Rogelio V. Solis/AP Photo
Attendees at a House Homeland Security Committee field hearing concerning the August 2019 ICE raids throughout Mississippi that resulted in the arrests of nearly 700 food plant workers
Before the second night of the Democratic National Convention, Progressive Democrats of America gathered 200 of their fellow progressives (on Zoom, of course) to discuss the immigration priorities of (they hoped) the next Democratic administration. Featuring speakers from several immigrant rights groups, the panel declared that a Biden administration must not return to Obama-era immigration policies.
Erika Andiola, chief advocacy officer of the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES), kicked off the panel by describing her own experience as part of the Obama-era program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). She was 11 years old when she arrived, undocumented, with her family. Now, her mother is in deportation proceedings “because of a raid that happened at my house by ICE,” Andiola said. Her mother stood trial under the Obama administration, but “we were able to stop her deportation,” she said. “But as soon as Trump got into office,” she continued, “we received a letter asking my mom to leave the U.S.”
Other speakers included Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García (D-IL), Phoenix immigration attorney Ray Ybarra Maldonado, and Bernie Sanders surrogate and labor leader José Alejandro La Luz.
Maldonado described getting on a plane to Mississippi after the largest ICE raid in history last year. Far from where many immigration attorneys do their work, the immigrants detained after the raid needed pro bono help. By design, immigration detention centers are far from population centers, making it much harder for immigration attorneys to represent their clients. After this Mississippi raid, Maldonado called it “triage work.”
As the story of Andiola’s mother makes clear, the damage the American immigration system inflicts on immigrant families—even before Trump’s “zero tolerance” plan—began long before Donald Trump came to power. Even as it sought to legalize undocumented immigrants, the Obama administration intensified the government’s deportation of those immigrants, in a ploy, observers believed, to win conservative support for its legalization efforts and to dispel any thoughts that it was “soft” on illegality. It took several years of anger from the immigrant rights community for Obama to finally offer the protections in DACA.
The solution, Andiola says, is what advocates are calling the Migrant Justice Platform. It calls for a Biden administration to take immediate executive action (such as ending the “Muslim ban”), and to demand subsequent congressional action to create a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented DACA holders, as well as those under temporary protected status (TPS) due to situations in their home countries.
Other administrative actions the activists seek include demilitarizing immigration enforcement and the border, as well as establishing a commission “to address family separation, migrant deaths, and white supremacist violence in border communities.” Finally, the plan calls upon a future Biden administration to attend to the root causes of migration, through such mechanisms as addressing climate change by re-entering the Paris Agreement and ending deportation diplomacy.
The message was clear: Biden’s immigration agenda must not be a return to his previous years in the West Wing. Rather, he must embrace a new system, equipped to meet the needs and challenges of modern migration. And he must repair the damage and trauma, reuniting children separated from their mothers before they could walk.
