Immigration has become one of the central issues of the 2024 race, with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump vowing to expand the draconian policies of his first term and deport 10 million immigrants from the country amid what he calls an “invasion.”
Democrats, meanwhile, are touting their own border crackdown at the Democratic National Convention this week in Chicago. President Joe Biden celebrated his executive action to block many asylum seekers at the southern U.S. border, and Vice President Kamala Harris promises to hire thousands more border agents if she is elected.
We host a roundtable discussion in Chicago with Oscar Chacón, executive director of Alianza Americas, an immigrant rights group; Maria Hinojosa, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, founder of Futuro Media and host of the Latino USA podcast; and Marisa Franco, director and co-founder of Mijente, a national digital organizing hub for Latinx and Chicanx communities.
Isn’t that what the bipartisan bill that Trump killed was intended to do?
From what I know it included more money for detention beds, immigration judges+staff, asylum officers, lawyers for unaccompanied minors, and border cities, plus expedited work permits for folks already in the system, allowance for asylum officers to close out a claim rather than going through immigration courts, 250,000 new work visas, work authorization to the children and spouses of people who have H-1B visas, and also work eligibility for immigrants awaiting visas if they have a U.S. citizen spouse or fiancé or if their parent is the spouse or fiancé of a U.S. citizen, as well as workers who have claimed asylum but who have not yet had a hearing.