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Matt Katz: This is the Takeaway. I'm WNYC reporter Matt Katz and I'm in this week for Tanzina Vega. Since taking office, the Biden administration has pledged to overhaul many of the hardline immigration policies that former President Trump was known for. They've also outlined an approach to immigration that they say is more humane. Here's Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas speaking on NBC this past weekend.

Alejandro Mayorkas: We're taking a look at the immigration system writ large and seeing what reforms we can achieve to ensure that the manner in which we address the needs of individuals looking for a better life adheres to the principles and values of our country and it's proudest traditions.

Matt: Soon after taking office, the Biden administration issued a memo intended to halt most deportations during his first 100 days in office. That order was temporarily blocked last month by a federal judge in Texas. In the meantime, the administration has announced the less restrictive approach to deportation. People considered national security threats and those with aggravated felony convictions are prioritized for removal, and so are recent border crossers. Other immigrants without documents are supposed to be allowed to stay in the US and fight their deportation cases, and yet there's a Trump era immigration enforcement tactic that the Biden administration is still using to deport immigrants.

Starting in March of 2020, the Trump administration began using a CDC regulation known as Title 42 to justify the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of migrants at the southern border on the grounds that they represented a public health threat during the pandemic. The Biden administration has continued to use Title 42 to expel hundreds of undocumented immigrants over the past few months. Determining how much has really changed in our immigration system under President Biden is where we start today.

Here with me now is Maria Sacchetti, national immigration reporter for The Washington Post. Hi, Maria. Thanks for being here.

Maria Sacchetti: Thanks for having me.

Matt: It's our pleasure. Maria, I keep seeing this word used to refer to the Biden administration's removal of migrants and asylum seekers, and the word is expulsion, not deportation. Can you explain the difference?

Maria: Yes. Expulsion is something that happens much more quickly, deportation is often the result of a process. Sometimes it's a very quick process, but sometimes it's a process that can drag on for decades. You go before a judge, an immigration judge, you can appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals. You can even appeal some things to the real federal court system, but it's something that can take a lot longer. Expulsion can happen in a matter of hours or days. There are some humanitarian protections, but far fewer.

Matt: That's what's happening under Title 42, right? It's this expulsion started by the Trump administration, now continued by the Biden administration?

Maria: Exactly. It's Title 42 of the public health code, and the idea was to basically, effectively stop crossings at the border to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Now, of course, the United States is one of the hardest hit by the coronavirus, so migrants just crossing into this country would be at risk themselves, but that is something that the Trump administration instituted, and something that the Biden administration has continued, except for unaccompanied minors, and now you see the number of unaccompanied minors rising.

Matt: Why is the number of unaccompanied minors rising? You said except for that group of that people. How is the Biden administration handling those migrants?

Maria: A federal judge stopped the Trump administration from expelling unaccompanied migrants. These are teenagers, children who travel or are dropped off at the border by themselves, without their parents, and they would be expelled to their home country. A lot of people don't realize this, but this is something that routinely happens with Mexico because the two countries have an agreement, but we don't have similar agreements with third countries like Honduras or Venezuela or other countries.

To have expelled minors traveling without their parents, that was a very big deal to immigrant advocates, and they sued and won in lower court, but then an appeals court overturned them. The Biden administration has the authority to expel minors, they just have decided not to. As a result, you're seeing more and more minors crossing into the United States. Some people say that by expelling so many people into Mexico and also to their home countries, the Trump administration created this pent up demand that people are continuing to try.

You're seeing a lot of repeat attempts at the border so the numbers, each one is an encounter, each one is someone a border patrol agent has to book in and greet and process, so there are risks there on the border of spreading the disease, just like there would be anywhere in the United States, but the Biden administration's continued to expel migrant families and other people.

Matt: We mentioned that last month. A federal judge blocked the Biden administration's memo halting most deportations. How much did that ruling change the administration's approach to deportations?

Maria: That is our understanding. One thing that is always important to point out is that unlike the regular court system you see on TV, law and order and things like that, or just in regular news coverage, those records are public. The arrest records are public. You know who gets arrested. None of that happens in the immigration system. The arrests are not public record, you can't pull a court record, so a lot of it is very foggy. Our understanding is that thousands of people have been deported this fiscal year. We don't know precisely how many Biden has deported.

