New Administration, Better Immigration Policies?

On 12 February 2021, the DU Immigrant and Refugee Rights Colectivo hosted a discussion regarding the past and future impacts of the Biden-Harris Administration on United States migration. Below is a transcript of the event. Note: some responses have been edited for clarity.

Colectivo Moderator:

With less than a month in office, the Biden administration has already made several important changes to immigration policy that should have positive impacts for the community. But how significant are these policies? What more can be done? And what is the realistic possibility for some of these reforms to pass through Congress? Today, we hope to start processing through some of these questions, so we appreciate you all for joining us. 

Our two panelists for today are Kevin Vargas, who does work with Jason Crow’s Congressional Office, and Erik Garcia, who works with CIRC. I would now like to turn it over to Kevin Vargas and Erik Garcia, if you guys would like to introduce yourself, tell us where you work, and some hope you have for the new administration. 

Kevin Vargas: 

Hello folks, thank you for having me here today. It’s always a pleasure, being a DU alumni, so it’s definitely always great to be back with familiar folks. 

So I actually work for Congressman Jason Crow in District Six as his Immigration Staffer. I am also the Chair of the Immigrant and Refugee Commission in the City of Aurora. There’s only 10 commissions in the country that are specifically dedicated for immigrants and refugees, and Colorado is lucky enough to have one of those commissions. I would like to clarify that I am not here to speak on behalf of any of these roles that I have, so I am just here as a community leader and community advocate. So I’m not speaking on behalf of the Congressman or the Chair, I’m speaking on behalf of Kevin here and just sharing my expertise. I’ve been with Congressman Crow for about two years now and have also been the chair of the commission for about a year, and I’m going into the second term. 

My parents are from Mexico City, and they’re undocumented, so we definitely know what it’s like to feel immigration policies being affected in our family and our experiences throughout our life. It has motivated me and inspired me to be in these roles discussing what it means to be involved around policy work and how much it affects families in our community and around the country. This is part of the reason why I am so passionate about immigrant rights. So that’s a little about me, and I’ll pass it off to Eric. 

Erik Garcia: 

Hey everyone, I’m Erik Garcia, and I’m an organizing director with Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition. Most of my experience stems from directly combatting detention duplications. 

I think one thing to know about how I come to the movement is that I’m directly impacted, right? So I think I came into the movement at a time where we intentional about shifting from the “Dreamer” narrative of undocumented youth and to steer away from this sort of model minority narratives, and so I think that has extended through the way that I look at the narratives that are embedded in the ways we talk about immigration and the way different systems interact to really target folks. 

Moderator:

Alright, well if no one has anything further to say, we’ll go ahead and get started with our questions and dive right in. We want to start with this very hot-button topic about detention and detention centers in the United States today. It hits close to home, as Kevin was speaking about Aurora, and we have the privately-run GEO group facility there. There’s a tremendous amount of human rights violations and issues associated with it. At the same time, the Biden administration recently ended private prisons with the Department of Justice, but not with the Department of Homeland Security. What do you guys think the current administration’s plans are to do with the detention system? What is it like currently? Are there alternatives?

Erik Garcia:

I think when we talk about alternatives, it’s important to talk about community based alternatives because we already have them, right? The current alternatives that do exist are still an expansion of the surveillance state. They’re still an expansion of the police state, so it’s still detention. You may not be behind bars, but at the end of the day, you are still limited in your freedom. So I think that when we talk about alternatives, it’s important to talk about and think creatively around what a community based alternative to detention looks like. 

The only other thing I’ll add to this is that there definitely is pressure for folks. We saw it on the DOJ side, so there’s definitely pressure at the national level to extend this. But this also speaks to a deeper connection. The immigration detention system is a direct arm of the prison-industrial complex. The way they’re run, their infrastructure, and the folks in enforcement within them all stem directly from the prison-industrial complex. So these conditions are replicated and exacerbated across the country. We need to make this connection not just from the private prisons and the profit motive, but we also need to think broadly about the role of the prison industrial complex and its roots in white supremacy and how that extends into immigration. 

