US president-elect Joe Biden said it would take months to roll back some of US President Donald Trump’s actions on immigration, tempering expectations he generated during his campaign and one that might rile advocates pushing for speedy action on the issue.
His comments on Tuesday echoed those made by two of his top foreign policy advisers on Monday in an interview with Spanish wire service EFE, hitting the brakes on rolling back Trump’s restrictive asylum policies.
Susan Rice, Biden’s incoming domestic policy adviser, and Jake Sullivan, his pick for national security adviser, as well as Biden himself, said that moving too quickly could create a new crisis at the border.
Photo: AFP
Speaking to reporters in Wilmington, Delaware, Biden said he has already started discussing the issues with the Mexican president and “our friends in Latin America,” and that “the timeline is to do it so that we in fact make it better, not worse.”
“The last thing we need is to say we’re going to stop immediately, the access to asylum, the way it’s being run now, and then end up with 2 million people on our border,” Biden said.
He said that more funding is needed for more asylum judges to process claims, and promised that while he would work to loosen Trump’s asylum restrictions, “it’s going to take probably the next six months to put that in place.”
His comments came as interceptions along the border have increased in the past few months. US authorities encountered migrants at the border with Mexico more than 70,000 times in October and last month, four times April’s tally.
Some experts predict the surge could increase in the early months of Biden’s presidency, as a response to the damage wrought by the two hurricanes that have pummeled Central America and the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as expectations of a more humane approach to immigration from the Biden administration.
Sullivan and Rice both said in their interview with EFE that Biden would take executive action where possible to address issues with the immigration system, and emphasized plans to provide humanitarian aid and help bolster Latin American economies to try to address the root cause of the influx of immigrants to the US.
Biden “will work to promptly undo” Trump’s deals with Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador that let the US transfer asylum seekers to those countries, and would “follow through” on his commitment to end a Trump-era program that returns undocumented border crossers to Mexico to await their legal proceedings, Sullivan said.
On his campaign Web site, Biden promised to end the agreement with Mexico, known as the Migrant Protection Protocols, within the first 100 days of his presidency.
However, Sullivan said that many of those reforms would take time.
He said that “increasing processing capacity and changing policy at the border will take time,” and warned those considering fleeing for the US to wait, predicting it would take “months” for the Biden administration to fully implement their plans with respect to Latin America.
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