President Joe Biden made a sweeping effort on his first day in office Wednesday to reverse many of his predecessor's hard-line immigration policies, drawing guarded optimism from local immigration advocates.
He directed his administration to preserve the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which has offered legal protections to hundreds of thousands of immigrants who came as children without legal authorization. President Donald Trump had tried to rescind it. Biden requested Congress give DACA recipients permanent status and a path to citizenship.
"I feel like I can breathe again knowing that we have a path," said Karen Velez-Barron, a 24-year-old DACA recipient who lives in Inver Grove Heights. "Because this is our country at the end of the day. I've been here since I was 3 years old."
She recalled how terrified she had felt as a DACA recipient during the Trump years, as the administration rolled back DACA and many immigrants in the program were deported.
"I realized that I couldn't really talk to folks about it at all, because you just don't know — you feel like you're underneath people's shadows and you're not able to walk around freely," said Velez-Barron, who emigrated from Mexico.
She worried even after the Supreme Court last June found that the Trump administration's move to terminate DACA was unlawful but left a window open for future repeal. Trump officials then moved the cycle of recipients needing to renew their status from two years to one, and "it's scary because you have kind of this expiration date," Velez-Barron said.
She expressed support for Biden's choice of Alejandro Mayorkas to head the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — the nominee would be the first Latino and immigrant to hold the job.
The immigration bill that Biden is sending to Congress would also grant a path to citizenship for holders of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and 11 million immigrants living here without legal permission.