“There isn’t a pro-immigration Stephen Miller. There isn’t someone to get on the phone 50 times a day to yell at officials telling them to get their act together”
to include citizens of every country in the Western Hemisphere—it was originally limited only to Spanish speakers—have bewildered advocates. After all, the bitterest lesson learned during the Trump administration was how vast the executive branch’s powers are on immigration. Biden’s refusal to exercise them on a host of policies, said Katharina Obser, director of the Migrant Rights and Justice program at the Women’s Refugee Council, shows a lack of political willpower that feels like a betrayal.
“Protecting DACA recipients, ending the Muslim ban and the public charge rule, putting together the Family Reunification Taskforce, re-starting the Central American Minors program that the previous Administration ended, extending or newly designating Temporary Protected Status for a number of countries, and working with DHS to give clear guidance for internal enforcement, among others,” the spokesperson listed.
Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, has had his fair share of policy disagreements with Biden and progressives over the years. However, on U.S. immigration issues, Nowrasteh believed that Biden’s platform in 2020 was “the most pro-immigration platform of any presidential candidate since Abraham Lincoln,” the Cato analyst said on Wednesday, the day before the one-year anniversary of Biden’s inauguration.