New homeland security pick is no border softie

President-elect Joe Biden has pledged to end many of Trump’s harsh new immigration policies. But his choice of Alejandro Mayorkas to lead his Department of Homeland Security indicates the new administration won’t be embracing open borders, or even crafting especially welcoming policies towards migrants arriving over the Mexican border.
President Donald Trump’s harsh treatment of immigrants was one of the most contentious issues of his first three years in office, and Biden will certainly expect Mayorkas to take a kinder approach towards asylum seekers, refugees and the undocumented.
Biden probably will reverse many of Trump’s signature initiatives: separated families, kids in cages, sweeps through so-called sanctuary cities by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, and the ban on travel from many majority-Muslim countries. “Dreamers” who have never known any other home than the US will be safe under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that Trump tried to cancel.
ICE intrusions into communities will be curbed, families will be reunited and conditions in immigrant detention camps will improve dramatically. But when it comes to the thorny issue of Central American asylum seekers, Biden’s policy is unlikely to swing in a direction radically opposite to the one under Trump. Mayorkas has publicly signaled his sympathy with migrants seeking refuge in the US And he helped design the DACA program when he served under President Barack Obama as deputy secretary of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE and the Border Patrol.
But the Obama administration had its own tough border policies, and the selection of Mayorkas may signal Biden’s desire to continue with that approach. Obama presided over a record number of deportations —surpassing even Trump in raw numbers — though he focused mainly on deporting those who committed serious crimes.
When a surge of Central Americans came north in 2014, Obama enacted policies that, while nowhere near as severe as Trump’s, were explicitly intended to deter migrants. Biden, then serving as vice president, told Guatemalans in 2014: Those who are pondering risking their lives to reach the United States should be aware of what awaits them. It will not be open arms…we’re going to send the vast majority of you back.
Years of witnessing Trump’s cruelty will temper that harsh message substantially. But the fact remains that both Biden and Mayorkas are veterans of an administration that also saw caravans of asylum seekers as a problem. In the 2010s, a wave of families came seeking refuge from the poor and violent countries of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. This wave was only a fraction of the number of people who had immigrated from Mexico in previous decades, but the sight of tens of thousands of destitute Central American families streaming north alarmed many conservatives.
Compounding this was the fact that the US system didn’t really have a good way to deal with large numbers of people crossing the border illegally and then turning themselves in to authorities and requesting asylum.
—Bloomberg