What to know about Biden’s new plan to legalize US citizens’ undocumented family members

President Joe Biden, who has recently adopted hardline immigration policies, is today announcing another immigration policy. This time, however, it’ll be one of the biggest efforts in over a decade to legalize undocumented immigrants.
The new program would allow the undocumented spouses and stepchildren of US citizens to apply for permanent residence and get a green card without having to leave the US, according to senior administration officials.
Approximately 500,000 spouses and 50,000 of their stepchildren could be eligible for the new program, the officials said in a call with reporters Monday.
Though these individuals were always technically able to apply for permanent residence through their US citizen spouse or stepparent, they typically would not do so. That’s because anyone who enters the US without permission and stays for more than a year has to leave the country and remain abroad for 10 years before they are eligible to apply for permanent residence. Immigrants can apply for waivers of this 10-year bar, but the process faces major backlogs.
The new Biden administration policy essentially allows noncitizen spouses and stepchildren to bypass that 10-year bar by offering them parole, which protects them from deportation and gives them work authorization.
It’s the biggest effort to legalize undocumented immigrants since former President Barack Obama unveiled the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in 2012, shielding from deportation undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the country as children.
It’s all the more surprising because lately, Biden has been emulating former President Donald Trump more than Obama on immigration. Though he came into office promising to undo the legacy of his predecessor, Biden maintained Trump’s pandemic-era restrictions on the border for more than two years and has introduced new versions of several Trump immigration policies — including a new rule to limit access to asylum when border crossings are high.
It seems the president is trying to appease both sides of a key 2024 election issue that has plagued his campaign: He’s under fire from those to his left who want to achieve justice for immigrant families living in the US and seeking the protection of its asylum laws. There is also an increasing share of Americans who want to see immigration levels decrease.
Whether that ends up working for Biden in November remains to be seen, but the introduction of the new permanent residency policy is undeniably good news for undocumented immigrants caught up in the US’s broken legal system.
To be eligible for the new program, spouses must be present in the US without having been legally admitted to the US or provided immigration “parole” — a kind of temporary deportation relief. They must have also lived in the US for at least a decade and have a legally valid marriage to a US citizen as of June 17, 2024. And they must “merit a favorable exercise of discretion” and not pose a threat to public safety, according to a senior administration official.
For stepchildren to be eligible, they must be unmarried and under 21. Their parent must have married a US citizen before the stepchild turned 18.
Those who receive approval from the Department of Homeland Security under the new program will be allowed to apply for permanent residency for a three-year period thereafter in which they will also be eligible for work authorization and be allowed to stay with their families in the US.
More information on eligibility will be available once a notice is published in the Federal Register, which is expected in the coming weeks. Administration officials said they anticipate applications will open up by the end of the summer.
Most of the individuals who will benefit from the new program will likely be Mexican, given the profile of immigrants who arrived in the US 10 years ago. On average, those impacted have resided in the US for 23 years, according to Biden administration officials.
Republicans are already criticizing the president’s policy as a “mass amnesty scheme.” For years, they have blocked legislation in Congress to legalize the undocumented population in the US, as well as challenged programs like DACA in court. As a result, the federal government had to stop accepting new DACA applications under Trump.
But this new path to legal status might not face the same fate in court. That’s because it’s based on “parole in place”: a longstanding legal authority that the Homeland Security secretary can exercise on a temporary, discretionary basis “for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.” The Biden administration will likely elaborate on these potential reasons or benefits in its Federal Register notice, which could help protect the policy against legal challenges.
Parole in place has historically been used on a smaller scale in the context of undocumented children, parents, and spouses of active duty or retired service members, but at the recommendation of immigrant advocates, the Biden administration is now looking to rely on its parole authority more heavily.
The Biden campaign might hope the US citizen spouses of those who stand to benefit from the policy will be more likely to vote for the president this November in purple states including Arizona and Nevada, which both have large Latino populations.
But the views of Latino voters on immigration are complicated, and when considering Biden’s immigration policies as a whole, they might not see a compelling case to vote for him. An April Axios-Ipsos and Noticias Telemundo poll found that 64 percent of Latinos supported Biden’s new rule restricting asylum when border crossings are high and 42 percent support a fence or wall along the southern border, but 59 percent also support the right of people fleeing crime and violence in Latin America to seek asylum in the US.
That suggests that they want to see more border controls but not necessarily harsh crackdowns. That’s a balance that Biden, facing critics on both his left and right, appears to be attempting to strike with his new series of rules.