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President Biden will announce a new leniency for illegal immigrants Tuesday, giving them a chance to adjust to legal status here in the U.S. without having to return to their home country.
The new policy could apply to as many as a half-million people who are married to a U.S. citizen, though they themselves are here illegally. Under the law, they can adjust their status, but they are supposed to return home for processing, which can take years.
Mr. Biden will have Homeland Security grant them “parole,” which will allow them to adjust their status without leaving, and give them a three-year window to apply for a green card. They will also gain quick work permits.
The administration characterized the move as pro-family, seemingly contrasting it with the family separations that occurred under former President Donald Trump and his now-defunct zero-tolerance policy.
“These measures show the administration is committed to taking action within its legal authorities,” a senior official told reporters in previewing the announcement.
Mr. Biden is expected to reveal his plan Tuesday at a ceremony where he will celebrate 12 years since President Obama created DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. That was a similar election-year move aimed at shoring up Mr. Obama’s weak showing with Hispanic voters.
Activists said they expect Mr. Biden to reap similar gains this year.
“We anticipate that immigrants and Latino voters will express their gratitude at the ballot box in November,” Gustavo Torres, head of CASA, a major immigration group in the mid-Atlantic, told reporters ahead of the announcement.
The new plan would apply to people who have been in the U.S. for at least 10 years as of Monday. They also needed to be legally married by Monday. Officials figured some 500,000 people might qualify.
It would also cover as many as 50,000 children of the illegal immigrant spouses, who also themselves are here without authorization.
Many of the details were unclear Monday.
Officials couldn’t say what fees would be charged or what sort of staffing U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services will devote to the effort.
Mr. Biden is also expected to take steps to ease the process for DACA and other young-adult illegal immigrants to claim guest-worker visas, which can help them get firm legal status.
Administration officials said they were constrained in what they can do through executive action, and they made another appeal for Congress to pass broad reforms to the U.S. immigration system.
Mr. Biden’s new leniency comes two weeks after he announced a tougher approach to migrants at the border, with tighter restrictions on how they can attempt to claim asylum.
Those moves angered immigrant-rights advocates, and it is those advocates that Mr. Biden is hoping to win over with the spouses policy.
Republicans, meanwhile, mocked Mr. Biden’s asylum move as too little and too late. And they readied attacks on the spouse policy, too, saying it would entice more illegal immigrants to attempt the journey.
“This is what the Border Patrol calls a pull factor. It’s like a magnet, attracting people into the United States who know that if they wait long enough, President Biden will find some way to allow them to stay in the United States, even though they circumvent legal means of coming into the country,” said Sen. John Cornyn, Texas Republican.
Mr. Biden’s new program relies on the government’s power of parole, which has become the workhorse of the president’s attempts to redraw the immigration system without Congress passing legislation.
He has previously flexed what’s known as “humanitarian parole” to allow millions of migrants, including Ukrainians, Afghans, Venezuelans and a wide swath of people at the southern border, into the U.S. despite lacking legal visas.
The new program uses a different power, known as “parole in place.” It has been used by previous presidents, including chiefly for spouses of members of the military.
Mr. Biden’s new program would be a major expansion.
The administration says it will dole out paroles on a “case-by-case” basis, though when the Biden administration has used that language for past programs, the approval rate has been above 95%.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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