President-elect Joe Biden says he will halt construction of Donald Trump’s southern border wall after his inauguration. Biden says he will not tear down the 400 miles of barrier already built, but added that no further funding will be granted to the project, which was President Trump’s flagship policy.
Trump originally vowed to build a strong concrete wall with ‘see-through’ sections, and toured a site filled with prototypes in 2018.
But he later settled on repairing and extending the existing barrier using identical steel slats to those already in place.
The incoming president plans to take a far softer line on immigration than Trump, having previously said ‘immigration is who we are as a nation.’ Biden also plans to undo Trump’s so-called ‘Muslim ban,’ which barred travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries.
Trump began his term in 2017 by warning anyone in the US illegally would be subject to deportation. But Biden is set to return to former President Barack Obama’s former policy which sought to limit deportations to illegal immigrants with serious criminal records in the US.
President-elect Biden also hopes to reunited 666 children separated from their parents after being detained following their crossing over the US southern border with Mexico. Attempts to try and reunite hundreds of those children – some aged as young as five – with their families have so-far proved unsuccessful.
And Biden has also vowed to reinstate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. That protects people brought into the US illegally as young children from being deported.
The next president is said to want to act ‘cautiously’ with reforming current asylum rules in a bid to avoid further increasing the number of arrivals. Biden will have to take some of his attempts to untangle Trump policies to court.
And he has vowed to ‘commit significant political capital to finally deliver legislative immigration reform.’
Any such policy could see an amnesty offered to the millions of illegal immigrants already living in the US.Photo Credit: Getty
