Washington, DC – In a stark departure from the previous administration’s approach to immigration, US President Joe Biden, together with leaders of 20 nations in the Western Hemisphere, unveiled a declaration intended to guide a coordinated response to growing migration pressures in the region. The Los Angeles Declaration, announced on Friday at the end of the ninth Americas Summit, includes giving aid to communities most affected by migration, expanding legal pathways for migrants to enter countries, humane border management, and coordinated emergency responses. Migration experts have said the Biden administration’s focus on multilateral regional cooperation and its recognition that migration is a phenomenon that needs to be managed, rather than stopped, is far removed from the stance of his predecessor, former President Donald Trump. Still, experts have said, there are questions about how the terms of the declaration – which are non-binding – will be executed, and whether the migrant programmes that were announced will do enough to address the needs in the region. “There are more carrots and fewer sticks,” said Theresa Cardinal Brown, managing director of immigration and cross-border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think-tank based in Washington, DC. “There are promises of investment in the region and trying to help countries that are hosting migrants with financial and other resource support,” Cardinal Brown told Al Jazeera. “But it’s one thing to promise more visas, and it’s another thing to process more visas,” she said, in reference to the US’s inflated backlog of visa applications. Since taking office in 2021, the Biden administration has sought to reverse Trump’s legacy on migration. As a candidate on the campaign trail, Trump vilified migrants. As president, he focused on reducing migration in the US by slashing visa and refugee programmes, and building a wall along the US-Mexico border. In 2019, he threatened to impose tariffs on Mexico if it did not do more to stop migrants from travelling to the US. “In terms of the strategy, the goals and the manner in which migration is being undertaken, it is a light and day departure from the Trump administration’s bat-wielding unilateralism,” David Bier, an immigration policy expert at the Cato Institute, told Al Jazeera. “But this administration does not want to spend a lot of time highlighting immigration domestically,” Bier said. “They haven’t found a way to make it a winner.” Republican leaders have seized on the topic of migration as an election issue, specifically at the southern border where numbers have reached record levels. The stakes are high for Biden as the US heads for midterm elections in November, where Republicans are vying for control of Congress. In a fact sheet published on Friday detailing the declaration’s main points, the White House laid out measures that the US has already implemented in recent months, as well as adding some new commitments. The Biden administration said it was committed to resettling 20,000 refugees from the Americas during the next two years and to providing $314m in aid for countries that are hosting refugees and migrants, which includes Mexico, Colombia and Costa Rica. The administration also said it would resume efforts to reunite Haitian and Cuban families in the US. “It’s certainly a step up from what we’ve done in previous years, when only a few hundred or a few thousand refugees from Latin America have been admitted each year,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council. “But it is also about four days’ worth of border encounters,” Reichlin-Melnick told Al Jazeera. In the fiscal year 2021, just 11,411 refugees were resettled in the US from all around the world after Trump slashed the refugee admission programme. Meanwhile, Mexico has committed to integrating 20,000 refugees into its labour market during the next three years. While Costa Rica will give protection to migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela who arrived in the country before March 2020. “Each of us is signing up to commitments that recognise the challenges we all share and the responsibility that impacts on all of our nations,” Biden said during the ceremonial unveiling of the pact. “This is just a start, he said. “Much more work remains, to state the obvious.” So far, migrant groups have commended the commitments in the declaration, saying they echo some of their demands and provide a good starting point for regional cooperation. But they also voiced concern about implementation and funding, and whether there would be any follow-up before the next summit in four years. “It is unclear how these commitments will be monitored and evaluated,” Julio Rank Wright, deputy regional director for Latin America at the International Rescue Committee (IRC) said in a statement on Friday. “Without long-term funding and political will to protect those displaced throughout the region, the IRC is fearful that the Declaration’s intentions will fall flat and leave millions of people in the Americas behind,” Wright said. MCALLEN, TEX.—Sister Norma Pimentel, the Catholic nun who directs the Humanitarian Respite Center in the Rio Grande Valley, surprised me when I asked about right-wing commentators and politicians using the baby formula shortage to vilify immigrants. Fox News, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, and others claim that “illegal” migrant kids are getting formula while American children are not. “Our guests don’t want baby formula,” Sister Norma explained. “They’ve spent months walking and riding buses through Central America and Mexico, and their kids got used to drinking ordinary milk.” Republicans and Fox News are distorting the truth about the southern US border, and the rest of the US mainstream media is failing to clear it up. On May 20, a Trump-appointed federal judge effectively ordered the Biden administration to continue violating the US Refugee Act of 1980, which guarantees the right to apply for asylum. Judge Robert Summerhays, directed the US to keep using a public health measure called Title 42 to immediately deport migrants without letting them plead their cases. (The purported justification is to stop the spread of Covid-19, but the Centers for Disease Control says there is no epidemiological reason to keep Title 42 in effect.) Over the past two years, the United States has used Title 42 to carry out 1.8 million expulsions. It was due to expire on May 23, but Summerhays extended it indefinitely. As a result, many thousands of people remain in refugee camps in Mexico. Many migrants thought that Title 42 would end and that they would be allowed to apply for asylum. But for more than two years, Washington has blocked efforts to claim asylum, creating a backlog. If you essentially shut down any US government agency for that long, the Passport Office for instance, the number of people demanding their documents would surge. The refugee crisis at the border is a direct consequence of US policy.
