these executive actions.

Matthew:
Right so the first order deals with the sentence apportionment and illegal aliens and so President Trump issued an executive order to try and excluded illegal aliens from the 2020 Census count for the purpose of congressional apportionment and federal funding. This was a crucial step to ensure that states like New York and California who have large illegal alien populations, do not take congressional representation and federal funding from states that have smaller illegal alien populations. And let's not forget, congressional apportionment is a zero-sum affair, so the gain of one seat by state necessitates the loss of a seat in another state and the same goes with with federal funding, more federal funding will go to states that have larger populations and doesn't really take into account if someone is here legally or illegally in their state. Now with this new executive order that Biden has just put in place, sanctuary states like New York and California and Oregon can now grow their congressional representation due to their already existing illegal alien populations and this is really gonna hurt states that adhere to our federal immigration laws or federal laws and it's just not fair. These states that have more American citizens in them should be granted more political representation and federal funding so it's just disappointing to see this from President Biden and it really signals that he is wanting to side with illegal aliens more so than American citizens. The second order deals with the national emergency at our southern border. President Trump declared a national emergency at our southern border when the southern border saw record numbers of migrants coming. This was in about 2019 and this order, the emergency declaration helped construct more than 450 miles of border wall and this was really helpful because Congress was stymieing the Trump administration, they weren't really providing enough funds. And this order allowed the administration to move resources from other departments and really helped construct the 450 miles of border wall. And it's very odd that Biden wants to end this declaration for a few reasons. One: he supported the Secure Fence Act in 2006 while he was a senator and this act added several hundred miles of border wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. We're also facing a borderline border crisis already, we have illegal alien apprehensions soaring the past year even though we've had all these COVID restrictions, they're still soaring. Many caravans are forming right now because of the immigration promises his administration, the Biden administration have already indicated to the media and to the press and also, the other problem with this order is that a president can't unilaterally tell Congress to stop a project that already has funds earmarked or appropriated to it. So right now, congress has already, or rather the border wall has already 300 miles of earmarked money to build 300 more miles of this wall and if you don't take that money to build the 300 miles of border wall, not only are you wasting taxpayer money but you're also jeopardizing our national security. This wall needs to be continued to be built and it's just a great mistake by the Biden administration. In the last order I’ll talk about is the DED for Liberians and so this is a smaller order but it does have some large implications with it. so DED stands for Deferred Enforced Departure, it's a form of deportation relief for select individuals from designated countries and usually this happens when in a select country there is a major conflict like a civil war or a natural disaster like a hurricane and then the United States offers this humanitarian protection so these individuals can stay in the U.S. until the conditions in their country return back to normal. Now the problem is, this program is never temporary which is what the point of the program is it's for the conditions and the home country to improve and then the foreign nationals return back to their country. Well unfortunately this isn't happening it just keeps getting renewed, and renewed and renewed. For instance, Liberia got this DED designation in 2007 under President Bush and now we're here 14 years later and it's still being renewed, so you got to ask, at what point is Liberia going to be seen as a safe country to return to for Liberians in the United States. And I don’t think many people can answer that question. So right now, only Liberia and Venezuela have this designation, a few thousand people are impacted by this, but it just shows how the Biden administration views DED. They don't view it as temporary; they view it as permanent.

