WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 23rd December, 2020) US President-Elect Joe Biden said he expects to lift many of the existing immigration and asylum restrictions imposed by the Trump administration within six months.
Biden on the campaign said he would reverse many of Trump's strict immigration policies, including restrictions on asylum seekers, within his first 100 days in office.
"It's going to take probably... six months to put that in place," Biden said at a press conference on Tuesday when asked about the timeline for rolling back some of the specific Trump administration immigration policies.
The president-elect said he will not lift every restriction on day one or immediately halt the current asylum process because the US would then end up with 2 million people stranded on the southern border. Biden warned changing things immediately to "what it was 20 years ago," would only complicate the crisis.
"I already started discussing these issues with the President of Mexico and our friends in Latin America, and the timeline is to do it so that we in fact make it better not worse," Biden said.
He stressed that it requires getting a lot of things in place including the funding.
Biden during his campaign promised that in the first 100 days he would reverse the Trump's administration's policies that deter asylum-seeking migrants seeking refuge in the United States, end prolonged detention of migrants in the United States, and end Trump's National Emergency on the border that justified the use of Defense Dollars on new border wall.
Earlier efforts to halt the influx of migrants coming to the United States included a "zero-tolerance" policy that led to the separation of children from families, sending more than 60,000 asylum seekers back to Mexico to wait for their asylum applications, and a ban on asylum seekers who crossed through a third country to reach the United States.
In October, US media reported, citing the American Civil Liberties Union, that the Trump administration is unable to find the parents of nearly 600 migrant children in US custody. More than 1,000 migrant families were separated in 2017 under the so-called zero-tolerance policy.
In addition, Biden has promised to surge humanitarian aid to the southern US border, offer deportation protections for migrants brought to the United States illegally as children - also known as Dreamers - and an end to the travel and refugee bans on Muslim-majority countries.
Biden also wants Congress to pass legislation to clear the path to citizenship for nearly 11 million people living in the United States and to reform visa programs for temporary migrant workers in certain industries.
