Today’s announcement in the Federal Register regarding the processing of family immigration applications is a victory for Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez (D-IL) who has spento more than a year urging the Obama Administration to remove obstacles to legal immigration in the absence of any definitive action in the Congress. The announcement indicates that some spouses and children of U.S. citizens who qualify for a family visa could travel overseas to obtain it without facing a mandatory decade-long exile from their families. The Congressman first proposed this paperwork processing policy change a year ago, along with a series of other administrative changes, and toured the country to rally support for the Obama Administration to take action.
“I am happy and excited that the President is taking this step,” Rep. Gutierrez said. “On the immigration administrative fixes I have been fighting for, the President spent the last year saying ‘no I can’t’ and now he is saying ‘yes we can’ and the community will get the message. This is movement in a positive direction that will not fix broader issues of immigration, but for a certain number of families caught in a bureaucratic nightmare, this is the common sense solutions I have been urging.”
“I am glad that the President is adopting some of the Gutierrez plan to keep families together and make sure that our laws are not unnecessary barriers to legal status and immigration,” the Congressman said. “When this processing procedure is implemented, some of the families I have been talking to around the country will have an option available to them that gets them in the system and protected from deportation.”
Today in the Federal Register, the Obama Administration announced its intention to change how it applies rules governing family immigration for citizens who request a visa for their spouses and children. Under current law, many immigrants who qualify for such visas face a tough choice: apply and face up to ten years in exile overseas, often separated from their families, or remain in the U.S. in legal limbo or in an illegal immigration status. By allowing some immediate family to file waivers in the U.S. before incurring the ten year exile, the Obama Administration is increasing the chances that immigrants will apply for and receive the immigration status for which they already qualify.
“Most Americans I talk to think that if you are married to a U.S. citizen and have children and other family obligations, it should be fairly easy for you to apply for legal status and are shocked to hear we make that next to impossible,” Congressman Gutierrez said. “When people ask ‘Why don’t immigrants here illegally leave and come back the right way?’ this is one of the main reasons why even the wives and husbands of U.S. service members are prevented from doing so by this bureaucratic straightjacket. This step will ease that somewhat, but only for the immediate family of U.S. citizens who already qualify for legal status.”
The Congressman pushed even harder for this policy change after working on one high profile case in the Chicago area where an Army National Guard soldier, Hector Nuñez, was petitioning for the legal status of his wife (and mother of his young son) who had been brought to the U.S. illegally when she was a girl. The family did not know about the mandatory ten-year exile and in late 2010 were stuck in the Mexican town of Ciudad Juarez with an infant in need of specialized medical care and another troop deployment for Specialist Nuñez on the horizon.
Rep. Gutierrez helped draw attention to the case and the family was eventually issued a humanitarian visa that got them back in the country temporarily, but the Congressman knew many families were facing similar difficulties and in a series of meetings, asked the Obama administration to address the problem.
The Congressman said, “I talk to families every week that are faced with a choice no family should have to endure: live apart in a dangerous place like Ciudad Juarez for a decade or live under ground in the undocumented population — but together — in the U.S. Just by changing how a form is filed makes that dilemma disappear for some lucky families who will eventually benefit from this policy.”
“If Republicans are serious about supporting legal immigration and having rules families can play by without being split apart, they should thank the President and work with him to implement more common sense changes,” the Congressman said.
The Congressman said he would work with immigrants, clergy and community organizations to ensure that those who eventually qualify for the “provisional waivers of inadmissibility” actually apply and receive them. He has been working with immigrants across the country since a round of administrative changes to how deportees are prioritized was announced in 2011 and plans to continue his public education and advocacy efforts.
“It will take about 30-seconds before hyperbolic immigration hawks on talk-radio and the campaign trail start crying wolf about the new ‘Obama Amnesty,’ but for families who have had their legal options needlessly blocked, this will be a serious and difficult process that will require experienced legal counsel and a lot of time,” the Congressman said. “In the mean time, a lot of fly-by-night opportunists will be trying to fraudulently sign desperate immigrant families up, so we need to get the word out about what this is and what it isn’t.”
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