What Is Immigration Policy Expected to Look Like in a Biden Administration?

This transcript was generated using AI and may contain inaccuracies. If you notice an error, feel free to email [email protected].

CHAPTERS 

[00:03:06]: Ending Migrant Protection Protocols (Remain in Mexico) and regulatory hurdles 

[00:04:23]: Litigation and Congressional Review Act options 

[00:05:46]: Priorities and bandwidth in early days 

[00:11:58]: Reopening asylum system: key challenges 

[00:21:23]: Lessons from past reform attempts 

[00:28:29]: Interior enforcement and ICE shifts 

[00:38:22]: Strengthening regional protection pathways 

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:01.280] 

Hello, my name is Andrew Selee. I'm the President of Migration Policy Institute. It's my pleasure to welcome you to this discussion this morning on the incoming Biden administration and the future of U.S. Immigration policy by my colleagues at MPI. Elections have consequences, and this was a hugely consequential election. And there's probably no issue which will be more affected by the results of this election than immigration policy. It was at the center of some of the Trump administration's most public decisions. And the Biden administration, incoming Biden administration, has pledged, Biden and Harris have pledged to take the country in a different direction, undoing much of what was done by the Trump administration, but also building a 21st century immigration system. This will, of course, not be easy to do. We are likely to have a divided Congress. We are in the middle of an economic crisis and a pandemic. There will be other priorities. But clearly this is going to be one of the issues that will be front and center in a coming administration. Over the next 40 minutes, my colleagues from MPI will provide insight on how a future Biden administration might try to change immigration policy and what obstacles they may face in trying to do so.

[00:01:10.880] 

We will be covering six sets of questions. What is likely to happen in the first 100 days? The U.S.-Mexico border, asylum, immigration courts and refugee resettlements, interior enforcement brighten prospects in Congress and the federal judiciary, and finally, international and regional cooperation. To start us off, I will go to Sarah Pierce, Policy Analyst at MPI, who will talk about the first 100 days. Sarah?

[00:01:37.140] 

Hi, everyone. The president-elect has promised a significant amount of action on immigration in his first 100 days, including reinstating DACA and ending the two travel bans as reported by, but also ending many of Trump's asylum policies, enacting a temporary moratorium on deportations, focusing enforcement on threats to public safety and national security, ending public charge, sending Congress a roadmap and bill on legalization, reuniting children separated from their parents, and many more items that are listed on the campaign's website specifically for the first hundred days. This list is obviously very ambitious, and getting through it will depend on the procedural and logistical challenges of of each item. So which could actually happen quickly. The easiest will be those that can be reversed with one administrative action, such as an executive order, but don't come with heavy logistical challenges. Examples of these would include ending the 2017 and 2020 travel bans, which currently block certain types of immigration from 13 countries. Also, reinstating DACA to its full force would likely only require a memo, and it would mean opening it up to more than 400,000 young foreign nationals who were immediately eligible for DACA benefits went unable to apply during the Trump administration, and this includes 56,000 who became eligible since the Trump administration tried to end DACA.

[00:03:06.680] 

Other items might be easy procedurally, but will come with really big logistical challenges, and this includes ending the Migrant Protection Protocols or also called Remain in Mexico. Procedurally, that would likely require little more than a policy memo. That's actually how it was created via memo. But there will be a lot of questions about what to do with the more than 67,000 individuals who are currently or were previously enrolled in MPP. Those questions will present a lot of political and logistical difficulties for the new administration. Meanwhile, Trump administration policies that were completed via regulation have a lot more procedural challenges. Typically, if a regulation is final, even if the prior administration didn't go through notice and comment to finalize it, which was true of a lot of Trump administration regulations, the new administration still needs to issue an entirely new regulation to reverse it, which can be a time consuming and burdensome process. There are a few small ways around it. If the regulations are subject to ongoing litigation, it may be possible for them to be settled in court. If the judges are open and interested, the Justice Department could try to settle the lawsuits in a way that allow agency leaders to revise those rules.

