Facebook Instagram Twitter YouTube

The Newest Member of Biden’s Transition Team: Defender of Obama Era Deportations and Family Separations

Obama’s top immigration advisor, Cecilia Muñoz has been named to Biden’s transition team. Well known for defending Obama’s record of deportation, her appointment shows continuity between Biden and Obama’s immigration policies.

Tatiana Cozzarelli

November 14, 2020
Facebook Twitter Share
(Ross D. Franklin / Pool / Getty Images, 2014).

Leer en español

During the last presidential debate, the one where you could actually hear him speaking, President Trump attempted to crush Joe Biden’s charade of sadness over family separations.

“Who built the cages?” he said repeatedly. “Who built the cages?”

And it’s true: the anti-immigrant deportation machine was built by both parties. And it was vastly expanded under the Obama administration. To this day it is true that while Trump detained more people than Obama, Obama still holds the record of deportations in U.S. history. And it is true that the image of the child crying hysterically, held in a cage, is not from the Trump years but from the Obama administration.

Biden tried to distance himself from Obama’s anti-immigrant history. When asked why voters should trust him after Obama’s record deportations, Joe Biden said “we made a mistake.” He said he would have done things differently and that he will do things differently. And it’s no wonder. The ground game of Latinx nonprofits in places like Arizona may have decided the election for him.

But now that Biden is slated to occupy in the White House, he and the rest of the Democratic Party are more than happy to turn their backs on the progressive folks who spent the last months campaigning to get him there. And on the issue of immigration this is clear as he clearly proposes continuity with the Obama administration, naming Obama’s former top immigration adviser, Cecilia Muñoz, to his transition team.

Muñoz, who was a well-known advocate for the Latinx community, having previously worked at La Raza and Center for Community Change, became the public face of Obama administration’s deportation machine. She was the Latina who provided political cover for the largest deportation machine built in the history of this country. She justified Obama’s immigration policies, in Spanish, including Obama’s deportation of thousands of Central American children and its decision to stop an executive order that would have halted deportations. She defended the policy of deporting “criminals” — which could include a vast array of offenses, including traffic violations. And she went as far as to say that deporting people who had not been accused of a crime was “collateral damage.”

In 2011, Muñoz said the in the PBS documentary Lost in Detention, “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. There will be parents separated from their children.”

She added, “As long as Congress gives us money to deport 400,000, that’s what we’re going to do.”

At a meeting of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, she spoke out against the #Not1More campaign against deportations, arguing that lawyers shouldn’t oppose all deportations. “Immigration reformists need a theory for humane enforcement,” she said. #NotOneMore a great slogan, but not a working theory.”

Muñoz’s working theory was the deportation of 1.5 million people in Obama’s first term.

Even though Latinx nonprofits and volunteers worked tirelessly to get Biden into office, he is not going to stop the deportations or the practice of keeping migrant children locked in cages. While he won’t call Mexicans rapists in the press, and will put a Latina face on his administration’s inhumane immigration policies , Biden will be the deporter in chief.

Facebook Twitter Share

Tatiana Cozzarelli

Tatiana is a former middle school teacher and current Urban Education PhD student at CUNY.

United States

Far Right Imposed Shutdown Represents Deeper Crises Only Workers Can Resolve

The United States is on the verge of a government shutdown. The fact that a minority far right in Congress has forced this, largely over disagreements with military spending, shows that the U.S. regime is in a historic crisis. Now more than ever, workers must intervene for their own interests.

Sam Carliner

September 29, 2023

Neither Trump nor Biden Represent the Interests of the Striking Workers

Donald Trump skipped the second GOP debate to go to Michigan to speak on the UAW strike. This, one day after Biden became the first U.S. president to walk a picket line, represents the on-going fight between the parties to win influence over the working class.

Enid Brain

September 29, 2023

The Deadliest Year for U.S.-Mexico Border Crossings Occurred during Biden’s Administration

The humanitarian crisis at the border was created by capitalism. Voting for a lesser evil won’t save the Latin American working class; it will take international, political and strategic solidarity across borders to build a combative immigrants’ rights movement.

Paul Ginestá

September 28, 2023

Scabs Will Not Pass: Defend the UAW Strike With Organized Grassroots Power

The Big Three are escalating their use of scabs. The rank and file are fighting back.

Jason Koslowski

September 27, 2023

MOST RECENT

The Big Three Are Using Layoffs to Punish the UAW and Undermine the Strike

The Big Three are retaliating against the UAW by laying off thousands of its members at plants across the country. Defeating these attacks will require the self organization and mobilization of all the workers.

James Dennis Hoff

September 28, 2023
President Biden visits striking UAW workers in Michigan.

Biden’s Picket Line Visit Doesn’t Mean He Is On Our Side

President Biden’s visit to the UAW picket line shows the strength of the strike — and why it should remain independent from him and the Democrats.

Tatiana Cozzarelli

September 27, 2023

Toward a Revolutionary Socialist Network

In this article Warren Montag and Joseph Serrano respond to our call for a network for a working-class party for socialism. 

Warren Montag

September 27, 2023

China’s Rise, ‘Diminished Dependency,’ and Imperialism in Times of World Disorder

In this broad-ranging interview, originally published in LINKS, Trotskyist Fraction member Esteban Mercatante discusses how recent global shifts in processes of capital accumulation have contributed to China’s rise, the new (and old) mechanisms big powers use to plunder the Global South, and its implications for anti-imperialist and working-class struggles today.

Esteban Mercatante

September 22, 2023