The pro-immigration reform group FWD.US. recently released a study based on the 2019 American Community Survey that found that over two-thirds of undocumented immigrant workers are in frontline jobs that are deemed essential in the fight against COVID-19 in the U.S.
Immigrant advocacy groups recently met with President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team on family separation to discuss a plan to address the trauma and rebuild trust of immigrant families who have experienced family separation.
The U.S. Supreme Court threw out a lawsuit meant to block President Trump’s plan to leave out immigrants from the population count, which determines the allocation of congressional districts to states.
The U.S. government is planning on deporting more than a dozen immigrant children and parents at a Texas immigration detention center, including a four-year-old girl with a broken arm who is in need of surgery.
The recently passed $900 billion COVID relief bill will include mixed-status immigrant families with undocumented family members, making them eligible to receive stimulus checks, which they were not able to receive with the first stimulus package last spring. Mixed-status families with one Social Security Number-holder will also become retroactively eligible for the checks that were a part of the CARES Act.
In 2017, mother and son Leticia and Yovany traveled from Guatemala and crossed the Rio Grande to seek asylum in the United States. Soon after, they were detained and separated. Speaking to Catherine Rampell of The Washington Post, Leticia and Yovany describe the trauma of such separation, something her son likened to “being a flower without water” and call on the U.S. government and the American public to redress the harm done to them and countless other families.
Despite a preliminary injunction issued on November 18th that blocked the Trump administration from turning back unaccompanied children at the border, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) flight with 33 children took off for Guatemala. ICE officials claim that they were not aware of the ruling at the time the flight departed. However, immigration advocates have stated that the children should be brought back to the United States due to the judge’s decision.
In this piece, Jessica Blatt traces the intersecting traumas that immigrant children experience from the countries they leave behind to their detention at the border of a country they believed they could seek refuge in. The longstanding, compounding traumas these children face are, according to Blatt, tantamount to a mental health emergency. However, through collective action in support of legislative measures, including the Keep Families Together Act and electing legislators concerned about immigrant children’s welfare, the United States can work to mitigate continued harm.
During its tenure, the Trump administration enacted more than 400 policy changes aimed at immigration. While many of these regressive policies can be overturned by the incoming Biden administration through executive orders and directives, Gomez and Gonzalez indicate that others could take months or years to undo. A list of possible actions Biden could take in the first 100 days, like halting construction on the border wall, raising the refugee cap, and preserving and expanding DACA, are all seemingly within reach. However, immigration advocates contend that rescinding policy is one thing, but hoping to undo the damage is another task entirely.
In this opinion piece for The Hill, Gregory Chen, the senior director for government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), explains the glaring lack of attention paid to how the judicial system has been seismically changed under the Trump administration. Chen states that any comprehensive plan to reverse this course under a new administration will mean seeking to restore the nation’s courts’ independence and fairness.
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