Biden will reverse most of Trump's anti-immigration policies and provide a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants

On Day One of President Joe Biden's administration, he will seek to overhaul Donald Trump's immigration policies based on xenophobia and racism.

Biden’s incoming chief of staff, Ron Klain, said Saturday that Biden will send an immigration bill to Congress “on his first day in office.” He didn’t elaborate and Biden’s office declined to comment on specifics but other sources who heard the plans Saturday said the proposed legislation would provide a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants, including 1.7 million from Asia.

In an earlier Univision interview, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris said DACA and TPS recipients will “automatically get green cards” while others would be on an eight-year path to citizenship.

In his campaign website, Biden outlined his immigration plan, which is almost the polar opposite of Trump's immigration proposals and executive orders. 

Among Biden's Immigration proposals are:

• Biden said he will rescind Trump’s “Muslim ban” on Day One and reverse the detrimental asylum policies that are causing chaos and a humanitarian crisis at our border. 

• He will support family-based immigration and preserve family unification as a core principle of our immigration system, which includes reducing the family visa backlog.

• He will reinstate strengthen the protections for those in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program affecting.

• He will increase the number of visas offered for permanent, work-based immigration based on macroeconomic conditions and exempt from any cap recent graduates of PhD programs in STEM fields. 

• He will support first reforming the temporary visa system for high-skill, specialty workers to protect wages, then expanding the number of visas offered and eliminating the limits on employment-based visas by country.

• He will restore the naturalization process for green card holders. 

• He will increase the number of refugees welcomed into this country by setting the annual global refugee admissions target to 125,000 and seek to raise it over time commensurate with America's responsibility, values, and the unprecedented global need. 

Trump's visit to the Mexican border last week failed to take attention away from the Jan. 6 attempted coup and his role in inciting the  insurrectionists who forcibly occupied the Capitol for four hours ostensibly to protest the outcome of the Nov. 3 election but was also an alarming display of racism by white supremacists.

But the trip to the border was a harsh reminder of how inhumane and nonsensical Trump's policies have been in trying to limit immigration to the United States and how important it is to begin repairing the damage that has been done over the last four years. 

It was the separation of crying children from their parents that turned many voters away from Trump. Support for more immigration and family reunification actually grew during Trump's term.

A 2020 Gallup poll found that 34% of those surveyed favored more immigration, up from 21% in 2016 and higher than any time since it began asking the question in 1965. The survey found 77% felt immigration was good for the country on the whole, up slightly from 72% in 2016.

Supreme Court will hear case excluding undocumented immigrants from Census

The U.S. Supreme Court, dominated by conservative justices, agreed Friday (Oct. 23) to hear arguments for not counting undocumented immigrants in recently concluded U.S. Census.

A day after a lower court ruled against Donald Trump's executive order to exclude the undocumented from the decennial count, the High Court accepted the appeal by government lawyers.

Until this year, undocumented people have always been included in the Census under the mandate of the U.S. Constitution to count "every person" in the country.

Census data determines how House seats, which determines Electoral College votes, are divided among the states, a three-judge federal count said in September when it held Trump’s policy illegal. Trump believes that excluding undocumented would hurt immigrant-heavy states like California and New York. What the administration didn't think through, though, is that traditionally Republican-dominated states like Texas, Florida and Texas would also be hurt by the order.

The Supreme Court put the case on the fast track in case Trump loses the November election. SCOTUS will hear arguments Nov. 30 and render a decision before the end of year. It could be the first decision faced by Trump's SCOTUS nominee Amy Coney Barrett if her nomination is approved by the Senate next week.

Nationally, the undocumented population has stabilized at approximately 11 million with about a quarter of that number residing in California, the lead plaintiff in this case.

While the general public believe most undocumented immigrants come from Mexico, the majority are from other countries. The four largest Asian undocumented populations are from India, Korea, the Philippines, and China. Between 2007 and 2017, the number of Indian undocumented immigrants in the country alone grew by over 60 percent, from 325,000 people to 525,000—about 5 percent of the total undocumented immigrant population, according to the Pew Research Center.

The lower court on Thursday ruled on behalf of the plaintiffs saying that the exclusion of undocumented immigrants violates the Constitution's requirements about how congressional districts are apportioned. It also found the order violated other federal laws.

“The Constitution’s text, drafting history, 230 years of historical practice, and Supreme Court case law all support the conclusion that apportionment must be based on all persons residing in each state, including undocumented immigrants,” wrote the three-judge panel.

The outcome of the census case would benefit Republicans in the House and could affect the distribution of political power for the next 10 years. The census also helps determine the distribution of $1.5 trillion in federal funding annually.

EDITOR'S NOTE: A word of caution, this is news sprinkled with opinion. Readers are encouraged to seek multiple news sources to formulate their own positions.

Court rules against Trump's attempt to not include undocumented immigrants in the U.S. Census

To the consternation of Donald Trump, a panel of judges ruled that the government must count unauthorized immigrants for the Census.

A special three-judge court in New York Thursday blocked the Trump administration's efforts to leave out unauthorized immigrants from the census numbers that determine each state's share of seats in Congress.

“This is a huge victory for voting rights and for immigrants‘ rights,” Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, said in a statement. “President Trump has tried and failed yet again to weaponize the census against immigrant communities. The law is clear — every person counts in the census.”

The judicial panel's decision comes after the release of a Trump memo in July  that directs Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the Census Bureau, to stop including  undocumented immigrants from the apportionment count.

Excluding undocumented immigrants from the census could benefit Republicans electorally. One study found that California, which is solidly Democratic, could lose two House seats if undocumented immigrants did not get counted. The state’s attorney general, Xavier Becerra, sued to stop the move in July.

The lawsuit challenged “President Trump’s lawless attempt to exclude undocumented immigrants from the ‘persons’ who must be counted in the census for purposes of apportioning congressional seats to states.”

Plaintiffs are the New York Immigration Coalition, Make the Road New York, CASA, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, ADC Research Institute, FIEL Houston, and AHRI for Justice.

The U.S. Constitution mandates that the Census count every person living in the U.S. regardless of status. The Census, currently underway, is scheduled to end it's effort on Sept. 30. That deadline is also being challenged because the government and the Census Bureau had previously agreed to extend the Census count to the end of October because the pandemic had interfered the Census' timetable.

Besides the New York case, there are eight other lawsuits in courts in other parts of the country filed against Trump's attempt to affect representation in Congress.

The New York ruling is likely to be appealed directly to the U.S. Supreme Court. Federal law allows decisions by a three-judge court — which are convened for lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of how congressional seats are reapportioned — to skip having to go in front of an appeals court.

“We will not be moved by the President’s attempts to silence people in our country," said the Asian Americans Advancing Justice coalition of five legal advocacy agencies. 

"This is the latest in a series of attempts to politicize the census and use it as a weapon in his anti-immigrant agenda," continued the AAAJ statement. "It is a move straight out of the white supremacists’ playbook that has every discriminatory practice to restrict the rights of Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian American people.”

EDITOR'S NOTE: A word of caution, this is news sprinkled with opinion. Readers are encouraged to seek multiple news sources to formulate their own positions.