President-elect Joe Biden has promised a massive overhaul of outgoing President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. A closer look at the immigration team he’s assembling suggests big changes—but not necessarily in the direction that progressives want him to go.
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra is said to be Biden’s likely pick for AG; his past comments about decriminalizing undocumented immigration are already making the rounds on Fox News.
But it’s a lower-level hire currently serving on Biden’s transition that signals a more conservative stance toward immigration—and who has many progressives worried.
Cecilia Muñoz, one of President Barack Obama’s top immigration advisers, known for defending the family separation policy and the deportation of children, has been tapped for the president-elect’s transition team and could very well serve in his administration in an immigration capacity. She’s thus far proven to be the most unpopular of Biden’s appointees — and has earned comparisons to Trump’s nativist adviser Stephen Miller, known as the architect of many of the Trump administration’s crueler immigration policies.
“Cecilia Muñoz is the one person besides Stephen Miller who has spent years of her public service dedicated to the smooth execution of mass deportation policy at the West Wing level,” former Democratic National Committee spokesperson Pablo Manríquez told The Hill when she was tapped for Biden’s transition team.
Muñoz’s most infamous comments about the policy came in a 2011 PBS interview in which she brushed off criticisms of family separation.
“At the end of the day, when you have an immigration law that’s broken and you have a community of 10 million, 11 million people living and working in the United States illegally, some of these things are going to happen, even if the law is executed with perfection,” she told PBS’ Maria Hinojosa. “There will be parents separated from their children. We don’t have to like it, but it is a result of having a broken system of laws. And the answer to that problem is reforming the law.”
Though Muñoz is the most well-known flashpoint in the budding Biden team, she’s not the only appointee with a mixed record on immigration. She’s joined by Blas Nuñez-Neto, a RAND Corporation analyst who works with Homeland Security, who’s been tapped for Biden’s DHS transition group.
As Common Dreams noted, Nuñez-Neto has suggested undocumented families be indefinitely detained in a spate of new private prisons as a “humane” alternative to family separation and has claimed that migrants “take advantage of” American asylum for their own gain.
While much has been and will be made of the diversity of the Biden transition team and his forthcoming administration, hiring Latinos and other people of color is not in itself a progressive act. In this case, it appears that the Latinos he’s chosen as immigration advisers may end up carrying water for conservative policies that aren’t so different from his predecessor’s.
