Updated at 6:18 p.m. ET
President Biden signed three executive orders on Tuesday that he said would lead to a more "fair, orderly, humane" immigration system, including one that would begin the difficult process of reuniting migrant children separated from their parents after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.
"There's a lot of talk, with good reason, about the number of executive orders that I've signed. I'm not making new law — I'm eliminating bad policy," Biden told reporters in the Oval Office before signing three actions to begin to roll back former President Donald Trump's hard-line immigration measures.
One of the orders creates a task force to find ways to reunite children in the U.S. with their parents, who were deported without them — something Biden said was a "moral and national shame."
The job is made challenging by a lack of records. Details of how children will be reunited are still to be determined. The task force will make recommendations on how to do it, working with representatives of families and other stakeholders. The task force will issue a report on its progress in 120 days and every 60 days thereafter, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters.
But advocates said urgent action is needed. "What we need now is an immediate commitment to specific remedies, including reunification in the U.S., permanent legal status and restitution for all of the 5,500-plus families separated by the Trump administration," said the American Civil Liberties Union's Lee Gelernt, who fought the issue in court.
"Anything short of that will be extremely troubling given that the U.S. government engaged in deliberate child abuse," Gelernt said in a statement.
Officials who previewed the executive actions to reporters said change won't happen overnight. In fact, more actions are almost certain to follow. "It takes time to review everything, so we are starting with these right now, but that doesn't mean it's the end of it," one of the officials said.
Restoring asylum
A second order looks at how to address the surge of migrants seeking asylum in the U.S. in recent years and will look at how to replace the Migrant Protection Protocols program — what Trump referred to as "Remain in Mexico."
Biden suspended that program on his first day in office. He has vowed to help countries in Central America address the underlying causes of migration. But the administration wants to restore the asylum system, officials said — and do something to help people stuck in camps at the border. The details of how that will happen are not yet clear.
"We want to put in place an immigration process here 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," Psaki told reporters.
The third order requires agencies to do a "top-to-bottom review of recent regulations, policies and guidance that have set up barriers to our legal immigration system." The first one to go: Trump's "public charge" rule, which prevented immigrants from getting permanent resident, or green card, status if they had or were likely to require public benefits such as housing subsidies.
Advocacy groups said ending the public charge rule would help immigrants struggling with health care and food insecurity amid the COVID-19 crisis.
The new administration is under pressure from immigration activists who are worried that reforms will stall as Biden rushes to deal with the response to the health and economic crises caused by the COVID-19 pandemic — as well as climate change and racial equity priorities.
Biden sent a sweeping immigration legislative proposal to Congress the day he was sworn into office, but it's unclear how quickly the plan may be considered.
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