WASHINGTON – Eight weeks from today, Donald Trump will return to the Oval Office with a broad mandate to conduct mass deportations. Yesterday we scooped that White House senior advisors Blas Nuñez-Neto and Liz Sherwood Randall are inexplicably pushing for another asylum ban. Within hours of our story, Trump announced that his former interim ICE director Tom Homan will be appointed as his new “border czar” — a ambiguous role overseeing the immigration enforcement portfolio. As recently as October 27, Homan told Cecilia Vega on 60 Minutes that he plans to deport entire families together, including the U.S. children of migrant parents.

Rather than take the policy sea change lying down, migrant rights advocates are working overtime to push Joe Biden to do what he can to protect migrant families during the final days of his presidency. Migrant Insider obtained a list of twenty-two policy recommendations being circulated by advocates in the Biden White House orbit that could insulate people from the inevitable excesses of the Trump presidency. We include their recommendations verbatim below—  

Actions to Limit Mass Deportations

• Close Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities with egregious records of human rights violations and abuses and halt further detention expansion. Closing detention facilities and halting ICE’s current expansion plans is vital to protect communities from the planned draconian enforcement agenda of the incoming administration. It is also vital to saving lives and preventing abuses against people in ICE custody, often committed by for-profit prison companies. ICE should also immediately rescind all outstanding requests for information or proposals for detention expansion.

• Publicize information to assist state and local governments in limiting their involvement in mass deportations. State and local government agencies will be the frontline in defending community residents from raids and other mass deportation actions. The administration should publicize guidance, training manuals, memoranda and other materials regarding CBP/ICE enforcement, e.g., current CBP/ICE contracts, as well as riders on other agencies’ contracts, including but not limited to U.S. Marshals, and CBP/ICE access to state and local government-held data, ICE “at large” arrest tactics including impersonation of local law enforcement, and programs that seek to tap state and local agencies for immigration enforcement.  

• Issue a memo stating that DHS officials must check the government’s own records prior to entering or executing an expedited removal order to determine whether the government possesses information sufficient to establish that the individual facing expedited removal has not been present for more than two years and/or has not been admitted or paroled into the United States. 

• Prioritize release from custody of all parole- and TPS-eligible individuals from detention in accordance with the 2009 Morton Parole Directive and 2002 Carpenter TPS Memorandum. DHS should issue a directive to ensure the release of people with serious health conditions, including mental health conditions, whose health needs will not be met if they remain in detention, and where continued detention may not be appropriate.

• Prohibit enforcement of removal orders entered against unrepresented children absent a hearing to determine validity of notice. DHS should issue a memo stating that prior to physically removing any individual who was ordered removed in absentia while unrepresented and under the age of 18, it will request that the respondent receive a hearing to determine whether the individual’s removal order should be rescinded due to their age.

• Redesignate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for El Salvador before January 8, 2025. The administration should redesignate TPS for El Salvador, thereby protecting the 239,000 current El Salvadoran TPS Holders as well as others from that country, by no later than the statutory deadline which is January 8, 2025. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) should publish in the Federal Register its determination that conditions in El Salvador continue to merit a TPS designation and update the eligibility date to some date in December 2024. By statute, such a determination must be made no later than 60 days before the end of the current period of designation, which ends on March 9, 2025. 

• Redesignate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for other currently designated countries. The ongoing crises in the other fourteen countries currently designated for TPS rest on a determination made, within the last 18 months or less, that those countries cannot safely accept the return of their nationals. These would include 63,000 Venezuelans, 37,000 Haitians, and at least tens of thousands of Hondurans not protected by current TPS designations. Unless conditions in those countries have improved, DHS should redesignate (and update their designation dates). Beyond being right on the merits, redesignating TPS for these countries would also provide further protections from deportation, and fulfill the administration’s original promise to protect people to places where they would be in danger.

• Issue new TPS or DED designations for all other countries that merit protection. The Administration should issue TPS designations for the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ecuador, Guatemala, Colombia, and all other countries that meet the existing criteria. 

• Finalize the Rule providing automatic extensions for those with work permits and prioritize work permit processing. USCIS should finalize the temporary final rule to permanently extend the automatic extension period from 180 days to 540 days and ideally 720 days to ensure work authorized immigrants do not lose their jobs. DHS and USCIS should also take immediate action to prioritize work permit processing across all categories of work permits (e.g. asylum applicants, DACA, TPS).

• Review and conduct re-paroles. DHS should review all CHNV, CAM, and CBP One paroles and grant four-year parole extensions on a case-by-case basis as has been done for U4U and Afghan allies. Failing to do so will leave nearly 200,000 CHNV parolees and thousands of others without status, while forcing them to apply for asylum and thereby adding to the asylum case backlog. 

• Prioritize reopening of final removal orders. DHS should prioritize and promptly respond to prosecutorial discretion requests under current guidance seeking a joint motion to reopen (and dismiss), including for individuals who have pending or approved SIJS petitions or other relief before USCIS.

