The Biden administration on Friday began halting most deportations for 100 days so it can “review and reset enforcement priorities” following a Trump administration that instituted a “zero tolerance” policy for undocumented migrants.
Acting Homeland Security Secretary David Pekoske announced the policy this week, which fulfills a campaign promise by President Joe Biden to immediately move away from the hard-line stance of U.S. immigration policy under former President Donald Trump.
“[We] will pause removals for certain noncitizens ordered deported to ensure we have a fair and effective immigration enforcement system focused on protecting national security, border security and public safety,” the department said in a statement.
“The pause will allow [us] to ensure that [our] resources are dedicated to responding to the most pressing challenges that the United States faces, including immediate operational challenges at the southwest border in the midst of the most serious global public health crisis in a century.”
The moratorium on deportations is just one of several moves Biden made this week regarding immigration policy, which is expected under his leadership to return to a far more humanitarian state.
For the next 100 days, until May 2, migrants can still be deported if they have engaged in terrorism or espionage or are suspected of doing so, or if they are considered a threat to national security. The ICE administrator can also intervene in individual deportation cases.
Immigration policy under Trump was virtually a nonstop controversy for his entire presidency, particularly when it became known that border agents were separating families and keeping some children in locked isolation.
Trump also spent millions to build a border wall and instituted a so-called “Muslim travel ban” that denied U.S. entry for people from several Muslim-majority nations.
“The Trump administration has done more than fail in its commitment to children,” Henry Giroux, a cultural studies professor at McMaster University, wrote for UPI in 2019. “It has abused, terrorized and scarred them.”
Biden has already begun taking steps to reverse Trump’s immigration policies.
After his inauguration on Wednesday, he rescinded the travel ban on Muslim-majority countries and introduced a comprehensive immigration reform package that includes a pathway to citizenship for more than 11 million undocumented migrants.
In a memo this week detailing the pause on deportations, Pekoske told U.S. Customs and Border Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees that their priorities are protecting national security, border security and public safety, at least until the administration completes its review.
Pekoske said the process will “enable the development, issuance, and implementation of detailed revised enforcement priorities.”
“Throughout this interim period DHS will continue to enforce our immigration laws,” the department added.
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Socialism 101; First halt the deportation of Illegal Aliens, then empower anything, anyone, anywhere anything that is Illegal, or alien to American Common law or Culture. Import and infect first with pandemics and later hate inspired social anti-Anglo Saxon pogroms, the peaceful successful general American population that is the envy of the world, to deplete its strength and vitality so that the imperfections and failures of other world cultures do not look so bad by comparison, and the fallacy of Socialism can be empowered to socially level the world to the same historically proven equality of human degradation and failure. Enter the Democrat party of death and social destruction, that in the redistribution of personal property they steal the very life force expended by American strength to earn it, first killing people by the inches in taxes, then by the mile in lockdowns, higher taxes, inflated oil prices, then social dependence upon secular men, women and sexual identify confused people with moral compasses that just point the American ship of state to the great abyss of turbulence, division and violence. This my friends is what you just elected to rule, not govern over you, unless it was not elected, but stolen?
Yep Joe, we need more people with covid in our Country, we need more gang members in our Country, we need more illegal aliens on welfare, we need terrorists in our Country and we need illegal aliens getting free health care. Keep the borders open Joe. Joe, what do they call people that want the destruction of our Country? They are called traitors, right Joe?
They aren’t Illegal Aliens; they’re Undocumented Democrats!
ALWAYS have been.. And you can bet, even if only 51% of them voted Republican, the left would have ENDED ILLEGAL alien admission into this nation, DECADES AGO.
Please harling… and everyone else…stop referring to Quid Pro Joe’s party as democrats… from now on call them the communist party. If we can get 90 million people including some of the conservative talking heads and President Trump himself to refer to them as the communist party I’m sure it will stick.
Oh my those 90,000,000 mad people are not going to like this Joe , but don’t get scared you have 2000 national guard to protect you !!
Somebody, anybody PLEASE ! get this idiot out of the White house he makes me sick !!!!!!!!!
Not only stop deportations but release all illegals from ICE. That’s just plain wrong
What’s the bet, that once this is done, they’ll find something ELSE TO FORCE on us.
Then, in May, they will swing the doors wide open and say Hola criminalidad!