Photo / Joe Flood
Rights group United We Dream warned April 27 that unless he takes immediate steps to improve his administration’s treatment of immigrants, President Joe Biden is at serious risk of repeating the destructive failures of former President Barack Obama, who deported roughly three million people during his eight years in office.
Despite Biden’s characterization of Obama’s mass deportations as a “mistake” and pledge to usher in a more humane immigration system, United We Dream estimates that the administration has deported just over 300,000 people since January—largely using a Trump-era policy called Title 42.
The policy was first issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in March 2020—at the start of the coronavirus pandemic—and has been kept in place by the Biden administration. As Human Rights Watch (HRW) explained earlier this month, “The Title 42 expulsion policy has effectively closed the U.S. border to nearly all asylum seekers based on the misapplication of an obscure, 75-year-old public health law.”
Cynthia Garcia of United We Dream stressed that “Title 42 was designed under one of the most anti-immigrant administrations in modern history.”
“President Biden and the Department of Homeland Security must be reminded that their inaction to protect vulnerable immigrant communities seeking refuge in the U.S. is not only putting lives on the line; it upholds a white nationalist immigration system that seeks to expel and keep Black and brown immigrants out at any cost,” said Garcia, who voiced dismay at the Biden administration’s deportation of vulnerable Haitians and others.
According to a report released late last month by the Haitian Bridge Alliance and other advocacy groups, the Biden administration used Title 42 to deport more Haitians during its first weeks in power than the Trump administration did in all of Fiscal Year 2020.
“Reflecting on his time as vice president, President Biden acknowledged that the Obama administration was wrong in deporting over 2.5 million people and vowed to never make that mistake again when he took office,” Garcia continued. “President Biden is well on track to repeat history. Now, he must make a choice: repeat the mistakes of the Obama administration or do everything in his power to end the cruelty of detentions, expulsions, and deportations and show that he is a president of his word.”
See full article at Common Dreams.
Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.
@johnsonjakep • jake@commondreams.org