For example, one of the ways that we’re seeing many people fall into detention currently are through previous criminal convictions or some contact with the criminal legal system. And that has been enabled largely by the criminalizing narratives, by the carve outs for the little bit of relief that we have been able to get, like DACA, for example, which has robust criminal carve outs. So we’ve created the conditions for folks to be funneled into detention for profit. So we need to make that connection to the broader prison-industrial complex and say there is no place for this in the world we want to create. 

Kevin Vargas:

That’s a great response, I don’t know how I can beat that. What I will say is that I think with this administration taking initiative in the DOJ that we want to head towards the private detention facilities at the DHS. Is there hope for that? Yes, there’s better hope than there was four years ago for sure. But I think that for us to start dismantling these for-profit companies that have been able to gain revenue just off of keeping people incarcerated and completely change the agency, we have to slowly take away some kind of their priorities and keep them transparent and accountable for what they actually do. 

For example, I think we can easily take out these for-profit companies and then proceed to re-evaluate what the agency is actually for. What is the mission of the agency that it needs to actually implement good programs for refugees and asylum seekers to be actually involved in our society today? I one time heard from an individual who said that the radical idea of abolishing, which is a famous term, is to consider actually implementing an agency that has things like rehab programs for these asylum seekers or immigrants in general to be actually incorporated in our society. That would be a beautiful thing to cherish. That is a radical idea, I think completely taking out an agency will be a difficult process, but we have thought about radical ideas before. And they’ve been accomplished, even if it took years or even a century. 

For us to proceed forward to those areas, we have to slowly start taking away these little bits of pieces that really damage our immigrant and refugee communities in general. There’s these examples of how much profit they earn, and imagine what we can do with this profit to actually integrate them into our communities! Or even just nonprofits that are actually already taking initiative on how to have these asylum seekers actually be incorporated into our societies. Casa de Paz is a great example, they do a lovely job in terms of when someone is released by starting to incorporate them into our society? We have organizations like the Village Exchange Center and Mi Casa and all of these programs are already working in terms of how to incorporate them into our society. We can also head that way as an agency. It’s a radical idea for some folks. 

Erik Garcia: 

Really quick on the profit, something that just came to mind, it’s so important to specify that profit isn't just something from GEO or Core Civic. It’s not just these companies, but also the companies that are providing mattresses, software tech, etc. There’s so much money for folks in detention, and it’s disgusting. The profit motive really drives detention, and so I think when we think about why we still have detention, we need to think about the profit motive and what is driving us or people to profit from detention. 

Kevin Vargas:

That’s a great point, too. I’m thinking about the legislation side, like how much money we actually appropriate to these agencies. We could easily grab this batch of money and put it somewhere else to incorporate immigrants and refugees, but instead we allocate it to agencies that actually harm our immigrants and refugees. Many of us don’t pay attention to what happens in these appropriations bills, for example, to our fiscal years. We don’t realize how much money DOJ, Border Patrol, DHS, and USCIS have, so that’s the profit and the money that we don’t pay attention to. They’re able to continue to operate because of the fact that we continue to approve their budget every time. 

Moderator:

Now, we are heading to another topic, which is the United States Citizenship Act. So as you may know, the US is considering an act in 2021 that establishes a new system to responsibly manage and secure borders, keep our families and communities safe, and overall improve our immigration system. Kevin, Erik, I want to ask what your main takeaways are from this act and what you think its most significant aspect is. 

Kevin Vargas:

This country needs immigration reform and updates ASAP in general. Any immigration reform that would benefit immigrants and refugees at this point is good. I’m not going to say that whatever the administration put out was great, but it’s definitely a step forward into better than it was back in 1986, which was our last immigration reform. We’re in 2021, which is years later, where our country has been completely changed and shifted, so it needs to change! 

I think the biggest thing here that everyone’s looking for is the Pathway to Citizenship component. Not just for DACA and TPS, but we also need to look at the parents and grandparents of these individuals that have been here for a long time. Speaking from personal experience, my parents are undocumented, and they’ve been here for almost 20 years now, maybe a little longer. They’ve been here more than they’ve been in their own country, so those are the folks who have been waiting for such a long time for an immigration reform. 