Spencer:
Yeah thanks Matthew, and yes as surprising as it may sound that's not everything he did when he first took office there's still a number more executive orders that he put in place and there are more coming as we understand it, so the first one I want to touch on regards DACA or the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program, which of course was put in place by former President Obama in 2012, quite possibly illegally by his own admission when he said that such orders have to go through Congress. A president can't just unilaterally legislate a program like that into existence. However, this program which was designed to provide certain illegal aliens who arrived in the country before the age of 16 temporary, that's an important note on it, renewable protection from deportation was eventually attempted, President Trump attempted to cancel it and of course that got tied up in court, reinstated, he tried to use it as a bargaining chip for other legislation, that never happened. And now one of President Biden's executive orders is designed simply to state that his administration is going to carry on the program. In fact, the name of the executive order is preserving and fortifying Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, very clear, very short and to the point and states that the Department of Homeland Security Secretary will take all actions that he deems appropriate, consistent and applicable to law to preserve and fortify DACA. Now of course there have been more than 600,000 DACA recipients so far, there are quite a few more that could apply that qualify, but I think it's important to understand the impacts that DACA has on the United States. It's often presented as a program that protects those who, young children who came here by no fault of their own when in reality the overwhelming majority of DACA recipients are now in their 20s and 30s, they're often presented as these genius, white lab coat individuals who are defeating the coronavirus and are essential to our economy, but again that's not the case either, less than half of DACA recipients have a high school education and many don't speak English at all. And alarmingly, a number of studies have come out recently showing that many DACA recipients are criminals. Of those who were approved for DACA status, more than 80,000 had previous arrest records and 16,000 have been arrested since receiving their status, so this isn't a program defending those who the media portray them to be, being only well-behaved geniuses that have every right to stay in the United States. In fact, quite often, it's on the contrary. Another thing that's important to note with the DACA program is that the requirements are very loosely enforced, for example if you apply for DACA as an adult, as someone who came to the United States as a child, you're supposed to have shown that you've completed high school, or that you've served in the military, however the Obama administration essentially always waived that requirement and that's why you end up with a large portion of the population unable to speak English, having no high school degree and only a very small percentage, less than one percent, actually served in the U.S. military. In fact, if you look at the number of applications versus the number of approvals, the Obama administration rubber stamped more than 99% of the applicants and did very little vetting on them, just essentially tried to approve everyone that came through and because of that, these requirements were often waived and thousands of DACA recipients have had their status revoked due to criminal activity or violating other laws or lying on the application was discovered later as a result. So, it's important to realize that DACA isn't necessarily the program that the media portrays it to be, so assuming, I think we can safely assume, and Biden has said as much, that he intends to return to how the Obama administration administered this program. It's safe to assume that we're going to go back to rubber stamping any new applicants, that it's likely that the program is going to be expanded, and that there's a very real possibility that we will be protecting criminals from deportation and that should be concerning to all American citizens. If nothing else this is a program that's in desperate need of reform and oversight and at this point it doesn't look like that's going to happen. The second executive order that I want to cover is where President Biden revoked the Trump travel ban that was enacted against countries, against seven countries that were known as hot spots for terrorist activity and where the United States had a difficult time vetting visitors, migrants and others who have obtained visas and of course despite inaccurately being labeled as an anti-Muslim Muslim ban, the list on these countries covered only a minute number of the Muslim majority countries in the world and believe it or not it was originally created by the Obama administration as a list of countries that are prone to terror and that needed additional vetting. And since the order was created by President Trump in January of 2017, it was expanded to cover other countries such as North Korea, Venezuela, or Chad. And it was it was a heavily supported move as well, in fact a political poll showed soon after it's enaction, that more than 60 percent of Americans fully supported the move and less than 30 percent fully opposed it, so the vast majority of Americans understood why this was put in place and they supported it. It was very important to preserving national security simply because we can't vet potential migrants from countries with non-functioning terrorist infiltrated or communist-run regimes. So, if we can't vet someone who's coming from a place that is full of enemies of the United States, it makes sense that we would need to pause that program until we could get to a point that we could be assured that those that are coming to the United States aren't trying to harm our country or the Americans in this country. And in the executive order that President Biden issued on this, he falsely claimed that the Department of Homeland Security will be able to undertake robust vetting of all new migrants and visitors from these countries. However, in reality, the vetting that he's talking about typically does nothing more than just consists of an interview of the applicant and having DHS officials try to determine whether or not they're offering true information or lying. That's essentially it because for many of these migrants, the countries are non-functioning or do not cooperate with the United States, so it's not like we can run a background check on someone coming from Syria through a Syrian government criminal check program that doesn't exist. It's very difficult to even vet social media accounts because oftentimes we don't have access to those or the applicants don't have them themselves, so it's essentially just an interview and we're trying to decide if the applicant is lying or not, so someone who has a very good cover story can get into the United States and have ties to terrorist organizations or other organizations that run counter to the interests of the United States. And one more concerning point on this, the Obama administration actually tracked the number of domestic terror incidents that occurred from individuals who originally came from these countries, and between 2008 and 2016 there were more than 200 incidents that occurred and there were thousands more that of either of individuals from these countries that have either been investigated by the FBI or are suspected to have had ties to terrorist organizations just based on their activities since they came to the United States. So, revoking this travel ban puts all of that risk back into the American public and there is really no excuse for it. There is no reason why we need to be bringing in a lot of foreign nationals from these countries right now, other than the argument that it's the humanitarian thing to do. And of course, right now that our country is not in an economic situation where we can be handing out a lot of humanitarian relief to other countries because we have a lot of work that needs to be done in our country, we have tens of millions of people who are still looking for gainful employment and the focus needs to be made there so there's really no excuse to be reversing this travel ban other than Biden wanting to reverse everything that former President Trump did on immigration. Finally, I want to touch quickly on interior enforcement because President Biden had another executive order revoking Trump's, I guess you could say revoking Trump's reinstatement of the practice or understanding that anyone who violates American immigration law is subject to apprehension and deportation. Of course, in the Obama era enforcement was largely targeting those who had criminal convictions, in other words had an offense other than illegally entering the United States. The Obama administration largely didn't even target those who had illegal re-entry convictions which is a criminal offense. And so, it's important to understand that going back to this policy is a message to potential illegal aliens that if you can evade border patrol and get into the country, you can stay here. And because of that, it's going to result in more illegal immigration, we're already seeing that. In fact FAIR just released our latest update of the total number of illegal aliens in the United States and in that report we discuss how once President Biden became the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, once he became the nominee and started making these promises that he would not enforce her immigration laws, that he would offer an amnesty, we saw apprehensions go up significantly at the southern border, we saw caravans forms, people started coming to the United States and that's just only increased since he's taken office, since he won the election. So again, all we're doing here is sending the message that if you can get in the United States, you're welcome to stay. And unfortunately, it's going to make the humanitarian crisis on the southern border just that much worse, because it creates a lucrative business for human smugglers to try and bring more and more people to the United States, often via very dangerous routes, through dangerous territories in Central and South America and it also gives an opportunity for human traffickers to target these caravans and to kind of up their game in these situations as well. They often like to embed themselves in these caravans and again understanding that they can get to the United States there's going to be very little enforcement mechanism in place to search them down and apprehend them. So those are just a few more of the executive orders that President Biden created here on his first couple of days in office that were related to essentially dismantling immigration enforcement in the United States.

