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Biden Immigration Chief Blasts Trump for ‘Gutted’ System

Biden Immigration Chief Blasts Trump for ‘Gutted’ U.S. System

President Joe Biden’s Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, accused the Trump administration of gutting the U.S. immigration system, complicating his job as he tries to meet demands from Democrats to roll back his predecessors’ policies.

“The prior administration dismantled our nation’s immigration system in its entirety,” Mayorkas said Monday at a White House press briefing. “The entire system was gutted.”

Mayorkas and the agencies he leads have come under criticism from immigrant-rights groups for not more rapidly unwinding Trump administration policies, including a program that forced migrants attempting to gain asylum in the U.S. to wait in squalid camps on the Mexican side of the border.

He also accused the Trump administration of issuing “unlawful” contracts within the department, citing an agreement signed just before Trump left office requiring the union representing Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to approve any immigration policy changes.

A spokeswoman for former President Donald Trump didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Biden administration is simultaneously facing a test over an influx of migrants seeking to cross the southwestern border, including thousands of families and unaccompanied children in recent weeks.

Mayorkas denied that the surge at the border constitutes a crisis.

“The answer is no,” he told reporters. “We are challenged at the border. The men and women of the Department of Homeland Security are meeting that challenge”

Mayorkas, saying the administration has to rebuild the immigration system “virtually from scratch,” urged migrants to wait before undertaking the dangerous journey north to the U.S., in anticipation that Biden will make it easier to win asylum.

“We need individuals to wait,” he said, referring to asylum seekers. “They will wait with a goal in mind, and that is our ability to rebuild, as quickly as possible, a system so that they don’t have to take the dangerous journey and we can enable them to access humanitarian relief from their country of origin.”

He said the Biden administration’s handling of unaccompanied children was unlike Trump’s, which often expelled them quickly to Mexico. He said the administration is considering ways to speed up the process of locating the children’s relatives or sponsors in the U.S., including partnering officials from the Department of Health and Human Services with U.S. Border Patrol personnel.

Meanwhile, Mayorkas said, there are no plans to immediately lift a Trump administration pandemic-related policy that has led to migrants being turned away and sent back into Mexico within a matter of hours after arriving. Immigrant-rights advocates called for an end to the policy, known as Title 42 authority, saying it is inhumane.

Mayorkas acknowledged that “families and single adults are indeed being returned, under Covid-19 restrictions,” saying the rapid returns are necessary “in the service of public health.”

He also indicated that Trump-era bans on certain temporary worker visas, including H-1Bs used by tech companies, would not be immediately lifted. Those bans are due to expire at month’s end. Biden lifted related bans on immigrant visas last week.

©2021 Bloomberg L.P.