Biden Signs Executive Orders Reversing Trump Immigration Policies - Do You Support Them?

by Causes | 2.3.21

What's the story?

• President Joe Biden signed three major executive orders Tuesday aimed at dismantling former President Donald Trump's restrictive immigration practices, including a task-force to reunite families that had been separated at the U.S.-Mexican border.

“I’m not making new law. I’m eliminating bad policy,” Biden said while signing the orders. "This is about how America's safer, stronger, more prosperous when we have a fair, orderly, and humane legal immigration system."

What are the three orders?

• Creating a task force to reunite children who were separated from their parents under Trump's "zero tolerance" policy, which the administration called a "moral failing."
• Evaluating legal immigration programs - such as the Central American Minors Program - which began under President Barack Obama. This program - which Trump terminated in 2017 - allowed certain Central American children to lawfully unite with family members in the U.S.
• The second order also calls for a review of the Trump administration's "Remain in Mexico" policy, which required asylum-seekers to remain in northern Mexico as they await court hearings for U.S. protection.
• The third order directs the State Department, the Justice Department, and the Department of Homeland Security to review policies implemented under Trump to determine whether they adhere to the government mandate to promote "integration and inclusion."

What are people saying?

White House press secretary Jen Psaki

"We want to put in place an immigration process here that can, that is humane, that is moral, that considers applications for refugees, applications for people to come into this country at the border in a way that treats people as human beings. That’s going to take some time. It’s not going to happen overnight."

Jessica Anderson, director of the political advocacy arm of Washington-based Heritage Foundation

“By resuming the pre-pandemic pace of visas, abandoning common-sense asylum policies, and increasing the burden on our strained social safety net, these orders will advance a dangerous open-borders policy, take away jobs from Americans struggling to find employment, and kneecap America's economic recovery from lockdowns.

-Josh Herman