I think a lot that needs to change is the language in immigration reforms. When we think about the immigration reform of 1986, we have section 1325, which states that anybody who comes through the border without documentation or visa are considered criminals at the highest level of crime in our immigration system. And that hurts a lot of individuals who, at the time in the 80’s and 90’s, were just planning on changing their name and providing a fake social security number to thrive in a society when they couldn’t thrive in their own countries. So that hurts. 

I will say, one interesting thing is that the US Commission of Immigration Reform back in 1997, they say that naturalization is the most important act that a legal immigrant undertakes in the process of becoming an American. That in itself says that we should be pushing towards citizenship as much as possible for these folks to actually thrive in our economies and our societies. So I think the Pathway to Citizenship is probably the best. I will say, eight years to a pathway to citizenship, I think that’s too long. I think that some of these folks have been here for 20 or 25 years, so why wait eight more years? I would like it shortened to a three or five year wait. Once a person has a Green Card, for example, they have to wait five years until they are actually qualified for citizenship. The same thing should happen here. 

So completely new immigraton reform, right now, will benefit no matter what. Not everything will be perfect, but I think there’s some tweaks that we can do to the immigration reform there that will benefit a lot of folks in general. 

Erik Garcia:

I think something else to say is that any plan that is a multi-year plan at this point doesn’t ensure anything happening within the next two years that you have everything controlled that you need to have control of. With any multi-year plan, I think we need to be honest about the fact that it assumes stability of people in a time where this country has spent decades destabilizing migrants. 

We’ll use DACA as an example. When the program was first proposed, I think over 800,000 people were eligible. Most recently, I think, since 2017, only 600,000 people are eligible now, so 200,000 people have fallen out. The takeaway from this is that with legal processes, especially with migration legal processes, people fall out. People can’t pay fees, can’t make deadlines, people are detained, so there’s many reasons why people would fall out of a process that they started. Which doesn’t even get us to the point of how many people are even going to be able to start it in the first place. We don’t have any guidelines on what Biden’s priorities or eligibility are going to look like, even if we’ll get them soon-ish.

So that already assumes that less people are going to be included. So consider the implications of this and the proposed plan is not a citizenship for 11 million when we think about all the barriers that are going to work throughout the process. So let’s say I’m eligible with whatever the carve outs are. If I’m eligible for the fees, do I have the money to pay the fees over the course of eight years or over the course of five years. If I do, then we get to the problem of fall out. How many people who can see it through are actually going to see it all the way through? With the migration system, people fall out for so many different things, and life happens. 

I spent 10 years in deportation proceedings, and I only say this because the immigration system is so complex, and any plan that takes multiple years, we need to be honest that it’s not legalization for all 11 million people. And I think that’s how it’s being presented. 

The only other thing that I’d like to think about is that I don’t think we have the language of the bill yet, all we have is this summary. So something to think about and something I’ve been trying to be vocal about is to think about the implications of a cutoff date. It’s such an under-the-radar thing, but there’s so many implications to a cutoff date, which we saw with DACA. In a time where climate change and climate change reports are showing us that we haven’t even seen the worst of climate refugees in terms of numbers, with more migrant folks who are going to migrate, there’s implications around a cutoff date and how we are sacrificing migrants and refugees of the future for relief now. 

So that’s just something I would like to offer. There are all of these inner-workings that aren’t as big-picture that all have an impact on the way that people access this relief. 

Kevin Vargas:

That’s a great point, something that comes to me personally is that I don’t want it to be eight years of citizenship when most of these folks have been here their entire lives. I don’t think they deserve another eight more years to wait for some of these families to actually be reunited with their own families. They’ve waited for so long. As a personal impact, my mother lost her mom and brother in the last 10 years and wasn’t able to go visit her own family. So think about the mental impact and health impact of that, when immigrants and refugees who just don’t have contact with their own families because they’re in such devastating countries being controlled by their own governments. 

Which brings me to a couple more points. Number one, I think in this immigration reform, Eric is right, we just don’t have the actual language of the bill, just the topic. So within the language, I would personally love to see frontline workers in the pandemic be benefitted. Now that you can implement a new immigration reform, how can you implement frontline workers into the immigration reform? They work at your McDonalds, the airports, the DMV, and all of these places that we need for our economy to continue to function, and I would like to see that. 