[00:04:23.720] 

Since many of the Trump administration's regulations are subject to ongoing litigation, including USCIS public charge regulation, this might be a frequent approach for the new Biden administration. Some regulations could also be reversed through the Congressional Review Act. This is a law that allows Congress to reverse regulations that were enacted within the last 60 working days of Congress, which probably means regulations that were finalized since mid to late March this year. Lawmakers could consider them in January, and if they pass a joint resolution in both houses of Congress and it's signed by the President, those regulations would be reversed. 17 rules have been overturned via this act, and 616 of them were overturned in 2017 at the start of the Trump administration. So this is definitely something that is ready for increased use. But if Democrats don't hold the Senate, then this strategy might be far less likely. If they do end up doing this, regulations that would be vulnerable to reversal under the Congressional Review act include expanding criminal bars to asylum and revising definitions for H1B eligibility. Finally, despite any procedural or logistical challenges, there's just the overarching questions of whether or not the new administration is going to have the bandwidth to do all of this in the first 100 days.

[00:05:46.190] 

Will immigration actually be their key priority? I think we know it's not going to be. If you watch the speeches on Saturday, they mentioned a lot of issues, but they didn't mention immigration. During the Trump administration, immigration was the top policy priority. They poured everything they had into enacting their agenda. I think under a Biden administration, we're about to see the pace of immigration changes slow down significantly. So there's going to be a lot of questions about how much they can accomplish in the first 100 days and really how much they can accomplish in four years. And with that, I'll turn it over to my colleague Jessica Bolter to talk about the U.S. and Mexico border. Great.

[00:06:23.230] 

Thank you, Sarah. So with the U.S.-Mexico border at the center of President Trump's immigration policy, President-elect Biden has pledged to undo many of Trump's actions there. One of the most prominent policies of the Trump administration, of course, has been the construction of hundreds of miles of Border Wall 386. As of October 23, the Trump administration has set aside $15 billion for wall construction and construction of infrastructure related to the wall. Only $4.5 billion of this has come from Congress, with 10.5 billion coming from Defense Department and other accounts. One of the most contentious aspects of building the border wall among both Democrats and Republicans in Congress was the transfer of Defense Department funds to build the wall, including through an emergency declaration that Trump issued in February 2019, allowing him to use billions of dollars appropriated for military construction projects. One of the easiest actions for President Biden to take right away will be to end the emergency declaration, which he can do immediately through a presidential proclamation. Then there is the question of what would be done with the funds that have already been transferred but not yet used. Of course, ending the transfer of future funds doesn't mean in itself that wall construction stops.

[00:07:45.300] 

But Biden has also promised to end wall construction. If Biden wants to follow through with his promise not to build another foot of wall, his administration could terminate current contracts for wall construction, possibly even if they are in the middle of construction, which the government does have a lot of leeway to do. A future Biden administration would still likely need to dedicate some funds to barrier maintenance. But if he really doesn't construct another foot of wall, that would be a break from the past five administrations. New border walls and barriers have been constructed under every president since at least President George H.W. bush. Biden's plans for border security have instead focused on improving screening at ports of entry, where most illegal drugs enter the country, investing in technology like sensors and surveillance towers between ports and building on partnerships with Mexico and Canada. Then, aside from border security infrastructure, Biden will have to decide what to do with the network of interlocking policies and regulations that the Trump administration has put in place to prevent unauthorized immigrants and coming across the border from staying in the U.S. And seeking asylum. My colleague Doris Meissner will talk more about the outlook for these policies next, but I want to talk about the flow of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border that any new policies will have to address.

[00:09:12.340] 

For most of Trump's presidency, flows at the border have been made up mostly of Central American families and minors. But the administration ratcheted up its efforts to to limit access to asylum in 2019, and in March 2020, the CDC issued an order allowing CBP to immediately expel migrants who cross the border illegally or come without proper documents, which has led to over 200,000 expulsions so far. So, consequently, we've seen a decrease in families coming to the border. The number of family members apprehended dropped from 84,000 in May 2019 to just under 5,000 in February 2020, before any related factors were at play, and then to under 1000 in April and May, when the pandemic was having the most effect on migration. We've also seen an increase in apprehensions of single adults, most from Mexico, during the pandemic, though much of that increase is due to people trying to cross the border multiple times and getting caught multiple times now that the CDC order has removed any formal consequences for being apprehended for most migrants. So it's not that a lot more people are coming, but that more people are trying to cross more times. It's unlikely that this shift from mostly families to mostly single adults is permanent, and a Biden administration would likely have to be prepared to address family migration at the border.

