Thread by @gsiskind

Everyone who cares about immigration law and policy needs to read @crampell's superb piece. - Trump didn’t build his border wall with steel. He built it out of paper. washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/…

It is not an easy read. But it does the job of laying out just how broad the problems created by Trump are. In order to really fix things, it's necessary to thoroughly understand what has happened. If Team Biden wins, they have a hell of a lot of work to do.

The immigration advocacy community has got to fight just as hard to get a new Administration to comprehensively address the problems. Some of that will be to address the hundreds of changes at the agencies and work on building a pro-immigration culture at the various agencies.

And ultimately we need to finally get comprehensive immigration reform passed by Congress. If the Democrats capture the Senate, this needs to be done immediately. Start out with the 2013 legislation that nearly passed and update it to fix the numerous Trump changes.

If I were Biden, I'd also appoint an immigration "czar" responsible for coordinating the necessary changes at the many agencies that deal with immigration and also overseeing overall implementation of immigration reform legislation.

By the way, even if Biden wins, the rulemaking won't stop. As @crampell points out, the Trump people will try to push out everything that was on their to-do list via rulemaking. Which means we're going to have a lot of lawsuits. And the suits may continue into a Biden Admin.

Even if the Biden Administration supports the plaintiffs in the litigation, they can't easily kill rules in progress. They'll need lawsuits to end successfully. BUT- and Catherine didn't mention this - Congress can also use the Congressional Review Act to quickly take down rules.

Some very good work has been done to track the hundreds of Trump changes. @crampell linked to the MPI report at migrationpolicy.org/research/us-im… (which obviously needs some major updates because it is now - dated from July - already ancient.

Lucas Guttentag's Immigration Policy Tracking Project at Yale Law School - immpolicytracking.org - is another group doing excellent work in this regard.

Obviously, first Biden needs to win next week. Honestly, the changes Catherine talks about will get much worse in a second term (assuming the Democrats don't win the Senate).

That parenthetical is important. The Democrats also need to be prepared with how they would use their control of Congress to stop Trump on immigration if he should get reelected and they get the Senate. They would control the appointment process and the money.

Anyway, read the piece. Do your part to help over the next few days to get the election results we need. And be prepared to fight even harder to rebuild our immigration system into one that is the best in the world.