The Biden administration has a warning to migrants considering seeking asylum at the country’s southern border.
“It remains a dangerous trip,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday. “This is not the time to come to the United States. We need the time to put in place an immigration process so people can be treated humanely.”
Psaki’s briefing followed the White House rolling out a slate of immigration executive actions. As part of the actions, which President Biden will sign late in the afternoon, he will create a task force to make recommendations on how migrant families separated during former President Donald Trump’s administration can be reunited.
Biden also will kick-start a three-pronged strategy for “safe, lawful, and orderly migration” at the southern border. Much of that strategy hinges on reviews of Trump’s policies, including his “Remain in Mexico” approach, otherwise known as the Migrant Protection Protocols. Under the program, asylum-seekers are required to wait in Mexico until their immigration court hearings.
White House officials estimate between 600 and 700 migrant children still need to be reunited with their families. Psaki told reporters cases would be assessed individually, but she suggested some deported parents could be brought back to the U.S. and given legal status to stay in the country.
“We need to find out first where all these kids are and figure out where their parents are. And so we are starting at square one here,” she said. “We are trying to repair the damage and the horrific actions of the prior administration by trying to do everything we can to reunite these kids with their families.”
On his first days in office, Biden took executive action to protect people who immigrated illegally as children, halted the construction of Trump’s border wall, and overturned the former president’s so-called “Muslim travel ban.” He proposed, too, the U.S. Citizenship Act, which forges an eight-year pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants.
Tuesday’s actions were due to be unveiled last week, but they were delayed after Senate Republicans held up Alejandro Mayorkas’s confirmation as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
She made clear the new president is not finished using the powers of his office to roll back as many of Trump’s policies as he can without tough-to-obtain congressional approval.
“We’re going to have more again soon, in the coming days and weeks, on more steps and actions that the president is interested in taking,” Psaki said.