Preston:
Yeah and he's actually gone even further or at least some of the agencies underneath the White House have. With the with the stroke of a pen, President Biden from behind the resolute desk is able to end many of President Trump's achievements on immigration, achievements in the sense that they were executive orders. And again, this is the biggest issue with executive orders, is that they're all inherently temporary and all it takes is for President Biden to sign an executive order and as long as his team followed the Administrative Procedure Act, they're good to go. But the 180 degree turn on immigration, like I was saying before, it goes beyond the Oval Office and Biden has also tasked the departments and the agencies of the federal bureaucracy to follow through on his immigration agenda and jumping off of what Spencer was saying, DHS - they just issued a hundred-day moratorium on removals, which is completely insane. This is something that Biden had promised when he was running for office and while it's not an executive order, the acting head of DHS, David Pekoske issued a memo that ends nearly all removals for 100 days, all deportations for 100 days. And alarmingly this includes all illegal aliens that have criminal records, meaning that President Biden is actually preventing the deportation of illegal alien felons that are in custody for certain felonies. And it’s unclear what positive impacts that this has on the U.S., and why the Biden administration is going out of its way to prevent these removals, particularly people that have already been found by an immigration judge to be removable from the U.S. It's not like they're picking people up off the street and just immediately putting them on a plane, these people have had due process in court, they've gone before an immigration judge, often many times. And if the immigration judge has found them removable, then we shouldn't waste any time getting them back to their home countries. But fortunately there was a U.S. district judge named Drew Tipton who just temporarily halted the deportation freeze and ruled in favor of the state of Texas, which had sued to prevent the freeze from occurring, and actually in their story about this AP News had a really interesting quote, and I’m quoting from that story right now, “The ruling also showed that just as Democratic-led states and immigration groups fought former President Donald Trump over immigration in court, often successfully, so too will Republicans with Biden in office.” So, this is just the first of what could be many court challenges to what Biden is doing at the executive level. And then another thing that happened at the department level is that they paused accepting new people into the Migrant Protection Protocols program which our listeners at home probably know as the “Remain in Mexico” program and without getting too into the weeds, what this was is that this pretty much, people who were applying for asylum had to wait in Mexico while their asylum claims were going through court in the United States. And this prevented people from just applying for asylum and then disappearing into the interior of the country and never showing up for their court case, so it took away that incentive to apply for asylum and it allowed those people who do have strong claims, to quickly adjudicate them through the court system and then they can come into the U.S. once they've finally gotten asylum. And so I wanted to now kind of open this up to you guys, for our listeners at home you're going to be hearing this after this has already occurred, but on Friday the 29th, Joe Biden is widely expected to issue another round of immigration executive orders and we've seen a lot of these kicked around what these are going to be they've leaked to reporters at the Wall Street Journal that they're going to roll back the public charge rule, they're going to freeze the asylum agreements with the Northern Triangle countries related to asylum, they might even completely stop the Remain in Mexico program, so not just pause it, they're going to actually rescind that memo. So, I wanted to open this up to you guys, we've already had round one of the executive orders that we've talked about, how much worse is round two going to be, if in fact this reporting from the Wall Street Journal is correct?

