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BIDEN’S TRUE TOP PRIORITY. The new Biden administration says it must act quickly, and act with a flurry of executive orders, because the nation is experiencing not one, not two, not three, but four crises. “We face four overlapping and compounding crises,” new chief of staff Ron Klain wrote in a memo a few days before inauguration. “The COVID-19 crisis, the resulting economic crisis, the climate crisis, and a racial equity crisis.” Thus, Klain argued, President Biden should undo much of what President Trump did, as quickly as possible.
So Biden had a big first day, issuing 17 executive actions. Those actions tell us something about his priorities. And judging by his first day, it appears that his top priority was not any one of those four “overlapping and compounding crises.” Instead, Biden’s top priority — again, judging by the things he chose to do first — is immigration.
Of Biden’s 17 actions, three dealt with coronavirus, two dealt with the economy, two dealt with climate, two dealt with racial equity, one dealt with the census, one dealt with ethics, one dealt with regulation, and five dealt with immigration. (Here is a handy list from CNN.) Plus, Biden introduced just one piece of legislation on his first day in office, and it was a comprehensive immigration reform plan called the U.S. Citizenship Act, which, among many other things, would provide a pathway to citizenship for the millions of immigrants in the United States illegally. Plus, Biden’s acting head of the Department of Homeland Security ordered a 100-day pause in deportations. And finally, another one of Biden’s executive actions, the one on the census, was immigration related, because it dealt with counting illegal immigrants in the census.
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So whatever Biden and his team said about his Day One priorities, especially about the terrible toll that COVID has taken, it’s fair to say the top priority was immigration. It is perhaps the top issue for the Democratic base, from grassroots organizers to big tech billionaires, and so it is the top issue for the new Democratic president.
Delving into all of Biden’s immigration plans would take several newsletters. So for the moment, let’s deal with just one of his actions — the moratorium on deportations. During the Democratic presidential primary campaign, Biden refused to advocate a deportation freeze, instead defending the Obama administration’s deportation policy. But he came under heavy pressure from Hispanic activist groups and ultimately changed his position. “Vice President Biden is absolutely committed to a 100 day moratorium,” the Biden campaign said in a joint statement with the Latino Victory Fund in February 2020.
“The first hundred days of my administration, no one — no one — will be deported at all,” Biden said in a March 2020 debate. “From that point on, the only deportations that will take place are commissions of felonies in the United States of America.”
According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the U.S. deported 267,258 people in Fiscal Year 2019. That is 732 people a day, or 73,200 people in a 100-day period. (The number fell to 185,884 in the virus-plagued Fiscal Year 2020.) Those were not immigrants rounded up and summarily thrown out of the country. They were all people who had their cases adjudicated, who had gone through the system, had been before an immigration judge — the kind of process Biden says he wants to expand — and been judged subject to deportation. ICE says that more than 90 percent of them had “criminal convictions or pending criminal charges.”
So now, for at least the next three months, that process stops cold. Not entirely cold — Biden’s order says the U.S. can still deport an illegal immigrant if there is a “written finding by the Director of ICE” that the immigrant “had engaged in or is suspected of terrorism or espionage, or otherwise poses a danger to the national security of the United States.” In addition, ICE can deport people here illegally who have arrived in the U.S. since November 1, 2020. That is essentially the election, meaning that Biden has given himself the option to deport someone who entered the U.S. illegally after the election specifically with the belief that the new administration would not deport him.
But those are just options. Biden does not have to exercise them. And remember Biden promised that “no one” would be deported in his first 100 days. So tens of thousands of illegal immigrants, the great majority of them with criminal convictions or pending criminal charges, will stay in the country. And once their deportations have been stopped, why would they be re-started? Biden’s promise to the Democratic base is to cut deportations to an absolute minimum, and he made good on it, on Day One.
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