WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden ordered an expansive election-year step Tuesday to offer potential citizenship to hundreds of thousands of immigrants without legal status in the U.S., aiming to balance his recent aggressive crackdown on the southern border that enraged advocates and many Democratic lawmakers.
The president announced that his administration will, in the coming months, allow certain U.S. citizens’ spouses without legal status to apply for permanent residency and eventually citizenship without having to first depart the country. The move could affect upwards of half a million immigrants, according to senior administration officials.
“The Statue of Liberty is not some relic of American history. It still stands for who we are,” Biden said from a crowded East Room at the White House, filled with advocates, congressional Democrats and immigrants who would be eligible for the program. “But I also refuse to believe that for us to continue to be America that embraces immigration, we have to give up securing our border. They’re false choices.”
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President Joe Biden speaks Tuesday during an event marking the 12th anniversary of the Deferred Action of Childhood Arrivals program at the White House in Washington.
Democrat Biden’s action, which amounts to the most expansive federal protection for immigrants in more than a decade, sets up a significant political contrast with presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, whose hard-line stance on mass deportations includes rhetoric casting migrants as dangerous criminals “poisoning the blood” of America.
On Tuesday, Biden accused “my predecessor” of preying on fears about immigrants as he chastised Trump administration moves, such as a zero-tolerance policy at the southern border that led to the separation of families.
Trump has leaned into his own policies as Biden faces disapproval of his handling of immigration throughout his presidency, and on Tuesday, Trump’s campaign accused the incumbent president of creating “another invitation for illegal immigration.”
To qualify for Biden’s actions, an immigrant must have lived in the United States for 10 years and be married to a U.S. citizen, both as of Monday. If a qualifying immigrant’s application is approved, he or she would have three years to apply for a green card and receive a temporary work permit. They would be shielded from deportation in the meantime.
Javier Quiroz Castro smiles Tuesday after introducing President Joe Biden at an event marking the 12th anniversary of the Deferred Action of Childhood Arrivals program at the White House in Washington.
About 50,000 noncitizen children with parents who are married to U.S. citizens could also potentially qualify for the process, according to senior administration officials who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity.
There is no requirement on how long the couple must have been married, but no one becomes eligible after Monday. That means immigrants who reach that 10-year mark after Monday will not qualify for the program, according to the officials.
Senior administration officials said they anticipate the process will be open for applications by the end of the summer. Fees to apply have yet to be determined.
Biden formally unveiled his plans at a Tuesday event at the White House, which also marked the 12th anniversary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, a popular Obama-era directive that offered deportation protections and temporary work permits for young immigrants who lack legal status.
The announcement was welcome news to families with mixed immigration status.
Foday Turay was among those invited to the White House Tuesday for the announcement. He came to the U.S. when he was 10 years old from Sierra Leone, and is now a father to a young son and married to a third-generation U.S. citizen.
Though he’s enrolled in DACA and working as an assistant district attorney in Philadelphia, his status doesn’t provide relief from the constant worry of deportation.
“My wife is tremendously impacted by this,” Turay said on Tuesday before the ceremony. “You know, every day she talks to me about what’s going to happen. What if I get deported? You know, how are we going to raise our son?”
President Joe Biden turns to others on the dais after speaking during an event Tuesday marking the 12th anniversary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program at the White House in Washington.
Republicans made their own sharp contrasts with Biden’s plan. In a likely preview of GOP campaign ads, Rep. Richard Hudson, chair of House Republicans’ campaign arm, called the Biden policy a “mass amnesty plan.”
Other Republicans, such as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, anticipated that this latest directive would be struck down by the courts.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., has in the past advocated for a pathway to citizenship for those without legal status in the U.S., but on Tuesday, he said Biden’s policy “is making every problem worse.”
Tuesday’s announcement came two weeks after Biden unveiled a sweeping crackdown at the U.S.-Mexico border that effectively halted asylum claims for those arriving between officially designated ports of entry.
Immigrant-rights groups sued the Biden administration over that directive, which a senior administration official said Monday led to fewer border encounters between ports.
Because the shadow of a second Trump administration looms over Biden’s new policy, Tuesday’s actions will set off a months-long sprint by Latino organizations to get as many people to apply for the program as possible.
Trump could dissolve the program if he is reelected, but immigrants who are granted the parole status would still be protected.
