The Biden administration recently announced that is has canceled border wall projects that were being funded by funds that were originally intended for the Department of Defense.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has announced that families separated at the border will be allowed to decide whether to reunite in their home countries or the U.S. Should they decide to reunify in the U.S., legal pathways to remain here and providing resources for transportation, healthcare, and mental health services will be explored.
The number of migrant children in custody in the United States has more than doubled since this time last year, testing the Biden administration’s promise for a more humane immigration policy approach. Despite these challenges, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has said that the administration plans to “re-engineer” the process for handling unaccompanied children to make it more efficient.
7-year-old Paisley has become an unlikely activist for refugees after reading a story about them from the Bible. At just 6-years-old she collected almost 300 stuffed animals, delivered toiletries and supplies, and raised $50,000 to open a school for refugee children – and she is still on a mission to help. She has pledged to sleep outside of her house every night until all children separated from their parents at the border are reunited. “I’m never gonna stop changing the world…I’m gonna do it forever,” Paisley says.
A new task force initiated by the Biden administration focusing upon reunifying over 1,000 families separated at the border will begin examining which pathways will allow the United States to begin to unravel the chaos created through the previous administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy. While presidential powers are being explored as temporary solutions, it appears that the solution offering the most permanent results will be through legislation.
The Biden administration is restarting the Central American Migrants program allowing for parents from this region with legal status in the United States to request a two-year renewable approval for their children to enter the country. The restart will occur through a two-phase process beginning with processing applications denied after the Trump administration halted the program in 2017. The program will begin accepting new applications in the coming weeks.
The approval of two immigration bills in the House, the American Dream and Promise Act and the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, address status issues for agricultural workers and undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children. Both are promising adjustments to the U.S. immigration system, signaling the beginning of renewed immigration proposals introduced by President Biden. However, with GOP pushback on such legislation, each bill’s future in the Senate is uncertain.
To bring context to the influx of children and teens arriving at our border, which increased by over 60% in February and where, on average, 500 children are arriving every day, a human rights lawyer and vice president for policy and advocacy at Kids in Need of Defense (KIND), Jennifer Podkul, discusses what we know about the arriving unaccompanied minors, why they are being held longer in detention, and what the Biden administration is doing to assist in placing children in the care of their sponsors.
Focusing on the story of one foster family who has taken in immigrant children who arrived unaccompanied at the U.S.-Mexico border, this article uses their experiences to address the broader issues that organizations are facing in rapidly trying to find temporary homes for children in the aftermath of policies like Title 42 which rapidly expelled children rather than reuniting them with sponsors in the United States.
By the end of March, the United States will be currently housing 15,500 children. 5,000 of these children are being kept in a Border Patrol tent facility well past the 72-hour limit prescribed by U.S. law. Due to limited bed space and the increasing number of unaccompanied minors, the sole refugee agency with HSS has had to open makeshift facilities to get children away from Border Patrol facilities. Thus far, the Biden administration has refused to expel these children back to their home countries, calling the previous administration’s practice of doing so inhumane.
© 2024 CICW.