March 7, 2024

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ABOUT THE IMMIGRATION STATE OF THE UNION FROM TEXAS’ LARGEST IMMIGRANT LEGAL SERVICES PROVIDER

President Biden decided how history will remember us upon delivering his highly anticipated State of the Union address to the American people. Today, President Biden embraced the toughest set of border security reforms we’ve ever seen in this country, formally adopting a more radical anti-immigrant position just as the sociopolitical climate becomes more hostile towards immigrant, refugee, and asylum-seeking people and families.

Since taking office, President Biden has made unconscionable choices — in violation of his own 2020 campaign promises — furthering a xenophobic agenda to end asylum once and for all. In practice and policy, he’s choosing to align himself with the extremist voices that ushered in an era of mass family separation, detention, and deportation.

Many of the immigration policies backed by the Biden Administration mirror the prior administration’s most radical tactics — including: 

Most recently, his administration went so far as to float interest in implementing, through executive action, the law that underpinned the ‘Muslim Ban.’

The humanitarian impact of these decisions has been grave. Families and people are encountering increasingly more hostile and dangerous conditions on their migration journey, as evidenced by reports that the U.S.-Mexico border has become the deadliest land migration route in the world, seeing hundreds of deaths each year.

While we applaud investments in our nation’s Refugee Resettlement program, which is on track this year to welcome the highest number of people in nearly three decades, there has regrettably been no political will to fix the foundational underpinnings of our nation’s broken immigration system. Instead, our elected officials, from the White House to the halls of Congress, have never been more ready to gamble recklessly with the lives of people and families pursuing safety and an opportunity to put down roots in the U.S. 

President Biden called for over $20 billion in “enforcement” funding during his speech. Rather than funding militarization and deterrence policies that put families and people in even more danger, that very same funding could be leveraged toward building a functional immigration system that meets the critical needs of this generation and this moment in history.

Our immigration system is grossly outdated and overburdened. The budget for the U.S. immigration court system in 2023 was $860 million — a number reduced by $16 million in the 2024 spending package passed this week. To put that in perspective, the American people spent a collective $1.38 billion on Super Bowl decorations alone this year. Our values as a nation are revealed by where we choose to invest our resources.

Americans support fair and just immigration policies that meet the needs of this generation and acknowledge the humanitarian considerations central to an effective immigration system.

If we are serious as a nation about saving lives and bringing order to the border, we must invest in a responsible resource system: 

  • Increasing the budget for our immigration courts to alleviate the backlog that has kept three million people languishing in immigration purgatory

  • Increasing the number of qualified asylum officers to process asylum cases

  • Expanding language access so that everyone can understand their options and have their cases accurately judged on their merits

  • Securing universal legal representation that ensures no one falls through the cracks of a giant institution that was created to keep them out

We know that legal representation keeps families together and free. Access to counsel gives people and families the tools they need to fight for and win their cases. Families with legal representation are up to 10 times more likely to have a favorable outcome in immigration court than unrepresented families, and legal representation ensures that people are given a credible chance to plant roots in their new homes.

These investments must be prioritized over carceral practices that denigrate everyone except the private prison contractors that reap billions of taxpayer dollars each year for detaining people and families in federal immigration prisons. No human being should be detained simply for migrating to the U.S. in pursuit of safety and security for themselves and their families — or obstructed from access to the equitable application of federal and international law.

The U.S. is long overdue for legislation designed to: 

  • Protect the legal and human right to seek asylum

  • Provide our neighbors with a pathway to citizenship 

  • Address the systemic flaws in our current immigration policy 

  • Reaffirm our commitment to becoming a more welcoming nation