[00:10:41.110] 

Now, Biden has promised to end many of the policies limiting access to U.S. territory and U.S. asylum at the border, including things like the migrant protection protocols and the metering policy, which limits the number of people who can make asylum claims at ports of entry. He has also said that he would review the CDC order, but we've seen throughout the Trump administration how responsive migration flows can be to U.S. Policy. For example, in the months following Trump's inauguration, we saw record low flows as people waited to see what his policies would be. As another example, before MPP migrant protection protocols was implemented across the entire border, we saw flows increase in sectors where it wasn't yet implemented. So if and when the future Biden administration changes these restrictive policies, it will have to do so with great care and planning and in a way that balances humanitarian concerns while avoiding a rush on the border that could overwhelm resources and result in a renewed sense throughout the country that the border is out of control. So, as I mentioned, much of what happens at the border does tie into the asylum system, which Doris will speak to now.

[00:11:58.220] 

Thank you, Jessica, and good morning, everybody. So picking continuing on the border and the preoccupation that the Trump administration has had with the southwest border, it's, of course, been the wall and it has been shutting down the asylum system. The issue of reopening the asylum system, even though it can be done through executive authority. I mean, after all, what Trump has accomplished at the southwest border was almost entirely through executive authority. So that can be used to undo. But the tension then becomes the one that Jessica and Sarah have alluded to, and that is, how do you manage reinstating humanitarian policies that are, after all, in accordance with U.S. law and with international principles in a way that does not generate new flows that make it then very difficult to manage the border? Going forward, I think it is fair to say that the first order of business will be the Remain in Mexico program. This is the program, of course, that forces people to wait for their asylum claims to be heard while being in Mexico. There, as Sarah said, the difficulties really are logistical. The policy can be changed. But than what happens, I think that what it's important to look for is this issue of metering and ports of entry.

[00:13:24.820] 

I think there will be a very heavy emphasis placed on orderliness and sequencing the numbers. So that will involve the government taking over the issue of metering. Right now, it's been a informal system, largely among migrants themselves. So you can expect, I think, that DHS will begin to take that over. But then as people are waiting for their asylum claims in the United States rather than in Mexico, there will, I'm sure, be need to quickly change guidance as fully as possible. Only about 1% of those cases are being granted, and that's because the Trump administration put very, very strong constraints into the policy guidance that asylum officers are using. That becomes a question then of coordination with the Justice Department, because the core of the decisions that lead to how the interpretations for asylum have been made rests with the Attorney General. And the Attorney General will need to reverse some of the decisions were taken in the Trump administration, which then needs to be translated into a shift in policy guidance to asylum officers and to immigration judges. Now, that's not to say that the doors would just be flung open. I mean, the earlier policy guidance has also been strict and narrow, but it at least has been possible to under certain circumstances gain eligibility for asylum.

[00:15:13.800] 

And that has that was really set aside in the prior administration and that reverse needs to take place, but it's going to take some time. Now, parallel with that, you've heard reference to the CDC order, emergency order at the southwest border. And that is another thing to be watching carefully because the administration, the incoming administration, has not said what it will do about that. It said it will review it. And you know, they're coming into office in January. It's highly likely that COVID conditions will continue to be in an emergency state. So it is possible that we would see a new administration maintain the CDC guidance at the border at least for some period of time, which would also then gain some time for putting the changes into place that allow for there to be a more functional system for granting asylum. So then you get then to the new policies that a Biden administration wants to advance, and they do include surging asylum officers for handling border cases. That can be done quite quickly. But the Biden administration also wants to authorize asylum officers to do not only the credible fear screening, but also complete the adjudications of asylum cases in order to be able to decide them in months rather than having them languish for years in the immigration courts, which does incentivize misuse of the system in some cases.

