Administration grants Venezuela new TPS while also resuming deportations—10-11-23
Immigration news, in context
This is the 160th edition of BORDER/LINES, a newsletter by Felipe De La Hoz and Gaby Del Valle designed to get you up to speed on the big developments in immigration policy. Reach out with feedback, suggestions, tips, and ideas at BorderLines.News@protonmail.ch.
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You may have noticed we were on something of a hiatus for the last few weeks, a product of a pileup including COVID, the start of the semester (Felipe teaches at NYU), some lingering deadlines for both of us, and various other converging circumstances. We’re hoping to get back on a constituent schedule now.
This week’s edition:
In The Big Picture, we examine the temporary protected status designation for Venezuela, and the program writ large, as well as the administration’s deal to begin deportations there
In Under the Radar, we discuss New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ bizarre visit to Latin America
In Next Destination, we look at the Biden administration’s resumption of border wall construction
The Big Picture
The news: The Biden administration has re-designated temporary protected status for Venezuela, bringing up the cutoff date to July 31 of this year. This means that Venezuelans who have been present in the country since that date or prior, including hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers, will be able to obtain protections from deportation and work authorization, at least through April 2025. The decision follows an initial Venezuela designation in 2021; the fact that the redesignation has been officially estimated to affect about half a million additional people is a sign of just how significant arrivals from that country have been in the last couple of years.
One reason for that was that Venezuela itself essentially refused to accept deportation flights from the U.S., meaning that Venezuelans couldn’t be removed at all, and thus were not similarly ensnared by both Title 42, which lasted until May of this year, or the transit ban 2.0 that the Biden administration instituted to basically replace it. Just a couple weeks after the TPS announcement, the government also announced that it had reached a deal to begin deporting Venezuelans again. The one-two punch is part and parcel with Biden’s and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ approach, to expand what could generally be called legal pathways along with tightening the enforcement vise—fundamentally a continuation of the long-term bipartisan approach.
The new TPS designation is already in effect, though it’s unclear when exactly deportations to Venezuela will resume. Both announcements seem to be downstream from a political calculus driven by basically the same thing: what has come to be known as the “migrant crisis” in several states and localities, most notably New York City, and the demands of these places’ Democratic executives on the Biden administration, made additionally acute by next year’s looming presidential election. So how do these decisions get made, anyway? Read on for our breakdown and analysis.
Under the Radar
NYC mayor visits Latin America to dissuade migrants from coming
After months of urging migrants not to come to New York City, Mayor Eric Adams traveled to Mexico, Ecuador, and Colombia to deliver the message in person. In keeping with the time-honored tradition of conservative politicians engaging in military cosplay at the border, Adams donned an olive green outfit and aviators in the Colombian port town of Necoclí, where he was heckled by protesters. His four-day trip also included a stop in the Darién Gap—a treacherous stretch of rainforest between Colombia and Panama that has become a common route for northbound migrants en route to the United States—even though Colombian officials warned him not to go. Authorities ultimately had to deploy fifty cops to protect him, the New York Daily News reported.
If Adams set out to discourage migrants from making the trip to New York, his efforts were unsuccessful. The New York Times spoke with U.S.-bound migrants in Colombia who were undeterred by Adams’s visit and said they plan on making the trip anyway, because conditions in their home countries are too inhospitable.
Adams ended his trip by calling for a “right to work” for migrants in the United States. While the focus remains on the sheer number of migrants who have arrived in New York City over the past year, the real issue is not their numbers but rather their inability to provide for themselves. Asylum seekers must wait a statutory minimum of 180 days after filing their case to receive for work authorization, and must usually then wait weeks or months to be approved. Unable to work legally, and lacking support systems in the U.S., many recent arrivals have turned to New York City’s shelter system, which was already strained due to budget cuts even before the buses full of migrants began arriving.
Next Destination
Biden administration waives environmental laws to build border wall
The Department of Homeland Security announced that it will be waiving 26 federal laws to facilitate construction of a border wall in south Texas. The Clean Air Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, and Endangered Species Act are among the environmental laws DHS will be waiving to build a wall in Starr County, Texas, according to a notice published in the Federal Register. The administration is also waiving the Archeological Resources Protection Act, the Antiquities Act, the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act, and a litany of other cultural preservation laws.
The statute allowing DHS to do this dates back to the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. In addition to expanding the scope of who the government would prioritize for deportation, the 1996 law let the attorney general (at the time, federal immigration policy was under the purview of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, an agency within the Department of Justice) waive the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act to build a border wall in San Diego. A subsequent law, the REAL ID Act of 2005, allowed the newly established DHS to waive any “legal requirements” that interfered with the “expeditious construction” of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
As The Guardian noted, this is the first time the Biden administration has suspended these laws to facilitate border wall construction—a reversal of Biden’s promises regarding sustainability and immigration. The administration, for its part, is deflecting responsibility, claiming that it is required to build the wall because Congress appropriated money for it in 2019. “I tried to get them to reappropriate it, to redirect that money. They didn’t. They wouldn’t,” Biden said at a press conference. “And in the meantime, there’s nothing under the law other than they have to use the money for what it was appropriated.”