Liz Robbins
Liz Robbins is a freelance writer who formerly covered immigration for The New York Times. She is the author of “A Race Like No Other,” an in-depth account of the New York City Marathon.
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President-elect Biden has a tough road ahead in reversing the Trump administration’s damage to the immigration system. Advocates say they’ll make sure he fulfills his promises.
“To be in the same place where I was three years ago is very frustrating,” said one teen who, like others, has seen her DACA application rejected despite a ruling in June against the Trump administration’s cancellation of the program.
The ruling thwarts the administration’s attempt to deport nearly 700,000 immigrants who were brought to the United States as children.
The Supreme Court will soon decide the fate of 650,000 so-called Dreamers across the country. Lawyers say terminating protections for them during a pandemic would be ‘catastrophic.’
Lawyers, judges, and advocates for migrant children wonder what it will take to close all 69 immigration courts. ‘I hope that it won’t take a death, but I worry that it will,’ one lawyer said.
‘Continuing to maintain these youths in this hotbed of contagion poses an unconscionable and entirely preventable risk of harm,’ one lawsuit states.
The Trump administration’s hardline immigration policies are intersecting with a highly contagious disease at a time when cities across the country are shutting down.