More than 80 million Americans voted for Joe Biden in November, in part because he promised to end the Trump administration’s war on immigrants.
President Biden has tasked Alejandro Mayorkas, his nominee for secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), with restoring the United States’ mythical reputation as a welcoming nation.
The president’s pick is both symbolic and practical. Mayorkas, a Cuban refugee whose parents brought him to the United States as a young boy, served as deputy secretary of DHS under President Barack Obama. He helped implement the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program as director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
When confirmed by the Senate — the vote is expected Tuesday afternoon — Mayorkas will be the first Latino to head the agency.
But Mayorkas won’t be the first Latino to lead the federal immigration bureaucracy. That distinction goes to Mexican American Leonel Castillo, appointed more than 40 years ago by President Jimmy Carter to serve as commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) — later incorporated into DHS.
Castillo’s story illuminates some of the challenges Mayorkas could face when trying to roll back the Trump administration’s draconian immigration policies. It also speaks to the deportation machine’s long, bipartisan history and raises questions about Democrats’ commitment to implementing bold immigration reforms.
The 1970s were a time of growing controversy over immigration. Ongoing U.S. labor demand combined with fewer legal opportunities for Mexicans to enter the country led to a spike in unauthorized migration. This uptick coincided with a series of economic downturns in the United States. A recession in 1970-71, followed by the oil crisis and the subsequent drop in the value of the stock market a few years later, heightened feelings of economic and cultural instability across the country. Another recession in the late 1970s and early 1980s — during which the unemployment rate spiked to 10.8 percent, the highest it had been since the Great Depression — only reinforced such sentiments.
Authorities ramped up immigration enforcement efforts in response. Over the next three decades, deportations averaged nearly 925,000 per year, or more than 2,500 a day. The unprecedented magnitude and regularity of enforcement actions marked a break from the past.
Castillo took the reins at the INS in May 1977, at the dawn of the age of mass expulsion. A 37-year-old former high school football star, Peace Corps volunteer in the Philippines and Houston city controller, Castillo brought a public service background to the position. This contrasted with the militarized, enforcement-first approach of his Nixon-appointed predecessor, Gen. Leonard Chapman, who called for a crackdown both at the border and in immigrant communities.