[00:16:54.080] 

This proposal for asylum officers doing the full adjudication is one that MPI actually advanced and that the new administration is picking up, and that will require a regulation. Given what Sarah told you earlier about regulations, promulgating new regulations do take some time and that then becomes another constraint in moving forward with new policies. Similarly with immigration judges, which the administration has said it would double, will require appropriations and will require hiring and training. And so the capacity to build new procedures into place, along with the resources required to do it, will demand timelines that simply won't be within the first 30, 60 days. However, at the same time, on the humanitarian front and where the U.S. stance toward humanitarian issues and protection is concerned, the administration does have a very important opportunity to follow up on what it has said it will do with reopening refugee resettlement and refugee admissions to the United States. There of course, is an area where the United States has abdicated a long standing role of global leadership and example setting around the world. The refugee admissions from abroad are at an all time low, only 15,000. This year, the administration has said that it will ramp them up to 125,000.

[00:18:30.390] 

So in doing that, it will be necessary to rebuild the resettlement networks in the United States, which have been deeply cut and underfunded. But that is certainly possible to do. And in the process of increasing refugee admissions to the United States, a new administration would send very important signals to the world, to the country, and would possibly have the ability then to allocate significantly larger numbers of refugee admissions to the Western Hemisphere, particularly to Central American countries, which could help where the border is concerned. Because one of the things that we will be looking for from the Biden administration is its intention to establish refugee processing closer to the places from which people are free fleeing so that protection is available nearer home, less dangerous journeys. And that shift could be an important overall shift in the way new policies might be looking. So those are the executive branch issues that we've been looking at. There are, of course, the other branches of government, the legislature, I mean, the Congress and the courts. And for that, let me turn to my colleague. Muzaffar Chishti.

[00:19:56.820] 

Thank you, folks. Thank you, Doris. And thank you to everyone for joining us today. So let me just do it in two quick parts, first about the congressional possibilities and then what we are likely to see at the Supreme Court. So this is sort of the third moment in the last 20 years when we have sort of tantalizing the prospect of big move on immigration reform. Immigration, as Sarah pointed out early on, did not come up in any of the speeches of the president-elect or the vice president-elect this weekend. It did not come up as a huge issue in the election campaign towards the end in general. But president-elect did make an important announcement during one of the debates that he will send a bill to Congress in the first hundred days. That was a surprise to a lot of us, but just because of the other crowded agenda that they're going to be faced with. But it's also very important for the base of the Democratic Party in that regard. One can expect that there will be some movement towards immigration reform legislation, but we know that's an uphill topic, and what tells us it's an uphill task is sort of the experience over hope that we have confronted in the last two decades of immigration reform history.

[00:21:23.590] 

You know, there are mega events that have come in the way of immigration reform becoming a possibility and then the realities of divided houses of Congress. Let's just quickly remind ourselves that President George W. Bush, probably the most pro-immigrant Republican president in recent history, came to the office thinking that we're going to get comprehensive immigration reform in six months. And we know that 9/11 happened, one of the biggest mega events. And it's essentially stopped immigration reform even from being considered in Congress for about five years. President Obama came to office in 2008. Everyone thought this was going to be a major part of the President's agenda in the early part of the administration. But he was confronted with Great Recession and there was no possibility of any immigration reform legislation in the first term of the Obama administration. And unfortunately, similarly, when this administration takes effect with lot of hope that there will be significant change on immigration, the first things that the president-elect will have to deal with is the pandemic. So that makes I think real progress on some other important issues very difficult for in the immediate future. And then there's a story about the divided houses here.

[00:22:45.810] 

Let me just quickly remind all of us that in 2005 when Congress first had the ability to tackle on immigration, the famous Kennedy McCain bill, celebrated as one of the hallmarks or bipartisan legislation, never got even voted on in the Senate at that time. In 2006, there was a very restrictive censure bill passed by the House and then it did not go anywhere in the Senate. In 2006, the Senate actually passed a very significant comprehensive immigration reform bill by a wide margin. It never went anywhere in the House. Both House and and Senate in 2006 passed significant restrictive bills, but they were never reconciled. In 2007, there was a prominence again comprehensive immigration reform bill. It did not even get a vote. It never survived a closure vote in the Senate. And the famous the Gang of Eight Bill in 2013, which emerged after President Obama's victory in the reelection that got a thumping two thirds majority in the Senate and hit the big wall in the House and never became law. We have unfortunately experience here in divided House in a very polarized Congress in the last few years. Just on the other side, during the Trump administration, the House has passed reasonably significant immigration bills, one on the DACA and the TPS and one for the separate bill for TPS for the Venezuelan passed in the House did not even get a hearing in the Senate.

