As Congress works to avoid yet another government shutdown, immigration funding and legislation have been top of mind. Multiple states, including Massachusetts, have experienced the strain of a lack of funding and emergency shelter space for an unprecedented number of individuals and families traveling to the U.S. from Central and South America, India, China, and other countries. Last week, multiple immigration advocacy groups jointly released a memo demanding that Congress pass “common sense, bipartisan measures” to address the immigration system and the problems faced at the southern border and in major cities like Boston.
The signers of the memo – the American Immigration Council, American Immigration Lawyers Association, America’s Voice, Human Rights First, Immigration Hub, National Immigrant Justice Center, National Immigration Law Center, and Service Employees International Union – request that Congress increase funding to improve asylum processing and reduce backlogs and work permit waiting times while also improving resources for states, localities, and community shelter and support services. They criticize the “ineffective” and “cruel” policies recently proposed by some politicians (e.g., budget cuts to immigration organizations, family detention, an increase in Border Patrol agents) and propose partnering with the United Nations Refugee Agency to develop migration pathways and integration initiatives.
This memo comes a little over a month after a letter from the American Immigration Lawyers Association and American Immigration Council to Congress recommending FY2024 budget appropriations to improve the immigration system. In that letter, the AILA and AIC suggested more funding for USCIS, a reduction in immigrant detention, and an increase in access to counsel for those in detention. Motivating these recommendations is the fact that Congress continues to flirt with the disaster of a shutdown. Narrowly avoiding one in September cost House Speaker Kevin McCarthy his job, and the short-term extension he pushed through is due to expire at the end of this week. Another short-term extension may only guarantee a funded government through the beginning of next year, and some Republicans may use the opportunity of budgetary debate to slash funding for critical immigration services.
The Biden administration continues to do what it can outside of congressional control. It has proposed to rescind a Trump-era rule that would “limit the ability of immigration judges within the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR) to review immigration records, manage their own dockets, and make independent decisions about the best disposition for a case.” Courts initially blocked the rule from going into effect, but a future administration could revive it – and given that Trump is the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, this could be a likely scenario. Biden’s opposing rule would protect EOIR adjudicators’ authority and “restore adjudicators’ ability to reopen cases in the interest of justice.” The Biden administration is also developing a humanitarian parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans, which would provide safe and orderly pathways to the U.S. for 30,000 nationals of these countries.
Still, Biden can only do so much with executive orders and the soft power of the presidency. Congress will have to be the primary author of immigration reform. In the meantime, cities continue to struggle to serve large numbers of refugees and migrant families. The Massachusetts emergency shelter system officially hit capacity on November 9, and for the first time in its history as a right-to-shelter state, it was forced to place arriving families on a shelter waitlist. The Healey administration has developed a four-tiered approach to prioritizing people on the waitlist, with women facing high-risk pregnancy, families with a member who has a tracheotomy or an infant, and families at risk for domestic violence at the top of the list. There is some good news among the bad – the Massachusetts House recently released a spending bill that included the $250 million Healey had requested to support the emergency shelter system – but questions remain as to how the funds will be implemented.
The bill allows $50 million for the state to create overflow shelters for the first 30 days after capacity has been reached, but with the caveat that Healey’s cap of 7,500 families must be lifted if the funds are not used. Presently it is unclear where overflow shelters would be developed, though Hynes Convention Center has been suggested as a possibility. The Healey administration also announced that it was partnering with United Way of Massachusetts Bay “to identify providers who will in turn create short-term overnight sites for families and pregnant individuals with no alternative shelter options,” as a way to develop more overflow shelters. Obviously, logistical problems for the Healey administration are myriad. Yet some of their litigious problems may be disappearing: the advocacy group Lawyers for Civil Rights planned to sue Healey over the shelter cap, but recently announced it was planning to dismiss the lawsuit given the new funding for the emergency shelter system. Healey now has one less thing to worry about, though this is a cold comfort considering how dire the situation seems to be.
It is politics once again that rules the day. The debates and disagreements, bad blood and opportunistic coalition-forming, that occur at the federal and state levels will have real impacts on real people. We are now seeing the consequences of over a decade of congressional deadlock: the inability to pass immigration reform or develop budgets that can withstand the threats of government shutdowns have created the conditions in which we are currently living. But only politics can address these conditions. It is through some degree of compromise and political strategy that the state, and the country more generally, can mediate the crises we are facing. But if our politicians fail, self-styled “outsiders” (and demagogues) can ride the wave of popular disgust and skepticism and deepen the chaos. And the cycle of decline may simply continue.
