Even With Biden’s Executive Orders, Immigrants Must Save Ourselves

President Biden campaigned in 2020 as a proud defender of immigrants, promising to deliver a fair, orderly and humane immigration system from Day 1 of his administration. As we head into the teeth of election season, with Republicans stoking fury over immigration, it’s hard to know what the president’s promises were worth.

Mr. Biden announced on Tuesday that he was making it easier for many undocumented immigrants married to U.S. citizens to seek legal residency without leaving the country first. It’s his version of the Obama-era DACA policy, which protected undocumented young people called Dreamers from deportation.

Mr. Biden has delivered blessed news for what is estimated to be 500,000 families. But I still wonder where Mr. Biden is leading the country on immigration. The president likes to blame Congress for the failure to enact “comprehensive immigration reform,” whose long, slow death has been a bitter joke among immigrant advocates for years. Are his eyes on the border, on history or just on November? Are immigrants a key constituency or just political soccer balls?

Immigrants living inside the United States, including those who will receive relief from the new executive order, are in a different situation from migrants at the border. But many of us were at the border once, too, vulnerable strangers hoping to build lives and families here. My path goes back to El Salvador, a country that was brutalized by a war stoked by the United States.

I’m one of those who went north on La Bestia, the deadly migrant train from southern Mexico to the U.S. border. I crossed the swift Rio Grande with relatives, our arms locked so my cousin didn’t get swept away. We didn’t drown or get detained, and we found opportunity and family here. Now I’m a U.S. citizen, helping to lead an organization by and for immigrant workers.

That work has never been harder. As Donald Trump and his party barrel forward with a mad agenda to imprison and expel undocumented immigrants by the millions, Mr. Biden is weaving all over the road. When June began, he said he was going to shut the border to nearly all asylum seekers, borrowing from the Trump playbook. He chose to push the limits of his executive powers to deter people fleeing for their lives, repeating the Republican lie that the country must take drastic steps to secure the border.