Spencer:
Well just jumping on the public charge issue, for example again this is one of those executive orders that in my mind doesn't make a lot of sense because from essentially the founding of our country, there was an understanding there was legal framework in place to try and ensure that anyone who comes to the United States has the ability to take care of themselves, to provide for themselves here in the country. It doesn't make any sense to invite individuals into the United States other than perhaps for some humanitarian reasons when we have those programs, the refugee program, the asylum program those avenues, but just for other immigration programs, it doesn't make any sense to invite individuals to come to the United States and potentially, immediately need to jump onto some sort of welfare program or receive some kind of assistance from the federal government in order to survive in the United States. And so real briefly, essentially all the public charge rule does, is it requires that an individual provide some sort of proof that they can provide for themselves, or that they have someone who is willing to back them up and provide for them should they not meet the necessary requirements. And this is a significant issue because the public charge rule has very rarely been enforced and what President Trump did with his policy changes in 2018/2019 was firm up some of those rules and essentially direct that the federal government begin to enforce them. And of course, that was held up in court until then near the end of his presidency, but the reason this was such an issue and President Trump needed to address it, was because large numbers of migrants right now end up on U.S. welfare rolls and the rate is much higher than those for U.S. citizens and a big reason for that is because most migrants come to the United States now through chain migration. They have family members here who can sponsor them to come to the United States so they're not qualifying through some kind of work program or education or another avenue that would look solely at their merit. Instead, they're coming to the United States because they have family here and because of that you end up with a lot of people who do not have necessarily the financial stability that's necessary in order to subside in the United States and to live here, and all public charge does, is it makes that a necessary requirement in order to come to the United States and it's one that makes sense. However, it's expected that the Biden administration is going to roll that back in to a large degree and make the enforcement of public charge a non-priority for the federal government.

Matthew:
Right and to go after the public charge order too, this is the worst time to place this order, I mean our economy is already weakened we have tens of millions of Americans who are unemployed, who are seeking financial relief, COVID-19 relief, accessing unemployment and other welfare programs, and these should be going to people that are U.S. citizens, that are here already. This should not be going to people that we have complete control to screen and determine if they're going to be a public charge or requiring federal assistance from our government and so I think, especially now given the circumstances where we don't really have a lot of resources to spare, this is not the time to be doing this right now. And I want to mention a survey I found, it's called the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) and they determined that for Medicaid alone, that nearly 80,000 new immigrants enroll in this program each year, and so this study is a few years old, but I can only assume that this has climbed as we've had more immigrants come into our country since then and the Biden administration only wants to increase these numbers and so I think that's a legitimate question to ask, is if someone's going to immigrate here, are they going to be a public charge? Are they going to be requiring assistance, welfare assistance from our government? And maybe that's the case, but then do they have a relative who can help them out if they don't have enough funds to be sustainable in our country? And so yeah this is a bad move all around, especially given our circumstances. And aside from this public charge order, I want to talk about briefly the migration pacts, if those get unraveled with the Northern Triangle countries Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, I mean this is going to lead to another border crisis. I mean it's clear enough what these pacts can do, they help curb asylum abuse and they really kind of control and deter illegal immigration and at a time where there's a global pandemic right now, the Biden administration should not be unraveling these orders that secure our borders and that restore integrity in our asylum system. And this is another mistake, it's like they're setting themselves up for immediate failure, this is they just entered office, they have a crumbling economy, they have the COVID-19 pandemic to take care of, and now they're probably gonna be plagued with a border crisis. And this is completely preventable, there are other mechanisms in place to encourage asylum, to encourage applying for asylum, encouraging refugees to come here, but this is just not doing it in the correct way, to unravel these agreements.

