President Joe Biden’s senior adviser for migration, Amy Pope, is leaving her position, according to the White House.
Friday was Pope’s last day working for the White House.
Pope’s appointment to the White House role was temporary. In March, she was nominated to be the International Organization for Migration Deputy Director General for Management and Reform. Pope previously served in the Obama administration and worked with the British think tank Chatham House.
Pope will be replaced by Tyler Moran, the current special assistant to the President for Immigration for the Domestic Policy Council. In her new role, the White House said, Moran will “focus on implementing the President’s commitment to a well-managed border and a fair and orderly immigration system.”
Moran joined the White House after serving as executive director of the Emerson Collective-funded Immigration Hub. She previously served as senior policy adviser to former Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and in the Domestic Policy Council in the Obama-Biden White House.
“Amy had always intended to join the Biden Administration for a short time with an expected departure in the mid-summer. Tyler has been a key part of the team dating back to the Biden-Harris Transition and has been preparing for this transition for a little while now,” a White House spokesperson said in a statement.
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Her departure comes as a federal judge in Texas on Friday ruled that Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama-era program shielding certain undocumented immigrants from deportation, is illegal and blocked new applicants.
Since early on in the Biden administration, the White House has had to address a number of immigration challenges, including overcrowding at immigration facilities and an influx of migrants attempting to cross into the United States.
And earlier Friday, US Customs and Border Protection announced that US-Mexico border arrests in June were the highest they’d been in at least a decade.
CBP Acting Commissioner Troy Miller also noted Friday that agents are “seeing a high number of distress calls to CBP from migrants abandoned in treacherous terrain by smugglers.”
The Biden administration faces the possibility of another immigration headache, as it weighs whether to more widely reopen US borders in the near future – just days from the current travel restrictions expiring.
Biden appointed Vice President Kamala Harris to lead on issues in the Northern Triangle, but the administration has sought to distance her from issues related to the southern border.
The administration has also taken a number of actions to confront immigration issues. That’s included securing agreements for Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala to tighten their borders and stem the flow of migration, working to remedy overcrowding issues at immigration facilities and expanding its effort to identify vulnerable migrant families in Mexico for entry into the US.