In an attempt to counterbalance his own harsh crackdown on the southern border earlier this month, which infuriated supporters and numerous Democratic lawmakers, President Joe Biden is taking a broad step this election year to provide relief to possibly hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the United States who do not have legal status.
The Biden administration will, in the upcoming months, permit certain spouses of U.S. citizens without legal status to apply for permanent residency and eventually citizenship, the White House stated on Tuesday.
Up to 500,000 immigrants may be impacted by the change, according to senior government officials.
An immigrant must be married to a citizen of the United States and have resided in the country for ten years as of Monday in order to be eligible.
Laptops 1000If a qualifying immigrant’s application is accepted, they will be protected from deportation for three years while they apply for a green card and obtain a temporary work permit.
Senior administration officials who briefed reporters on the plan under condition of anonymity estimated that about 50,000 noncitizen children with a parent who is married to a U.S. citizen would also be eligible for the same procedure.
The length of the couple’s marriage is not a prerequisite, and after Monday, no one is eligible. According to the officials, immigrants who turn 10 years old after Monday would not be eligible for the programme.
Senior administration representatives stated that they hope to begin accepting applications by the end of the summer; however the application costs are still to be finalized.
At a White House event on Tuesday, Biden will discuss his plans. It will also be the 12th anniversary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals programme, a popular Obama-era policy that provided young immigrants without legal status with temporary work permits and protection from deportation.
In private, White House officials urged Democrats to return to Washington for the announcement this week while the House is in recess.
Many of the estimated 1.1 million persons who are married to citizens of the United States but who have up until now had to leave the nation for years in order to achieve legal status may eventually become citizens as a result of the change.
Laptops 1000After getting married in 2017, Houstonian Claudia Zinga married a man who had been in the country since 2007 but had moved to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, to wait for his legal return.
Zúniga, 35, claimed that after her husband relocated to Mexico, their family’s lives “did a 180-degree turn.” Her husband’s return “would be a dream come true.”
“My spouse might be present,” she remarked. “We could prioritize our children’s welfare.”
Additionally, the Democratic president will unveil new rules that will make it easier for certain DACA recipients and other recent immigrants to meet the requirements for long-term work visas.
That would make protection more robust for qualifying immigrants than the DACA work permits, which are presently being challenged in court and are no longer accepting new applications.
With his announcement on Tuesday for spouses, Biden is not invoking a new kind of power.
According to Andrea Flores, a vice president at the immigration advocacy group FWD.us and a former policy adviser in the Obama and Biden administrations, the policy would build on the powers granted to families of service members by Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama to allow “parole in place.”
Parole-in-place eliminates a typical obstacle for eligible immigrants who are married to Americans but lack legal status by enabling them to begin the process of obtaining permanent residency in the United States without having to leave the nation.
President Biden’s pledge to safeguard undocumented immigrants and their American families was fulfilled, according to Flores.
The declaration on Tuesday follows two weeks after Biden announced a broad crackdown at the border between the United States and Mexico that essentially stopped asylum claims for anybody arriving between legally recognized ports of entry.
Due to that directive—which, according to a senior administration official on Monday, had decreased border interactions between ports—immigrant-rights organizations have filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration.
