A Venezuelan father waiting in Mexico to plead his US asylum case who has yet to meet his newborn daughter. An Iraqi refugee stuck in Jordan despite his past helping US soldiers. A mother sent back to Honduras after being separated at the US-Mexico border from her two young children. A Malian package courier deported after three decades in the United States. And an Iranian couple kept apart for years under a US travel ban.
They have all experienced first-hand the effects of Republican President Donald Trump’s signature domestic policy goal in his nearly four years in office — the overhaul of the US immigration system.
A multitude of new bureaucratic hurdles to entering or staying in the United States have upended the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around the world. Trump says the changes were necessary to fix an immigration system he has characterised as broken and riddled with loopholes. As he campaigns for a second term, immigration is once again a key plank of his platform. While immigrants have faced hurdles settling in the United States for generations and illegal immigration has bedeviled both Republican and Democratic administrations, critics contend no recent administration has moved faster and more aggressively to carry out a restrictive immigration agenda.
Now, many immigrants are in a new phase of uncertainty, waiting to see who will win the November presidential election — Trump, or his Democratic opponent Joe Biden. Trump plans to expand and solidify his changes to the immigration system in a second term, while Biden has vowed to undo many of them if he wins. But the sheer number of new policies mean that many people waiting in limbo are affected by not only one new Trump measure but several layered on top of each other.
Many families have been waiting years to resolve their immigration cases, and regardless of what happens in the election, those waits are likely to drag out further. “A lot of people have it in their mind that a Biden administration would come in and reverse everything,” said Sarah Pierce, a policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank, but “a lot of the policy changes were layered with the intent of making them difficult to walk back.” — Reuters
Kristina Cooke and Mica Rosenberg
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