It is the beginning of a new year. Despite some changes made by Biden, many of the racist policies and practices of the former administration remain. There are several issues that U.S. nationals who care about Black immigrants should pay attention to and get involved with this year. Below are four that are important to Black immigrants.
Midterm Elections
Everyone who cares about immigrants and is eligible to vote in the midterms should show up and vote to move Congress toward positive immigration reform. According to current reporting, immigration will not be included in the Build Back Better Act. Although not much is expected at the federal level, there may be some state and local bills that touch on immigration. The states with the largest population of Black immigrants are New York, Texas and Florida. These three states are doing everything they can to roll back civil liberties and immigrant rights. Communities are voting on whether state money can be used to support immigrants who work in communities that need assistance with federal representation.
Detention
It has long been clear that immigration detention is a moneymaker for private companies. The Biden administration has made some movement in ending contracts with private prisons. The fact is that immigration detention is not needed. A report released by the American Immigration Council examines 11 years of government data on the rate at which immigrants appear for hearings in U.S. immigration courts. The report, “Measuring In Absentia Removal in Immigration Court,” concludes that an overwhelming 83% of immigrants attend their immigration court hearings, and those who fail to appear in court often did not receive notice or faced hardship in getting to the court. The current detention system is historically anomalous and is the result of policies and rhetoric that built the mass prison system. Further, years of detention, corruption and impunity have created a system that produces death and harm for countless immigrants.
Removal
The rapid removal of Black immigrants should be front and center in 2022.
The best case study is Haitian deportation. The U.S. government, even with knowledge of the lack of strong leadership in Haiti, has continued to make a record number of deportation flights to Haiti. These expulsions are to a nation for whose dysfunction U.S. policy bears a heavy responsibility. As of Jan. 3, there have been 120 flights since Sept. 19, expelling about 12,700+ Haitians, of which a large percentage were children and women. This is a record number of flights in such a short period of time. It is impossible that all these immigrants received the due process afforded under US Immigration laws. Beyond the cost involved in these rapid deportations, Congress must step in to address the rapid removal.
Backlogs
USCIS reported that over 200,000 green cards were wasted in 2021 due to processing delays. The presence of such a large number of undocumented individuals in the U.S. is due in part to outdated and slow processing of the U.S. immigration system. At the end of FY2019, USCIS had a backlog of 2.5 million cases. USCIS’ own forms and policies, fiscal and staffing issues, pandemic-related closures and inability to receive or process most applications electronically resulted in an explosion in the backlog, which more than doubled to 6.1 million pending cases a year later. There are Black immigrants who lost an opportunity to come to the U.S. because of these backlogs as well as State Department closures and delays.
The system has to work and provide an answer in a reasonable time frame.