This ain’t just Texas: More states want power to wage ‘war’ on migrants
This ain’t just Texas: More states want power to wage ‘war’ on migrants
Close to 200 National Guard soldiers and state police officers from Iowa, Indiana and Nebraska are preparing to deploy to the southern border in Texas, as a bitter partisan battle over immigration enforcement roils, and as the border itself becomes increasingly militarized. According to Newsweek, at least 14 states have sent soldiers since 2021, all on the order of Republican governors.
As reported by The Marshall Project, the personnel have been dispatched to assist with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star, an effort to police the border with state resources on the premise that the federal government has failed to do so effectively. The plan has included the deployment of thousands of national guardsmen, the erection of floating barriers and concertina wire, and roughly 40,000 criminal arrests (mostly for trespassing on private property). It has also created a testy ongoing standoff with federal agents at a high-volume crossing location in Eagle Pass, about two hours southwest of San Antonio.
Texas and the federal government are also facing off in court, where at the end of March, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals froze a law signed by Abbott that would make it a state crime to cross the border illegally. Were it to take effect, SB 4 would dramatically increase the state’s legal authority to criminally prosecute migrants, essentially creating a parallel immigration law system, complete with Texas-run deportations. Even the very conservative Fifth Circuit has been reluctant to contradict the vast body of law that delegates sole immigration enforcement powers to the federal government.
“For nearly 150 years, the Supreme Court has held that the power to control immigration — the entry, admission, and removal of noncitizens — is exclusively a federal power,” wrote Chief Judge Priscilla Richman.
The Fifth Circuit was heard more arguments over the law last month, but has not yet issued any further rulings. Most observers, including Abbott himself, expect that the Supreme Court will decide the fate of Texas’ law.
The rapidly evolving status of the law — at the end of March, different courts unpaused and re-paused its enforcement within a matter of hours — has left many confused, migrants and lawyers alike. Adam Isacson, director for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights nonprofit, told The New York Times that even unenforced, the law is prompting some migrants to try to cross the southern border in other states. Other experts note that Mexican authorities are changing enforcement strategies, which may also be driving down Texas crossings.
Overall, encounters with the U.S. Border Patrol were down nationwide in February, but the situation remains dire and chaotic. Nine migrants were charged with crimes including “inciting a riot” in March, after a group overwhelmed guardsmen and breached the barriers.
One of Texas’ legal arguments for SB 4 is built on the idea that the nation is under “invasion” from migrants, giving the state the authority to “engage in war.” Writing for Lawfare this week, Ilya Somin argues this reading goes against the Constitution. Still, it’s a framing that has caught on. At least seven Republican-controlled states have passed or are attempting to pass similar laws to SB 4, and many lawmakers have spoken of an “invasion.”
In addition, Tennessee and Georgia both passed related bills in March, bolstering the requirements for local police to inform federal immigration officials about undocumented persons. According to sponsors of the Georgia law, the effort was prompted by the death of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student who was killed while out for a jog in February. Authorities have said that Jose Antonio Ibarra, who has been charged with Riley’s murder, is a Venezuelan asylum-seeker who had previously been arrested and released in New York and Georgia.
Riley’s death was quickly turned into political fodder for conservatives, who blame President Joe Biden’s border policies for unleashing a “catastrophic wave of violent crime.”
Writing for The 19th in March, Mel Leonor Barclay and Barbara Rodriguez said that “broadly framing immigrant men as dangerous next to imagery of young White women victims,” is an old political strategy. While individual cases can be horrifying and evocative, data suggests undocumented immigrants are convicted of murder at a lower rate than native-born Americans. More broadly, an analysis by The Marshall Project found that immigration has not increased crime rates across a variety of offenses.
According to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released on March 28, Americans are increasingly concerned about immigrants — both legal and illegal — committing crimes. The same poll found that “substantial shares of U.S. adults believe that immigrants contribute to the country’s economic growth, and offer important contributions to American culture.”
This national tension plays out in Fremont, Nebraska. An influx of (frequently undocumented) migrants has kept the town’s three meat-processing plants in business, as young American-born residents have left for higher-paying, less dangerous work. But the town also has a 15-year-old law requiring anyone renting a property to sign a declaration that they are legally present in the U.S.
And in Baltimore, the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge on March 26 offers a tragic reminder of the role of immigrant labor in the U.S. economy. All six of the people who died in the collapse were migrants from Latin America doing road maintenance on the bridge.
“The kind of work he did is what people born in the U.S. won’t do,” a family member of one of the men told The Washington Post. “People like him travel there with a dream. They don’t want to break anything or take anything.”
This story was produced by The Marshall Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S. criminal justice system, and reviewed and distributed by Stacker Media.
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