President-elect Joe Biden plans to send a groundbreaking immigration reform to Congress in the first days of his term that provides a path to citizenship for the nearly 11 million undocumented immigrants estimated to live in the United States, the newspaper
Los Angels times
activists who defend the rights of migrants and who have been in discussions with the transition team to prepare the plan.
That program would give faster access to citizenship to two groups currently protected by temporary relief from deportation: DACA (the Barack Obama-approved deferred action for childhood arrivals) and TPS, a temporary protected status that has gone granting different Governments to undocumented persons from countries where wars or natural disasters such as Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador, among others, had occurred.
In both cases, the hundreds of thousands of beneficiaries can live and work in the United States, but do not have access to residency.
Special treatment is also envisaged for some essential immigrant workers.
As Marielena Hincapié, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center Immigrant Justice Fund, one of the organizations that has been in contact with the transition team, told the Los Angeles newspaper, the project by Biden and his vice president Kamala Harris does not link regularization to a tightening of the application of immigration laws.
With Barack Obama, for example, deportations reached record levels, to the point that some pro-immigrant sectors gave him the nickname 'deporter in chief'.
"This notion of strict enforcement of immigration law and giving Republicans everything they asked for was wrong from the start," Hincapié declared.
The project contemplates, according to what the elected vice president Kamala Harris told the Hispanic network Univision this week, a temporary residence of eight years for a good part of the 11 million undocumented immigrants, at the end of which they will be able to request the 'green card' or card of residence.
Three years later, they would be eligible for citizenship.
In the case of TPS and DACA recipients, according to Harris, they would have direct access to the residence.
The biggest immigration reform since Reagan's amnesty
The immigration reform proposed by Biden and Harris would be the largest since the one approved during the Ronald Reagan administration, which meant an amnesty for three million undocumented immigrants in 1986. Such a plan must be approved by Congress, but the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives and a Senate divided 50-50 between both parties added to the disposition of the Government to carry it out puts the project in a good position to prosper.
The plan has been very well received by the groups that have participated in the meetings with the transition team.
Héctor Sanchez Barba, director of the organization Mi Familia Vota and who in the past was critical of Biden, defined the incoming Administration's proposal on immigration matters as "the most aggressive" he has seen and that will be implemented from day one.
"It is not just immigration reform, but also executive orders," he told
Politico
.
"We were completely blown away by the immigration plan and the level of clarity," said Jess Morales Rocketto, the executive director of the Care in Action organization.
In addition to immigration reform for the 11 million undocumented, the president-elect has promised to end the first day of his term with the travel veto imposed at the beginning of the Donald Trump administration on some Muslim countries.
In addition, a document signed by Biden's chief of staff, Roy Klain, also asks various institutions to work from day one in a coordinated manner to reunite the nearly 600 children who were separated at the border by Trump's immigration policy. in recent years and that the outgoing government was not able to reunify.
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