Actions that Ensure that DACA Holders and Other Long-time Residents Are Able to Benefit from Current Policies

• Expedite the processing of DACA and TPS recipients. With the ongoing uncertainty around the future of DACA, we urge USCIS to process all DACA renewals, Advance Parole requests, and H-1B premium processing applications as expeditiously as possible. USCIS should also allow early renewals of DACA outside the 150 day window and allow sequential grants of status to maximize each individual’s time in status. Likewise, all TPS applications should be expeditiously processed and granted. Similarly, USCIS should promptly issue SIJS deferred action renewals for an additional 4-year period.

• Expand legal pathways and employment opportunities for DACA recipients who have graduated from American colleges and universities. We applaud your administration’s June 2024 announcement on “Easing the Visa Process for U.S. College Graduates, Including Dreamers.” We urge you to take additional steps in this area by finalizing those portions of a proposed H-1B regulation that clarify the rules around cap-exempt status under the H-1B program. Clearer cap exemption rules may encourage more employers, including public school systems, hospitals, and other city, county, and state agencies, to petition for H-1B visas on behalf of DACA holders. This action is essential to ensure qualified DACA recipients have opportunities to gain legal status through their employers.

• Protect farmworkers and other seasonal workers by finalizing the H-2 reform rule. On September 20, 2023, your administration published a proposed rule to improve protections for temporary and seasonal workers, including farmworkers. The rule is designed to ensure that these vulnerable workers are treated fairly while helping employers meet critical seasonal labor demands. The comment period for this regulation closed nearly a year ago, and we urge the administration to finalize this rule without delay to ensure that the rule becomes effective before the change in administration.

• Protect the ability for DACA and TPS holders and others to Travel on Advance Parole. Toward the end of the first Trump Administration, the Executive Office for Immigration Review proposed a rule to effectively restrict the ability of Immigration Judges to manage their court dockets. The rule also proposed to, among other things, overturn the Board of Immigration Appeals’ decision in Matter of Arrabally – a seminal Board case that clarified rules around advance parole and has helped many DACA recipients travel to their home countries for the first time in their lives. The administration should withdraw the bulk of this proposed rule, as well as use the opportunity to codify the Arrabally decision by making it clear that a noncitizen who leaves the country temporarily under a grant of advance parole has neither “departed” nor made a “departure” for purposes of triggering an inadmissibility bar under 8 U.S.C. 1182(a)(9)(B)[e].

Actions to Safeguard People Fleeing Persecution

• Dedicate Asylum Officers to adjudicate as many cases pending in the asylum application backlog as possible to ensure that those who started the process, in some cases years before the Biden administration even took office, are able to complete their cases. Many cases that are facially eligible based on country condition profiles could be prioritized for efficient processing. 

• Stop conducting Credible Fear Interviews in Customs and Border Protection (CBP) custody. For more than a year, the Biden-Harris administration has pushed people through Credible Fear Interviews and Immigration Judge reviews while in CBP custody. This practice results in wrongful deportations because people are unable to quickly articulate their asylum claim so soon after their arrival at the border. This practice causes particular harm to many of the most vulnerable people seeking asylum including rare language speakers, survivors of gender-based harm, and LGBTQI individuals. Further, access to legal services is extremely compromised in CBP custody. Continuing this practice will open the door for further due process abuses in the next administration. The administration should announce an end to this practice and recommit to protecting the due process rights of people seeking asylum. The administration should also immediately grant physical access to attorneys at CBP facilities.  

• Codify details about improving overseas refugee processing. The Biden administration has made tremendous strides in rebuilding the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP). It is extremely important to protect these advancements, so the administration should codify, in publicly available documents such as the USCIS Policy Manual and Department of State Foreign Affairs Manual, the steps it undertook to streamline and improve overseas processing. 

Take urgent action to protect Afghans.

• The administration should expedite processing of SIV applications, including issuing as many COM approvals as possible, asylum applications, and adjustment of status applications of any Afghan nationals along with the family reunification petitions. Many unaccompanied Afghan children evacuated in 2021 are still waiting for their parents to be relocated to the United States. Grant outstanding humanitarian parole requests and P1 and P2 referrals for at-risk Afghan nationals abroad and swiftly issue travel documents. Surge resources for additional interviews at overseas processing sites like Camp As Saliyah in situations where people could conceivably still travel and/or have conditional approvals issued before that time, as well as resources for CARE relocations. 

Frontload funding to insulate programs. 

• Distribute as much dedicated funding in Q1 for FY25 as possible, to insulate federally-supported programming for asylum seekers, unaccompanied children, and other populations served through ORR. This includes the remaining tranches of the Case Management Pilot Program (CMPP), FY23 and FY24 Shelter and Services Program (SSP) funds.

Eliminate all Trump-Era asylum restrictions. 

• The administration has left in place multiple regulations put in place during the Trump administration that unlawfully restrict access to asylum, some of which are inconsistent with the current administration’s own approach to the issue and most of which have not even taken effect because they remain blocked by court injunctions. To eliminate confusion, the administration should publish a final rule rescinding all Trump-era asylum restrictions.

• The administration should also take urgent action to vacate Trump-era attorney general decisions that impose unwarranted bars to asylum.

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking. What else can the Biden White House do to protect migrants before Trump is inaugurated on January 6? Let us know on Twitter or by emailing us at [email protected].