The second one is that people don’t understand how language really impacts our society and what it actually does. For example, I would love the word “alien” to be taken out completely. I don’t want to dehumanize anybody. We’re all human and we’re all equal, and we also deserve the same opportunity. Someone being called an alien is definitely not something that I would not like to see in the new reforms. Language is important, diversity is important, and if you want to continue to be diverse and you want to continue to include folks, language is definitely important as we continue to do so. 

And then the last one, which Erik brought up, is about fees in general and representation for these folks who are actually pleading their cases. An interesting stat came out from the American Immigration Council: 86% of people who have representation actually win their cases in the immigration courts. 12% of people who don’t have representation actually end up losing their cases. So representation and court fees, resources, lawyers, pro bono cases, are actually important. I told my dad, I said “If you’re about to apply for citizenship, let’s make sure we have representation, because your best chance is probably 86% instead of 12%.” 

So imagine if folks were represented in their asylum cases - some of these folks don’t even have representation, and it’s really sad to hear from that. So I would like to see within that immigration reform a way to contribute that funding towards that immigration court system and fees. 

Erik Garcia:

I just wanted a shameless plug here: the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition is actually pushing a legal defense fund bill that we’re trying to get support for. So yes, we’re pushing for that at the Colorado level, and it’s a bit of a struggle because of COVID. Folks are dealing with the budget issues and everything. However, we do have a commitment from an outside source that is willing to give us $100,000 towards the fund if the state of Colorado passes a legal defense fund, which would offer universal representation to folks. So yeah, just a shameless plug, something that CIRC is already working on here. 

I did want to ask Kevin if maybe you wanted to talk a little bit more about essential workers being included. Do you want to talk a little bit more about the reconciliation process and what that is shaping out to look like?

Kevin Vargas:

Yeah, the problem is that, because we don’t value our immigrants and refugees within the last four years, we’ve never taken into consideration how valuable they actually are. For me to ask to have frontline workers in the immigration reform is kind of old. We’re really just trying to get these folks included in the COVID packages, and I know that that’s very hard for a lot of representatives on the political spectrum. But we need to start showing that if we really value immigrants and refugees, we need to start taking those baby steps, like at least giving folks with ITIN numbers access to stimulus funds. 

We asked a lot of these folks to stay at home and quarantine when, in reality, work is probably their only way of making a living. So I’ve told many elected officials that this message is great, but at the same time, we have to be cognizant of the fact that a lot of these folks can’t do that. They simply can’t take a day off because one day for them is a whole month’s worth of rent. So that’s not possible for them. We have to be very sensitive about the idea that if we really want to proceed to include our immigrants and refugees, we have to take every step to actually include them in those areas. And it starts with a COVID relief package that includes them, with DBE’s for small businesses to keep thriving, and on the state and local level with what your city is doing to protect immigrants and refugees. That’s what we need to start heading towards. 

Erik Garcia:

Part of the recognition for that, and what we’re seeing at the federal level in terms of strategy, has been that folks are realizing that this filibuster thing is really a bigger deal than they anticipated at first. Instead of having to get a 51 vote majority, you actually need something like 60, so all of this to say that there’s so many hurdles to this sort of legislative process. Budget reconciliation is another way that you don’t need that, so you can circumvent that altogether. So with Democrats, the attempt is to include this sort of legalization of essential workers within the budget reconciliation so that 5 million essential workers are shown that we value them. So this is that opportunity through the budget reconciliation process. So that’s what the national landscape is shaping up to look like on top of all the different bills. 

Kevin Vargas:

One more thing to add: I think that as a country, we are so prideful and have a lot of ego. I think that sometimes we need to drop our pride and our ego and actually learn from other countries. So when I think about the refugee program in Canada, for example, they are outstanding in terms of what their refugee program is. I think we can learn a lot from them and how to implement it in our own country. I also think about Spain, where they’ve actually allowed the citizenship process for frontline workers to actually start to give them an opportunity, and I think we can learn a lot from that too. So if we are able to let that go for a little bit and actually learn from other places, I think we can definitely have a better immigration stem than what we’ve had for decades.