Spencer:
And one more thing I want to add to this is President Biden is promising a massive amnesty and so like you've already touched on Matthew, we've got a severe unemployment crisis in the United States right now so a lot of our welfare programs already being taxed significantly, but also you have more than 14 million illegal aliens that are looking at soon gaining lawful status and eventually citizenship quite possibly. If that happens, we have studies here at FAIR that show illegal aliens, on average make barely $30,000 per household, that qualifies for essentially every federal program in the books and most state programs. So, if that happens, you're going to see an already overtaxed welfare program just be under that much more stress, so you include that then you pile on rolling back the public charge rule and you're gonna see the fiscal cost of this to taxpayers is going to be massive, unlike anything we've ever seen before.

Preston:
And to jump back to Matthew what you were talking about with the asylum agreements, it really makes no sense to rescind them without any other kind of plan in place. Whether you agree with them or not they worked in terms of they largely were able to stop the flow of asylum-seeking migrants after the summer of 2019 and if you take that away without changing anything, any of the underlying conditions - we haven't turned off the jobs magnet, we haven't, especially now with what's going on at the executive level, we certainly have not gotten rid of catch and release. I mean all of these issues that were creating this crisis in the spring and summer of 2019 are still there. The only thing that has prevented it from happening again - one is COVID-19 and some of those border restrictions, but also it was that we were able to put in place these mechanisms with the agreements with the Northern Triangle countries with Remain in Mexico program, with some of the assistance that we were giving Mexico for their southern border, if you take all of that away, there's nothing there's nothing stopping you from creating another crisis. And I think it's so important to emphasize that I think this is a mistake from even from Biden's perspective of, yes, they want to help these asylum-seeking aliens, to help these other people, but I think it's a mistake to not have something else in place and to just get rid of this. And I think it's going to create a real headache for them in the future when they're juggling all of these competing crises and then this one gets added on to it where they have to address a huge surge at the border and there's over 100,000 people being apprehended by Border Patrol every month, on top of COVID, on top of the economy, on top of issues with foreign affairs and in global politics. And so, I think this is just a kind of a real mistake just from a policy angle on their point and I really can't emphasize that enough.

Matthew:
No, I think it's a complete, colossal disaster, I mean not only with the day one initiatives, but also the ones we're expecting on Friday. It's like, he's almost that Biden is just appealing to this radical fringe group of his party of these open borders people. He's taking into account special interests, not the national interest. I mean we're in a global pandemic, okay we have one of the highest COVID-19 rates out of any other country in the world and he's not addressing his EOs on COVID, he's not addressing the EOs on the economy, it's mainly these radical fringe immigration proposals to appeal to a very small group of his party and it's really like, it's unimaginable I just it's beyond me how what's happening right now.

Preston:
Yeah, it's, we knew this was going to happen. He didn't hide during the campaign and pretend like he was gonna do anything different than what he's doing right now, but elections have consequences and the consequence of the 2020 presidential election and then the subsequent elections in the in the House and the Senate shows that they are they're gonna try to push this through, not only at the at the executive level but, Biden has promised that they're gonna introduce some pretty big legislation and of course that's going to be an episode on this podcast in the future, but just for our listeners out there to remember this is largely going to be the next four years, is a lot of a lot more of these policies. It's going to be very different than what we had in the past four years under President Trump, and a very different vision for what immigration reform looks like between these two administrations. And on that note, we'll wrap up because that's about all the time that we have for today. We hope that you've enjoyed today's episode and learned about some of the early actions that President Biden has taken to reshape immigration in his image. And as a reminder, we'll be releasing a new episode every other Monday. Our episodes are available on most platforms including Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts. You can visit our website www.fairus.org and our Twitter handle @FAIRImmigration to access these episodes as well. So please spread the word and share this podcast with people you think might be interested in learning more about immigration and its impact on the United States and until next time this has been Understanding Immigration presented by FAIR.