Four Years Later, Are Immigrants Better Off?

(Corrected and complete version; major additions at end of article)

By E.J. Esperanza

[E.J. Esperanza lived as an undocumented immigrant for over 28 years and, in 2015, became one of the first “DACAmented” lawyers admitted to practice law in the country.]By E.J. Esperanza. 

[E.J. Esperanza lived as an undocumented immigrant for over 28 years and, in 2015, became one of the first “DACAmented” lawyers admitted to practice law in the country.]

Every four years we are told to vote for the Democratic Party because it’s a lesser evil. Every four years, there’s a specific issue or vulnerable population, we are told, that is at stake in the election. In 2020, it was about saving immigrant families from President Trump.  

Those who opposed voting for the Biden-Harris ticket in 2020 were accused of being “privileged citizens” for not caring about immigrant families. United We Dream and nearly every national immigrant rights organization in the ever-growing nonprofit industrial complex endorsed Biden and Harris. This was, we were told, a “strategic” vote. To quote Angela Davis, “to campaign for and vote for Biden[-Harris]” in 2020 was strategic because a Biden-Harris administration “[could] be most effectively pressured into allowing more space for the evolving anti-racist movement.”

Four years later, the opposite is true. Anti-immigrant policies are more entrenched among both political parties than before—to the detriment of our immigrant community. (Not to mention, that this administration is funding a genocide against the Palestinian people; murdering, displacing, and creating refugees in hoards in what Palestinians call a second Nakba.)

Between 2017 and 2020, there was a vibrant immigrant rights movement in this country. In the streets, inside detention centers, at the border, at airports: a mass movement was demanding an end to family separations, an end to the Muslim Ban, and the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—the federal agency responsible for terrorizing immigrant communities. Anti-ICE coalitions, 24/7 hotlines for undocumented immigrants to call during ICE raids, programs providing free attorneys, sanctuary policies protecting immigrants from ICE—all proliferated across the United States in a growing grassroots movement that shifted not only the national narrative about immigrants, but national policy, too. The influence of this movement pressured mainstream politicians to adopt the movement’s most radical demand: to abolish ICE.

The demand to abolish ICE was endorsed not only by progressives like Alejandra Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders; Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, NYC senator Kirsten Gillibrand, NYC mayor Bill de Blasio, and many other mainstream politicians endorsed the demand, too. In June 2018, this culminated in the introduction, in the House of Representatives, of the “Establishing a Humane Immigration Enforcement System Act,” legislation authored by Wisconsin congressman Mark Pocan, Washington congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, and New York congressman Adriano Espaillat. This legislation would have dismantled ICE and established a more humane process for immigrants.

This rising movement also largely thwarted the Trump administration’s plan for mass deportations, especially when compared to the record 3 million deportations carried out by his predecessor: Obama-Biden. In fact, by the end of the Trump administration, the number of people in immigrant detention centers dropped to a record 30-year low. In 2021, when Biden and Harris came into office, less than 15,000 immigrants were in ICE custody—the lowest since the 1990s.

Four years later, not only have ICE’s for-profit detention centers been repopulated by the Biden-Harris administration—to nearly 40,000 immigrants in 2024—Biden and Harris also kept in place Trump’s most draconian anti-immigrant policies at the U.S.-Mexico border. For a time, Biden and Harris continued Trump’s Title 42 expulsions, as well as his “Remain in Mexico” policy aimed at deterring asylum seekers. Biden and Harris also went further. In 2023, they enacted an unprecedented Asylum Ban, followed by a border proclamation in 2024 that effectively closed the border to asylees— two policies that the Trump administration could only have dreamed of enacting.

This Asylum Ban has all but eliminated the United States’ international obligations to refugees and asylum seekers, all while adding billions of taxpayers’ dollars to the further militarization of the border. This border policy, as I reported in October 2023, “will have one known outcome, regardless of the excuses: record deaths as migrants will be forced to risk more dangerous routes to seek refuge in the country.” Indeed, as I reported then, 2022 was the deadliest recorded year at the southern border, with “more than 890 deaths … making it the deadliest land route for migrants worldwide—a number many humanitarian organizations claim is an undercount.”

At the height of the movement’s reach and influence at the end of the Trump years, Biden and Harris on the campaign trail promised, within their first 100 days in office, a pathway to citizenship for the millions of undocumented immigrants in the country—a promise also made by Obama and Biden in 2008 as a response to the historic immigrant rights mobilizations of 2006. This of course became another unfulfilled promise by Biden and Harris, despite the Democratic Party having a majority, albeit a slim one, in Congress. Even so, Biden and Harris could have passed legislation with a simple majority, through the special process in the Senate known as the “budget reconciliation” process. They didn’t do so. Their excuse: an unelected Senate parliamentarian recommended against it.

(Of course, such parliamentarians have been overridden before—most recently by Trump and the Republican Party in 2017 when they enacted tax breaks for the super-wealthy.) Harris, as vice-president, could have overruled the parliamentarian as the tie-breaking vote in the Senate, but instead she and the Democratic Party hid behind this unelected staff member.

For the immigrant community, this came as no surprise. We’ve been here before. In 2009-2010, the Obama and Biden administration—with super majorities in both chambers of Congress, including a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate—failed to deliver a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented population, infamously voting down the DREAM Act in 2010 that would have given a pathway to citizenship to so-called “dreamers”—undocumented youth brought to the country as children.

Today, the immigrant rights movement is a shadow of its former self. Some immigrant rights advocates have entered the Biden-Harris administration to enact change from within, while others have pursued lobbying efforts and accepted a “seat at the table.” These strategies have done nothing to stop the administration’s xenophobic, rightward shift.

As an immigrant, I ask myself, are we better off? Have we “effectively pressured” the Biden and Harris administration leftward toward a more humane immigration policy?

This dire situation is not unique to immigrants. For all oppressed and working people, campaigning and voting for the Democratic Party—not unlike supporting the Republican Party—goes against our material interest as a class. Campaigning and voting for the “lesser evil” is not a strategy; it’s a hostage situation. The strategy is in how we finally break this vicious cycle.

For now, and most urgently, we must rebuild our grassroots coalitions and our capacity to struggle against the growing fascist forces in this country—without sowing illusions that the Democratic Party will be a “movable” and thus supportable target that we must campaign for this election cycle, let alone capable of fighting back Trump and fascism when they in fact have enabled such reactionary forces. As we rebuild our movements and class organizations—and deepen the existing Palestinian movement which is the sole exception which has remained independent of the Democratic Party for obvious reasons—we must also discuss and implement a strategy so that in four years we are not in this same electoral trap.

Concretely, and humbly, I posit, to this discussion on the most important strategy question of our times—how to break from the Democratic Party (that mass graveyard of social movements)—the following contribution: that within our movements and organizations, including in the labor unions, that we begin building labor and community coalitions across sectors and movements that promote the running of independent, working-class candidates that are democratically elected from within these labor and community coalitions and assemblies, and who are truly democratically accountable to our organizations and movements (and thus also recallable), from the bottom up, and that we test our new party infrastructure in local elections—school board elections, city and county elections, and statewide elections—as a precondition for laying the foundation for an independent party of a different kind: a working class party of the people, that elevates our movements, deepens our level of organization and struggle, so that we can, once and for all, challenge and defeat the twin capitalist parties, and so that, in turn, we can begin the process of radically addressing the existential questions facing humanity and our planet, at home and abroad.

Today, this strategy takes organizational form in the national coalition, Labor and Community for an Independent Party (LCIP). Join us.