Many more people have been expelled under the Title 42 order that Biden has kept in place, so that continues to happen. The judge enjoined part of a memo that the former acting Homeland Security Secretary created on Biden's first day, and he enjoined the part that said [unintelligible 00:06:35] halt deportation for 100 days, but he did not enjoin the part that set new priorities for deportation. There are lots of people out there who normally would have been targeted under the Trump administration who are just no longer targeted, so deportations will drop.

Matt: Yes, like national security threats, those convicted of serious crimes, are not supposed to be prioritized. I report on immigration here at WNYC and last week I learned about a Guatemalan man living in New Jersey for the last 13 years. US citizen wife and kids, no criminal convictions, and yet a few days ago he was deported back to Guatemala.

It made me wonder that, if Biden does want to be more permissive when it comes to immigration enforcement, maybe he does want that man to be allowed to stay in the country until his case is fully processed. Do we know if ICE will do as he says? Are we getting a test now to see if ICE is a rogue agency, as some Democrats have alleged over the last several years?

Maria: Well, I think it goes beyond that. How do we know it's a rogue agency? Why didn't we know ahead of time that the man from Guatemala who had no criminal record was about to be deported? These are secret records and so that's why there's so much controversy swirls around ICE and there's such a polarized view of it, because no one can really get close enough to see it like the way we can in the criminal justice system and the civil system. You can go pull the records and find out if what the government is saying is true.

We can find out if someone's in the system who shouldn't be there. Through FOIAs we found immigrant detainees who had been, when I used to work for the Boston Globe, who had been detained for 20 years, and nobody knew about, and then a man who had been detained for 14 years, and he was in a wheelchair. We've been writing about this for years and that seems to be one of the central issues here, which is just that how are you going to know? This is the thing. If the immigrant doesn't have a lawyer, doesn't have someone who will call the media and say, "Hey, I've been arrested." Part of our job as media is to go and find out who got arrested, but ICE simply won't tell us.

Matt: Right, that's the only way I knew, a lawyer called me. It's not like covering a local police department where you could say, hey, who did you arrest today, if you're a local reporter. You can't ask ICE such a thing as a reporter. They don't have to tell you.

Maria: We ask all the time, but they don't tell us and and they say it's to protect the immigrants privacy, but if you're jailing someone and trying to deport them to some of the most dangerous countries on earth, is that an inappropriate response? We're the media, we have to do our jobs, we are supposed to find out who got arrested. It's one of the most profound things that government can do to another person. There may be privacy concerns,

the same that you would have for victims of sexual assault and people who are in danger, but the criminal justice system deals with that as well.

Matt: There's an immigration reform plan that Biden has announced and it's trying to move its way through Congress. That would change the system that we've been talking about, in many, many ways. Does it seem like that proposal has gained any traction among lawmakers so far, from your perspective?

Maria: I'm not sure it would make the system any more transparent, which is a big issue, but I think what it would do is dramatically change the landscape for undocumented immigrants and it would legalize most of them. Right now you have ICE deporting a small fraction of undocumented immigrants in the country and a lot come back in. There are questions about is this an effective way to spend several billion dollars every year? Is it making an impact? Is it making people safer, and there's a debate over that.

I think that's what's coming, but right now the [unintelligible 00:10:55] is not something people are talking about every day. We're not hearing it at the White House briefing every day with a lot of energy. Maybe that will change, but there's other ways that immigrant advocates are trying to pass a bill and so we'll definitely cover that this year

Matt: Trying to take pieces of it maybe, and maybe some of the pro-immigration advocates can get pieces of this accomplished, if not the whole comprehensive deal.

Maria: Advocates know that this year is perhaps their only chance to pass something on immigration and they are determined to pass it. It's been 35 years since major legalization, so we'll see what happens.

Matt: We will be watching. Maria Sacchetti is a national immigration reporter for The Washington Post. Maria, thankful for your reporting. Thanks for coming on the Takeaway.

Maria: Same to you. Thank you.

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