Immigrant advocates to Biden: 'Meet the urgency of the moment'

A coalition of 138 immigrant, civil and human rights groups is calling on President Biden to take executive action to protect certain vulnerable immigrants from President-elect Trump’s pledge of mass deportations.

It’s within Biden’s reach, the groups say, to take relatively small measures that would help immigrants stay out of harm’s way before the incoming Trump administration supercharges immigration enforcement.

“Our immigrant communities are at a crossroads as President-elect Trump threatens to make his campaign promises to return to a cruel and chaotic immigration system a reality,” the groups wrote in a letter to Biden.

“The lives of American families — our neighbors, small business owners, farmworkers — hang in the balance so we urge the Biden-Harris administration to meet the urgency of the moment with immediate actions to protect vulnerable immigrant families, TPS holders, Dreamers and others who are at risk of mass deportation and family separation,” they said.

In his first term, Trump tried to scale down programs like Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).

If Trump can successfully end or significantly diminish temporary or humanitarian protections, hundreds of thousands to millions of beneficiaries could essentially be rendered undocumented overnight.

The groups — including the Service Employees International Union, Latino Victory Fund, Voto Latino, Indivisible, and CASA — are asking Biden to make sure people who are eligible for those temporary programs are not tied up in the immigration detention system, where they would be an easy target for deportation.

They’re also calling on the Biden administration to speed up TPS and Deferred Enforced Departure sign-ups. Those programs are available to nationals of certain designated countries that are either undergoing man-made or natural disasters, or that the United States deems too dangerous to justify repatriations.

There are 863,880 outstanding grants of TPS, according to the Migration Policy Institute, meaning the government has approved that number of petitions, but the number of active beneficiaries is likely lower due to attrition.

But there are also likely some remaining eligible immigrants, particularly from countries like Haiti and Venezuela, who are eligible to sign up but haven’t yet.

The groups — which also include Faith In Action, Amnesty International, MomsRising, Make the Road and Human Rights First — are calling for similar protections for DACA beneficiaries.

They want the Biden administration to quickly process any outstanding renewal applications and advance parole requests, which allow DACA beneficiaries to return to U.S. territory after international travel.

Though DACA has often been at the forefront of the immigration debate, its pool of active beneficiaries has dwindled to about 535,000 from more than 800,000, with the Department of Homeland Security blocked from processing new applications through a court order.

The groups are also calling for protections for farmworkers and seasonal workers, as well as work permit renewals and protections for asylees and refugees.

Immigrant advocacy groups are by and large bracing for an unprecedented crackdown by the new Trump administration, relying on collective and individual experiences from Trump’s first Oval Office stint to identify any available legal fortifications for vulnerable immigrants.

“There’s no doubt Donald Trump will impose far-reaching changes on our immigration system, dismantle legal pathways and reshape immigration enforcement as we know it. There’s no time to waste,” they wrote.

—Updated at 4:53 p.m.