WASHINGTON, D.C. – In light of the Department of Homeland Security’s first report from the Family Reunification Task Force, as well as the Vice President’s disappointing remarks in Central America that highlighted a misguided understanding of forced migration, FWD.us is taking the opportunity to put forward this new video that outlines how the administration can and should build a working, humane approach to regional migration, to protect asylum, and to keep families together.
The video outlined not only how the last administration weaponized a long failed immigration and asylum system—left broken by too many administrations—but the steps forward that are critical to building a new, orderly system that can uphold the best of America’s promise and values.
After decades of failure, we must seize this moment and act now. Many of the families the administration is working to reunify were forced to flee to the U.S. border surviving conflict, natural disasters and famine, in part because President Donald Trump, and too many politicians before him, cut off nearly all legal avenues to come into the U.S.
We need a new approach. FWD.us launched a new video highlighting:
- How the broken immigration system was gutted, essentially eliminating the asylum system, employment-based immigration system, including temporary work visas, and the family-based immigration system, leaving families with little to no opportunity to apply to come to the U.S. from closer to home.
- The need to strengthen the asylum process to ensure we can protect people in desperate need. The current journey migrants experience to arrive at our southern border cannot be the only option for people looking to apply to come to the U.S. from across the Western Hemisphere, and those who are transiting through.
- The need to create more opportunities for people to apply to come to the US through other avenues and from closer to their homes instead of forcing them into dangerous travel routes to the border, or weaponizing cruelty to deter these vulnerable populations from ever reaching our borders when seeking humanitarian protection, economic opportunity, or trying to unify with their families.
Ensuring that we create more legal avenues for people to immigrate to the U.S. will provide a vital source of future immigrants, keep our families and communities together, and grow our economy even stronger. America must work to welcome families and children seeking asylum with dignity, while expanding legal avenues to our immigration system.
We must only look to recent history to see that a strategy built solely on deterrence is both wrong and does not actually reduce forced migration. We must work to improve conditions on the ground that reduce the need for forced migration while creating working, humane legal immigration avenues that alongside a humane asylum system can be an effective, orderly and humane approach to regional migration. The administration put forth a series of positive plans, and they must follow through on them, including ending the use of Title 42 at the border.
The strategy outlined in this video won’t fix everything—not close—but we hope they can provide the outline to a better path forward after years of failed policies of deterrence.