[00:24:21.230] 

So we are confronted here with possible reality of a similar sort of polarized Congress on this issue. So the prospects of a very large bill going through Congress in the early stages of this administration, I think the chances of that are slight. But there may be possibility of doing some small board bills and the two candidates for them could come sort of on the coattails of what will be the big challenge of this administration, which is COVID that we're going to possibly see a relief bill coming out of out of Congress. And if there's a COVID related relief bill, one can see that it'll be possible to do something for the essential workers because they have gotten a lot of prominence in the last six to nine months. And the two candidates for that is to provide some financial relief to them in the form of the stimulus checks that many, in fact all unauthorized, were excluded from in the prior stimulus bills. So one can see that there will be some movement either on the eligibility for them for financial relief or from relief in the unemployment context. There may be some possibility that if DACA moves ahead, is one of the small bore immigration legislations for which there is more consensus that there may be some consensus, some legal status, even on a temporary basis for essential workers.

[00:25:50.790] 

From my vantage point, I would think that those are the possibilities that one should be looking at. Just quickly shifting on the Court now. Supreme Court this was a very crowded agenda for the Supreme Court in the last four years. About 25 odd cases landed up at the Supreme Court. This is like a tsunami for those who follow immigration at the Supreme Court. So one would argue that are we going to see a repeat of that in the administration or are we going to see a reversal of that? And here you can look at it from both points of view. One of the reasons why there was a lot of activity at the district court level and immigration cases and people thought that injunctions were coming in all directions. But at the end of the day, most of those cases that landed at the Supreme Court, Supreme Court landed up saying that the president has lot of leeway in immigration, that the authority on immigration is quite extensive. The only two exceptions to this were the DACA and the census case where the Supreme Court did not reject the authority of the president, just said that the president had not exercise that authority properly.

[00:26:59.100] 

So in one sense you could say that there has been a further reaffirmation of the president's authority on immigration in the last four years that that could potentially come to the advantage of the Biden administration when it starts to move on immigration. So I think that is something for people to watch. There are three cases pending before the Supreme Court in this year. One related to the wall that Jessica basically hinted on, one related to the MPP, and one related to the use to the counting the unauthorized for the reapportionment. Now, we don't have time to speculate on how those will come out, but those are some things for us to watch. Just in the very early part of the Supreme Court's new calendar. I can't tell you whether there's going to be a more crowded or less crowded decision there on the Supreme Court the next year. I think a lot of it will depend of how much executive action happens. We know it was a big tsunami in the last four years. You could argue that happened because the immigration advocates were busy so fighting every battle in the Trump arena. But the other hand, you could also say there was just so much immigration action by this administration that the litigants had no choice but to fight all the way.

[00:28:15.370] 

So whether we'll have a tsunami or we'll have a decline in the level of activity is one of the things that remains to be seen. Thank you and let me pass on to my colleague Randy Capps.

[00:28:29.930] 

Well, thank you, Muz, for that excellent overview and thanks everyone for joining us this morning. I'm going to focus a little bit more narrowly on enforcement of immigration laws inside the United States by U.S. immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has been one of the most controversial aspects of the Trump administration's agenda and ICE detention. One of President Trump's first actions in office was an executive order that broadened the scope of ICE's enforcement activities. After that order was implemented, ICE arrests and deportations from inside the U.S. Increased by about 40%, but they never reached the high level that they had been at the peak in 2010 and 2011 during the Obama administration. This is because you had states like California, Illinois and Connecticut that passed laws and major cities such as New York and Chicago that enacted ordinances that severely narrowed the scope of cooperation between ICE in identifying and handing over noncitizens in their prisons and jails for deportation. The Trump administration tried very hard but never succeeded in overturning these sanctuary policies. The Biden administration will no doubt stop publicly threatening these sanctuary jurisdictions and ICE will stop launching high profile retaliatory raids in them.

