WASHINGTON – The Biden administration will announce on Tuesday deportation protections for long-term undocumented immigrants married to U.S. citizens, as well as faster approval of work permits for people under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
President Joe Biden will officially make the announcement during an afternoon event at the White House to mark the 12th anniversary of the DACA program. The initiative was created during the Obama administration and was designed to temporarily protect undocumented children brought to the United States without authorization.
The new guidelines were presented in advance to reporters by senior government officials late Monday.
The new DACA policy will allow recipients who have graduated from an accredited university and have been offered a highly skilled job by a U.S. employer to quickly qualify for one of the existing temporary work visas, such as an H-1B visa.
The new measures came two weeks after Biden issued his toughest immigration crackdown yet, with a partial ban on asylum applications at the southern border. Immigration remains a top issue for voters and for Biden's Republican rival, former President Donald Trump.
Democrats and immigration advocates have long urged the Biden administration to grant permanent protections to the nearly 579,000 DACA recipients while they await a decision from the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which could declare the program unlawful. The legal battle will likely end up before the Supreme Court.
Many immigration policy experts consider DACA outdated because there are now thousands of undocumented people who are ineligible for the program because they have not even been born yet. To qualify, an undocumented person must have lived continuously in the United States since 2007.
Biden urged action
Americans with undocumented spouses have expressed their frustration and called on the Biden administration to issue an executive order providing relief to the more than 1.1 million Americans who fear their undocumented spouses could face deportation.
The deportation protection for those married to a U.S. citizen is a one-time measure that is expected to enable approximately 500,000 non-U.S. spouses and their children to apply for legal permanent residency – a green card – under certain conditions.
To qualify, a noncitizen must have lived in the United States for 10 years as of Monday, June 17, 2024, and must also have been married to a U.S. citizen as of that date. The noncitizen spouse must also not be considered a security threat.
The Department of Homeland Security will review those requests, which are expected to be available by the end of the summer, on a case-by-case basis, a senior administration official said.
This measure is also expected to affect approximately 50,000 non-US citizen children whose parents are immigrants and are married to a US citizen.
To qualify, these children must be 21 years old or younger and unmarried “and the marriage between the parents must have taken place before the child's 18th birthday,” a senior administration official said.
Under current U.S. immigration law, a foreign national who enters the country without authorization is not eligible for permanent residency status and would have to leave the U.S. and legally re-enter through an application for a green card from his or her U.S. spouse. This is a lengthy process that can take years.
“The challenges and uncertainties of this process result in many eligible spouses not applying for permanent residency,” said a senior administration official.
Application info follows
More information on the application and approval process will be published in the Federal Register in the coming weeks, a senior administration official said.
The U.S. Immigration and Citizenship Service, which oversees the legal immigration system, has a similar program that allows noncitizens who are immediate family members of U.S. military members to obtain a green card without leaving the country.
“This announcement uses existing powers to keep families together,” a senior administration official said. “But … only Congress can fix our broken immigration system.”
Immigration reform in Congress is unlikely, as Republicans control the House and Democrats control the Senate. A bipartisan deal on border security failed earlier this year. That deal did not include a path to citizenship for DACA recipients or long-term immigrants.
Congress came closest to bipartisan immigration reform in 2013, when the Gang of Eight, consisting of four Republican and four Democratic senators, drafted a bill that would pave the way to citizenship for millions of undocumented people.
The Senate passed the bill, but Republican House Speaker John Boehner never brought the bill to a vote.
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