Sister Norma said cartels target refugees by their non-Mexican accents. Migrants have long known that if they have US contacts, they should hide those phone numbers, because the criminals in Mexico will raise their extortion demands. A young women named Esperanza Ramirez told me back in 2014 that she concealed a tiny piece of paper with the number of her sister on Long Island in case the cartels kidnapped her and her 3-year-old daughter on the road north. Sister Norma told me that the situation is even more dangerous today: “Now, the criminals force them by saying, ‘I’m going to kill your son if you don’t tell me who your contacts are.’ They put a gun to the child’s head. ‘Call your relatives in America and tell them to send the ransom or else.’” A study last year by Human Rights First, an advocacy group, reported more than 6,000 kidnappings and violent attacks against asylum seekers after the US sent them back to Mexico—in only the first seven months of the Biden presidency. At least the Biden administration is admitting families with children, instead of continuing the cruel Trump family separation policy. The Respite Center in McAllen was once a night club, with dark purple walls, and now welcomes 400 to 500 arrivals every day, nearly all families with children. The former bar dispenses toiletries, clothing, and diapers. On one wall is a large US map. Respite Center workers, many of them volunteers, put the migrants in touch with family members who are already in the country, who then send money to buy bus tickets to their final destinations. There they will await hearing dates in immigration courts for their asylum applications. Patrick Déjean, originally from Haiti, will soon catch a bus to New Jersey with his wife, 5-year-old son, and 1-year-old daughter. Déjean, in his early 30s, is an electrician. He left Haiti in 2016 when it became clear to him that the country was not rebuilding after the 2010 earthquake and that gang warfare in the capital, Port-au-Prince, was spinning out of control. He was one of tens of thousands of Haitians who took one-way flights to Chile during this time. There he met his wife, who was also from Haiti, and they started a family. But Covid hit, the economy crashed, and he, like many other Haitians in Chile and Brazil, trekked northward. The most difficult stage was through the Darien Gap in eastern Panama, a rainforest area used by drug smugglers. “We didn’t eat for five days,” he said in Spanish. “Our group all survived, but we did pass many people who died along the way.” The Déjeans reached the United States and, because they had children with them, they were allowed to enter. Under Title 42, migrants without kids are nearly always turned back. Mexico will not accept returnees from Haiti, and so the US deports them by the planeload. There were 15 expulsion flights to Haiti in the week leading up to May 23. It is a painful irony that the US sent Haitians back to a nation torn by gang warfare and lashed by hunger on the same week that The New York Times ran a series of articles showing how Haitians had to pay crippling indemnities to France to maintain their freedom during the 19th century and beyond. On May 20, a federal district court judge issued a nationwide injunction ordering the Biden administration not to terminate its Title 42 order, which requires U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to process illegal land border crossers promptly (15 minutes in an outdoor setting) — without asylum screening or other Title 8 immigration processes — and expel them back to Mexico through the closest port of entry. Nearly 2 million migrants have been expelled under the order since it was instituted in 2020 as part of former President Trump’s pandemic response. The administration disagrees and intends to appeal the decision to a higher court. According to the administration, “The authority to set public health policy nationally should rest with the Centers for Disease Control [CDC], not with a single district court.” I agree that national public health policies should be set by the CDC, not by district court judges. But that’s not what happened in this case. The Title 42 order was issued to reduce the number of migrants held in congregate settings at ports of entry and Border Patrol stations because of the risk it posed of introducing, transmitting, and spreading COVID-19 in the United States. CDC terminated the Title 42 order on April 1, 2022, because less burdensome measures are now available to mitigate those risks. The termination, however, wasn’t scheduled to be effective until May 23 because DHS needed time to institute operational plans for implementing the termination order and to establish additional COVID-19 mitigation measures. Notice-and-Comment Requirements
The CDC did not comply with the notice-and-comment requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) when it terminated the Title 42 order. According to the CDC, its termination order was not a rule. Moreover, even if it were a rule, it would qualify for the “good cause” and “foreign affairs” exceptions to those requirements. The CDC claims that there is good cause to dispense with the APA requirements because the Title 42 order is restricting asylum applications and other immigration processes, and provisions in Title 42 state that such orders should last no longer than necessary to protect public health. It would be impracticable and contrary to public interest and immigration laws, the administration argued, to delay the effective date of the termination beyond May 23. As to the foreign affairs exception, the CDC claims that the Title 42 order concerns ongoing discussions with Canada, Mexico, and other countries regarding immigration and how best to control COVID-19 transmission over shared borders; consequently, it directly involves a foreign affairs function of the United States. Twenty-four states filed a suit seeking to enjoin the CDC’s termination. The states contend that termination would cause a major increase in undocumented immigrants coming into their states which, among other things, would increase their law enforcement and healthcare costs. They also claim that the termination order violates the APA’s notice-and-comment requirements. Judge’s Decision The judge decided the administration had not advanced its argument that its termination order is not a rule. In any event, the termination is a “rule” because it will end the Title 8 immigration restrictions and resume normal immigration enforcement operations. Thus, according to the judge, it is an agency statement of general or particular applicability and future effect “designed to implement, interpret, or prescribe law or policy.” The CDC’s justification for invoking the “good cause” exception, the judge determined, is flawed for at least four reasons. |