Immigration policy of the Joe Biden administration

Presidential Proclamation 10141 – Ending Discriminatory Bans on Entry to the United States

On January 20, 2021, soon after his inauguration, Biden halted the construction of Trump's Mexican border wall,[2] ending the national emergency declared by the Trump administration in February 2018.[3] Biden also ended the Trump travel ban, a series of three executive orders imposed by Donald Trump on 14 countries, most of them Muslim, in January 2017.[2][3] Biden also reaffirmed protections to DACA recipients and urged Congress to enact permanent protections for the 700,000 undocumented immigrants benefited by the policy.[1] The same day, Biden sent a memorandum to the Department of State reinstating Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) for Liberians, deferring the deportation of any "person without nationality who last habitually resided in Liberia, who is present in the United States and who was under a grant of DED as of January 10, 2021" until June 30, 2022.[5][6] The administration also issued a pause on deportations from the Department of Homeland Security for the first 100 days of Biden's presidency.[7]

On January 21, Biden proposed a bill that, if passed, would replace the word "alien" with "noncitizen" in United States immigration law.[8][9]

On January 22, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the Biden administration on the grounds of violating Biden's written pledge to cooperatively work with the State of Texas.[10]

The same day, Biden called Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to speak about immigration, where Biden spoke of reducing immigration from Mexico to the United States by targeting the root causes,[11] including $4 billion to aid development in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.[12]

On January 23, Biden introduced an immigration bill to Congress.[13] As introduced, the bill would give a path to citizenship to 11 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States. The bill will also make it easier for foreign workers to stay in the U.S. It is likely the bill will be significantly more modest as it goes through Congress.[2][14][15]

On January 26, federal judge Drew B. Tipton blocked the Biden administration's 100 day deportation memorandum, citing that the state of Texas would indeed "suffer imminent and irreparable harm" and the restraining order requested by Paxton would not harm the administration nor the public.[16]

On February 4, Biden signed a new wave of executive orders aimed at rescinding several of Trump's immigration policies, including raising the annual refugee admissions to 125,000 in fiscal year 2022 after Trump slashed it to a mere 15,000, a historic low.[17] It also called for a review to determine whether Afghan and Iraqi applicants for the Special Immigrant Visa were unduly delayed. The order also called for a report on the effect of man-made climate change on environmental immigration to the United States and reversed a 2019 executive order restricting federal funding for the resettlement of refugees unless state and local governments to consent to it, though the order was already struck down by a federal judge in January 2020.

On February 7, Biden began the implementation of new guidelines for Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, forbidding or restricting them from seeking out deportations on the basis of "drug based crimes (less serious offenses), simple assault, DUI, money laundering, property crimes, fraud, tax crimes, solicitation, or charges without convictions," as stated by Tae Johnson, the acting director of ICE, instead prioritizing "violent behavior, well-documented gang affiliations," and a record of child abuse, murder, rape, and major drug infractions.[4] Deportations merely on the basis of at least 10-year old felonies or "loose" gang affiliations would also be prevented. The guidelines also required permission from the director of ICE for agents to arrest suspects outside of jails and prisons. As of February 7, the guidelines are awaiting confirmation from Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas.

President of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service Krish O'Mara Vignarajah commended Biden's eight-fold increase of the refugee cap, stating that it would save the lives of "hundreds of thousands fleeing violence and persecution."[17]

As many as 160 criminal justice and immigration advocacy groups, however, wrote and signed a letter arguing Biden simply reversing Trump's immigration policies would not be enough to achieve comprehensive immigration reform and racial justice, citing equally harmful immigration policies enacted during the Bush and Obama administrations such as Operation Streamline.[19] Jacinta Gonzalez, president of Mijente, criticized Biden's initial immigration policy, arguing that "[Biden] said he would phase out private prisons but didn't end contracts with private detention centers where most immigrants are being locked up," in reference to Biden's termination of federal contracts with private prisons. Activists also referenced the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Forces, a group intended to bridge the divide between the moderate and progressive wings of the party, and whose recommendations included the end of "mass prosecutions of individuals who cross the border without regards to the facts and circumstances of their cases, through practices like Operation Streamline, that deny individuals their right to a fair hearing and due process," as well as the decriminalization of illegal immigration and prioritization of services to provide economic and humanitarian aid to undocumented immigrants. The groups also stated that several of the Trump administration's policies, most notably the family separation policy, had yet to be reversed by the president despite it being within his power.

In response to Biden's order on February 7, 2021, an anonymous ICE official chafed that the Biden administration had "abolished ICE without abolishing ICE [...] The pendulum swing is so extreme. It literally feels like we’ve gone from the ability to fully enforce our immigration laws to now being told to enforce nothing."[4] Other ICE officials and agents argued that said changes were more dramatic than even Biden promised during his campaign. On the other hand, former acting director of ICE under the Obama administration, John Sandweg, commended the actions, criticizing the Trump administration's policies as authoritarian and distracting from violent criminals, and drawing the comparison that "No one judges the FBI by the number of arrests they make. They judge them by the quality of arrests."