Last July the Migration Policy Institutedocumented more than 400 changes to America’s immigration system made between President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2017 and the middle of 2020, and concluded that Trump “has dramatically transformed the U.S. immigration system, in bold-brush, sweeping ways but also in small technical details across the immigration portfolio… The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic during Trump’s fourth year in office turbocharged many of these efforts.”
Yet, as destructive as Trump’s efforts have been to block immigration, the president failed to reshape border policy through convincing Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform. This means that the administration’s many restrictive and punitive actions against émigrés (who include refugees and asylum seekers)—made by presidential executive order, directives issued by the attorney general’s office and regulatory changes—are subject to swift reversal once Joe Biden occupies the Oval Office. The following is a list of the most important reversals Biden can undertake.