Joe Biden: The Most Striking Nominations from the US President-Elect's Cabinet, Including a Latino to Handle Immigration
A Latino at the helm of US immigration policy. A woman in the direction of the intelligence services. And a former secretary of state in charge of fighting global warming.
US President-elect Joe Biden began defining his government team with several novel nominations for national security positions confirmed Monday by his transition office.
The announcements include the nomination of Alejandro Mayorkas, a Cuban-born immigrant, as US Secretary of Homeland Security and Antony Blinken, a promoter of multilateralism, as Secretary of State.
Biden also chose John Kerry, Obama's former secretary of state, as his special envoy for the climate and Avril Haines as the director of US national intelligence.
Biden's selections for key cabinet positions anticipate a substantial turnaround from current president Donald Trump's most controversial policies in areas such as immigration or international relations, experts say.
But they also show Biden's interest in increasing racial and gender diversity in government, as well as turning to high-ranking officials from the Barack Obama administration to give muscle to his next administration.
A substantial change
Biden's nominations were announced before the Trump administration agreed on Monday to formally begin the transition of command after weeks of delays, although the outgoing president still does not recognize Biden's electoral triumph.
Trump has suffered several setbacks in his legal and political actions to try to reverse the outcome of the November 3 election, including the certification of Biden's victory in the state of Michigan.
Biden will take office on January 20 but warned that "there is no time to lose when it comes to our national security and foreign policy."
"I need a team ready from day one to help me regain America's place at the head of the table, unite the world to face the greatest challenges we face, and advance our security, prosperity and values," Biden said in a released on their appointments Monday.
A clear reflection of his intention to turn the US government around is the nomination of Mayorkas, the first Latino elected to head the Department of Homeland Security that Trump used in his aggressive fight against immigration.
"It's clear that Biden's immigration policy will be very different from President Trump's," says William Galston, a domestic policy expert at the Brookings Institution who advised former President Bill Clinton. "That appointment (of Mayorkas) was intended to underline that change," he adds in an interview with BBC Mundo.
Mayorkas came to the US as a baby, as a political refugee with his family after the Cuban revolution. He grew up in Miami and Los Angeles, studied law, served as a federal prosecutor, and worked in the Obama administration as head of Citizenship and Immigration Services and as Assistant Secretary for Homeland Security.
From that department, Mayorkas promoted the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that granted work permits and protection against deportation to more than 700,000 young people who entered the United States without documents when they were children.
The Trump administration, in the context of a series of tough actions against immigrants that included the separation of children from their parents at the border, tried to end the DACA program but ran into obstacles in justice.
If Mayorkas is confirmed in the post by the Senate, he will oversee an immigration policy that Biden anticipated in the campaign will seek to reverse Trump's actions, offer a path to citizenship to some 11 million undocumented immigrants, suspend deportations and increase the refugee admissions limit.
"When I was very young, the United States provided my family and me with a place of refuge. Now, I have been nominated to be the Secretary of the DHS (Department of Homeland Security) and oversee the protection of all Americans. and those fleeing persecution in search of a better life for themselves and their loved ones, "Mayorkas tweeted Monday.
"Biden's alter ego"
Another announcement that heralds a substantial change in US policy is Blinken's nomination as secretary of state.
Considered a promoter of multilateral alliances and contrary to Trump's "America first" policy, Blinken was assistant secretary of state during the Obama administration and served for almost two decades as an advisor to Biden, both in the vice presidency and in the Senate.
"(Blinken) fully understands the incoming president's thinking and has been described in many quarters as Biden's alter ego," Galston notes. "I think his appointment is designed to signal that (…) the secretary of state will be an important adviser to the president, as well as a main driver of his foreign policy."
Biden's campaign goals include restoring old US alliances relegated by Trump, such as NATO, returning to the World Health Organization, the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris agreement on climate change.
Blinken's nomination must also be confirmed by the Senate, where the party majority will depend on the two Georgia seats that will be defined in a second round of elections in that state on January 5.
By contrast, the appointment of Kerry as "climate czar" is lacking in need for senatorial confirmation.
The appointment of a former secretary of state to that position, with a seat on the White House national security council, is seen as a sign of the importance Biden plans to assign to the fight against climate change.
"You don't pick someone like John Kerry if you want to put that issue on the back burner," Galston explains.
Biden has also chosen as his National Security advisor Jake Sullivan, one of the negotiators of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal who, like Blinken, served as vice president of Biden and Obama's State Department.
Also new was the nomination of Haines, a former deputy director of the central intelligence agency CIA who in the past advised Biden, to head US national intelligence.
If confirmed in the position, she would become the first woman to hold that role.
Biden has selected another woman, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, an African-American with 35 years of foreign service experience, as the US ambassador to the United Nations, a position that is expected to gain more prominence in the next administration.
On the other hand, former Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen is anticipated to be nominated soon as Treasury secretary, something that has not yet been confirmed by Biden's office.
If she were nominated and confirmed in office by the Senate, in addition to leading the fight against the US economic crisis amid the coronavirus pandemic, Yellen would become the first woman to lead the Treasury.