[00:29:52.870] 

The administration will also likely renegotiate cooperation with these places, just as the Obama administration did in latter years when it replaced the Broad Secure Communities Program with the Priority Enforcement Program, or pep. Secure Communities links databases between the jails, FBI and DHS to identify removable noncitizens in state and local custody. And as it is currently operated, it broadly flags those arrested for or convicted of any crime for deportation, with an important point being that people don't have to be convicted, they only have to be arrested to be taken into that system. Restoring PEP and the administration's associated enforcement priorities would focus much more narrowly on people who are actually convicted of crimes and indeed more serious crimes such as felonies. Late in the Obama administration, MPI estimated that those priorities were protecting upwards of 85% of unauthorized immigrants from becoming targets for arrest, arrest and deportation. Additionally, there's been a trend at the local level away from ICE cooperation in major urban counties in the South. After the 2016 election, a new sheriff in Harris county, that's the Houston, Texas area, ended the 287G program there. This is the program that delegates authority from ICE to local law enforcement agencies to help identify and detain unauthorized immigrants.

[00:31:25.630] 

The counties that surround the cities of Nashville, Tennessee and Raleigh and Charlotte, North Carolina followed suit during the administration and now newly elected sheriffs in the suburban Cobb and Gwinnett counties outside of Atlanta have also pledged to end this program. So taken together, Biden's proposed short term moratorium on deportations, restoring those Obama era enforcement priorities and ending threats against sanctuary jurisdictions will substantially lower the political temperature around immigration issues and reduce fear in immigrant communities across the country. Importantly, these actions can all be taken almost immediately without statutory or regulatory changes. It was an abrupt shift at the beginning of the Trump administration. It can be an abrupt shift at the beginning of the Biden administration. Finally, the Biden administration will have an opportunity to significantly and perhaps permanently reduce the ICE detention population and perhaps close some for profit immigration prisons. The average number of ICE detainees has dropped from a high of 55,000 in August 2019 by more than 2/3 to 17,500 today. Most of this is due to the pandemic. To make a transition away from the current detention oriented system. ICE will need to quickly ramp up alternatives to detention to handle the anticipated increases in asylum seekers arriving at the border and and potentially those who will return in large numbers from Mexico when the migrant protection protocols or remain in Mexico end.

[00:33:06.310] 

The Obama administration operated a family case management program that was very successful with Central American families seeking asylum. This program operated for almost two years before the Trump administration ended it in 2017. A program like this on a large scale could replace detention for most if not all asylum seekers and many of those arrested in the US Interior. But transforming the immigration custody system will take time and significant resources and may require support from Congress given the legislative mandates for detention. With that, I will turn it back to Andrew to talk about regional cooperation with Mexico and Central America and to

[00:33:51.580] 

end the formal presentations. Thank you Randy. I think one of the questions going forward is also how the-how a new Biden administration may re-engage globally. Will we see a different sort of engagement with the global refugee regime. Will we see the U.S. become a signatory of the Global Compact on Migration? Will we see the U.S. become particularly more engaged with some of the specific refugee and migration flows, such as the Venezuelans in South America, Nicaraguans in Costa Rica, Syrians in the Middle East? I think those are pending questions that we will find out the answer to early next year as we see a new administration takeover. But first and foremost on their mind, of course, is going to be Mexico and Central America. And with that, actually let me turn it over to Ariel Ruiz, my colleague. Ariel.

[00:34:41.840] 

Hi. Thank you, Andrew. So in thinking about the Biden administration's approach to the region, what will be key is a tailored approach to the corporation that they take. We've known this from previous iterations of the Obama administration as well as Trump administration, that understanding the key differences among each of the countries will be the most important part in emphasizing which migration approach to take. Managing migration flows from Central America and Mexico will require specifically looking at the key factors, push factors that are coming from each of these countries and then from there looking at how to provide policies that actually lead to some sustained approaches and sustained policies in each of the countries. As we've heard from my colleagues, Biden has pledged to terminate MPP also other programs on the U.S. Mexico border, but with the Central American government specifically. Biden has also suggested that he would and his administration would cancel the some cooperation agreements that currently at least in Guatemala had started last year. One of the key things too that and perhaps the most important thing in the current approach of the Biden administration will be looking at how to invest and restart the process to a more sustained flow of investment to the region.

