More than 100 civil society groups called on the Biden administration to make a series of commitments on migration policy beyond any multilateral deal reached at the Summit of the Americas.
The hemispheric summit is expected to yield at least one major migration agreement, the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection, which will include commitments by the U.S., Canada and Spain to improve their refugee programs.
In a letter Monday to President Biden, Vice President Harris, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas and national security adviser Jake Sullivan, the groups called on the administration to work with civil society in the United States and the region but to take unilateral action where possible.
“We urge the Biden administration to sustain consultation with a wide range of civil society organizations in the United States, particularly those led by directly impacted refugees and migrants, and in the region, and to encourage regional governments to do the same. Beyond signing a rights-respecting declaration, we urge the administration to make … specific commitments during the Summit,” they wrote.
The letter’s writers include national immigration advocacy groups such as Immigration Hub, labor-based organizations such as the National Domestic Workers Alliance, single-national-origin advocacy groups such as Haitian Bridge Alliance, and a broad coalition of faith-based and civil rights organizations.
The groups called on the Biden administration to go beyond that declaration by, for example, committing to designate or redesignate Guatemala, El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras and Venezuela for temporary protected status (TPS).
TPS is a federal program that grants deferral from deportation and work permits to citizens of designated countries — the administration can designate any country where local conditions make it dangerous to repatriate nationals from the U.S.
Like TPS, many of the actions that the groups called for are solely within the powers of the executive.
But some immigration policy initiatives have been tied up in the courts, in part because of the policy whiplash on immigration over the past decade.
The groups asked for the Biden administration to expand its efforts for border officials to more quickly process asylum requests, while also calling for the administration to put up a fight in court to eliminate Trump-era policies that slow down asylum.
“The Biden administration should continue to pursue an end to the Migration Protection Protocols (MPP) and Title 42–which deny asylum seekers access to protection and send them back to harm– by strenuously fighting court and legislative efforts to impede their termination,” wrote the groups.
The groups also made an appeal to expand the goals of multilateral agreements at the Summit of the Americas, including the idea of a process to report on the progress made by individual countries to implement migratory agreements.
The Summit of the Americas is underway this week in Los Angeles, with civil society, business and national leaders converging on the city to discuss hemispheric issues.
The Biden administration’s goal as host of the summit was to show renewed U.S. engagement in the region, particularly after the Trump administration’s transactional, migration-focused approach to the region and in the midst of global crises attracting attention elsewhere.
But the migratory agenda at the summit is starting off on the wrong foot, as none of the presidents of the countries most closely linked to migration to the United States — Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — agreed to assist.