Joe Biden has vowed to "undo the moral shame" of the Trump administration by signing three new executive actions on immigration.
Per the Independent, the new orders include measures to help reunite families who were separated at the US-Mexico border and a review of the Trump administration's policy on US asylum.
The president said his order will "work to undo the moral and national shame of family separations" by forming a task force to reunite the families who were separated at the US-Mexico border under the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy.
Upwards of 5,000 families were forced apart during Donald Trump's term as a result of his immigration policies.
The Independent reports that immigration services are still searching for more than 600 parents, noting that more than 1,400 others who were separated from their children have been forced to spend years in the countries they fled in the first place without their families.
Reunification efforts will be lead by Alejandro Mayorkas; the president's pick for secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, who was sworn in by Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday (February 2).
The incoming secretary will be the first Latino and immigrant to lead the office.
"I want to make it clear – there's a lot of talk, with good reason, about the number of executive orders that I sign," President Biden told reporters inside the Oval Office. "I'm not making the law. I'm eliminating bad policy."
The executive actions, however, have been criticized by immigration advocates and civil rights groups as being too limited to adequately deal with the ongoing crisis at the US-Mexico border, or help the hundreds of families who have been separated from their children to come back to the US.
The task force will "broadly" cover the zero-tolerance era, which includes the pilot program in El Paso that separated hundreds of families, according to senior administration officials.
However, it is not known if the families who were deported back to the countries they fled will be given any special protections on a return to the US.
According to the executive order, the task force will review "any other related policy, program, practice, or initiative resulting in the separation of children from their families" at the border.
The order covers the duration of Trump's term: 20 January 2017 through 20 January 2021.
Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants' Rights Project, said the Biden-Harris administration "must do more than that if it is going to fully address the family separation tragedy it inherited."