[00:35:57.320] 

We've seen that under the Trump administration this started to decrease in the beginning and then at the end was used as a threat to try to manage the flows for the to the United States or to increase the efforts of each of these countries to reduce the flow to the north to migration flows to the United States. This strategy or this combination of strategies will require balancing migration enforcement, the humanitarian protections and assign a very tailored strategy for investment, specifically under careful sequencing. Given the ongoing COVID pandemic that is expected to worsen regional conditions and potentially suggest more flows of migration in the future. What we need to know, or we need to think for the moment, is to maintain these existing efforts at the U.S.-Mexico border should change in some ways, perhaps consider even allowing the CDC rule to continue for the short term while working with Mexico to maintain its current enforcement. We've seen similar efforts in Guatemala, for example, recently with the caravans. And this really highlights a key point so far. Migration management in the region has been a reaction to increased flows toward the United States. And caravan specifically became an issue in the Trump administration to do more to prevent illegal migration.

[00:37:15.320] 

We saw the U.S.-Mexico migration agreement that came in the summer of 2019, which really led to an increase in enforcement, not only through the existing means that Mexico has, but also to looking at the National Guard to provide some more enforcement in its border with Guatemala. Then we have the ACA's, the Asylum Corporate Agreements, and specifically in Guatemala, where we've known that at least about a dozen people from Honduras and Salvador were sent over the first several months of the program. That we will have to see what will happen will come to be of that program. We know that. And by that I mean the approach in Guatemala. We know that Honduras has suggested that they will continue to explore opportunities, at least under the Trump administration's final months. But we will see that that will have to change as well. Now to this, there is a point about trying to increase and invest in the protection asylum systems of the region, but I think it will have to be for it to be successful. We'll have to create a very different approach to how you provide the relationship, thinking specifically about what's in stake for this country as well.

[00:38:22.630] 

And again reorienting to the political conditions that each of these countries faces, including in Guatemala more recently, where you saw again that the caravan that started in mid October was actually stopped by Guatemalan authorities before even got to the Mexico border, even though there was already a large presence of Mexican immigration officials there. And then the key part, and I think other colleagues have mentioned too here is thinking about other alternatives to protection outside of these countries, potentially restarting, for example, the CAMP program, Central American Miners Program, trying to consider what other countries can do, including Mexico, Canada and other countries that may be able to do more in protections. We've seen the Mexican organization or the Mexican Refugee Commission, for example, has been saturated by applications for protection since 2013. It's been increasing. In 2019, there were 71 applications, 71,000 applications. And even though they decreased in the beginning of 2020, we've seen a gradual increase in the late months of 2020. Lastly, but perhaps more importantly in terms of collaboration, the Biden administration's focus on increasing investment, about 1 billion per year for the next four years will be important and certainly is something that was a highlight of his time with the Obama administration.

[00:39:37.860] 

But it will require to actually diagnose and understand how to measure the impact and specifically how and where these programs are invested will be what dictates their success in the region and the country. For example, in Honduras, certainly more has to be done in security and anti corruption efforts, whereas for example, in Guatemala more could be done in anti poverty and other nutrition programs that began to shed some light. But again, it will be key here to see how the administration, the Biden administration works with Congress to be able to figure out how to design realistic goals and then be able to measure their effectiveness over the long term. We know that Mexico could be part of this. The Mexican President, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has expressed interest to the Trump administration in investing in southern Mexico and Central America. And this could be one of the potential areas that they could begin to collaborate. Given some of what has been discussed before. We need to keep in mind too that there was just recently a hurricane in Central America which really impacted Honduras and a little bit of Guatemala too in the () that have happened since then.

[00:40:38.340] 

And it's something that's going to be bound to come up again in our conversations in the future. In conclusion, administering all these pieces of the new regional strategy that the Biden administration has proposed will require a significant degree of interinstitutional coordination that may be difficult to come by, will be essential if it is to be able to successfully manage these flows from the region. And with that I'll transfer back to Andrew. Thank you.

[00:41:07.070] 

Thank you, Ariel. And thank you everybody. We are now going to go to some questions. I want to thank you all for joining us. This has been a very rich discussion. As you can tell, there's enormous challenges ahead for the Biden administration. There's a lot to change. If they want to change things that were done during the Trump administration, there's a lot to build for the future. There's a lot to do with allies and other countries around the world in the process. And there's a lot to do within this country. And getting all these pieces right and coordinating among all these pieces is going to be an enormous challenge, but it's also an opportunity for the United States as an opportunity for the future of the country.