Biden Immigration Proposal:

 FACT SHEET:

President Biden Sends Immigration Bill to Congress as Part of His Commitment to Modernize our Immigration System

The U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 establishes a new system to responsibly manage and secure our border, keep our families and communities safe, and better manage migration across the Hemisphere

President Biden is sending a bill to Congress on day one to restore humanity and American values to our immigration system. The bill provides hardworking people who enrich our communities every day and who have lived here for years, in some cases for decades, an opportunity to earn citizenship. The legislation modernizes our immigration system, and prioritizes keeping families together, growing our economy, responsibly managing the border with smart investments, addressing the root causes of migration from Central America, and ensuring that the United States remains a refuge for those fleeing persecution. The bill will stimulate our economy while ensuring that every worker is protected. The bill creates an earned path to citizenship for our immigrant neighbors, colleagues, parishioners, community leaders, friends, and loved ones—including Dreamers and the essential workers who have risked their lives to serve and protect American communities.

The U.S. Citizenship Act will:

PROVIDE PATHWAYS TO CITIZENSHIP & STRENGTHEN LABOR PROTECTIONS

● Create an earned roadmap to citizenship for undocumented individuals. The bill allows undocumented individuals to apply for temporary legal status, with

the ability to apply for green cards after five years if they pass criminal and national security background checks and pay their taxes. Dreamers, TPS holders, and immigrant farmworkers who meet specific requirements are eligible for green cards immediately under the legislation. After three years, all green card holders who pass additional background checks and demonstrate knowledge of English and U.S. civics can apply to become citizens. Applicants must be physically present in the United States on or before January 1, 2021. The Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may waive the presence requirement for those deported on or after January 20, 2017 who were physically present for at least three years prior to removal for family unity and other humanitarian purposes. Lastly, the bill further recognizes America as a nation of immigrants by changing the word “alien” to “noncitizen” in our immigration laws.

 

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• ●  Keep families together. ​The bill reforms the family-based immigration system by clearing backlogs, recapturing unused visas, eliminating lengthy wait times, and increasing per-country visa caps. It also eliminates the so-called “3 and 10-year bars,” and other provisions that keep families apart. The bill further supports familes by more explicitly including permanent partnerships and eliminating discrimination facing LGBTQ+ families. It also provides protections for orphans, widows, children, and Filipino veterans who fought alongside the United States in World War II. Lastly, the bill allows immigrants with approved family-sponsorship petitions to join family in the United States on a temporary basis while they wait for green cards to become available.

• ●  Embrace diversity. ​The bill includes the NO BAN Act that prohibits discrimination based on religion and limits presidential authority to issue future bans. The bill also increases Diversity Visas to 80,000 from 55,000.

• ●  Promote immigrant and refugee integration and citizenship. ​The bill provides new funding to state and local governments, private organizations, educational institutions, community-based organizations, and not-for-profit organizations to expand programs to promote integration and inclusion, increase English-language instruction, and provide assistance to individuals seeking to become citizens.

• ●  Grow our economy. ​This bill clears employment-based visa backlogs, recaptures unused visas, reduces lengthy wait times, and eliminates per-country visa caps. The bill makes it easier for graduates of U.S. universities with advanced STEM degrees to stay in the United States; improves access to green cards for workers in lower-wage sectors; and eliminates other unnecessary hurdles for employment-based green cards. The bill provides dependents of H-1B visa holders work authorization, and children are prevented from “aging out” of the system. The bill also creates a pilot program to stimulate regional economic development, gives DHS the authority to adjust green cards based on macroeconomic conditions, and incentivizes higher wages for non-immigrant, high-skilled visas to prevent unfair competition with American workers.

• ●  Protect workers from exploitation and improve the employment verification process. ​The bill requires that DHS and the Department of Labor establish a commission involving labor, employer, and civil rights organizations to make recommendations for improving the employment verification process. Workers who suffer serious labor violations and cooperate with worker protection agencies will be granted greater access to U visa relief. The bill protects workers who are victims of workplace retaliation from deportation in order to allow labor agencies to interview these workers. It also protects migrant and seasonal workers, and increases penalties for employers who violate labor laws.

  PRIORITIZE SMART BORDER CONTROLS

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• ●  Supplement existing border resources with technology and infrastructure. ​The legislation builds on record budget allocations for immigration enforcement by authorizing additional funding for the Secretary of DHS to develop and implement a plan to deploy technology to expedite screening and enhance the ability to identify narcotics and other contraband at every land, air, and sea port of entry. This includes high-throughput scanning technologies to ensure that all commercial and passenger vehicles and freight rail traffic entering the United States at land ports of entry and rail-border crossings along the border undergo pre-primary scanning. It also authorizes and provides funding for plans to improve infrastructure at ports of entry to enhance the ability to process asylum seekers and detect, interdict, disrupt and prevent narcotics from entering the United States. It authorizes the DHS Secretary to develop and implement a strategy to manage and secure the southern border between ports of entry that focuses on flexible solutions and technologies that expand the ability to detect illicit activity, evaluate the effectiveness of border security operations, and be easily relocated and broken out by Border Patrol Sector. To protect privacy, the DHS Inspector General is authorized to conduct oversight to ensure that employed technology effectively serves legitimate agency purposes.

• ●  Manage the border and protect border communities. ​The bill provides funding for training and continuing education to promote agent and officer safety and professionalism. It also creates a Border Community Stakeholder Advisory Committee, provides more special agents at the DHS Office of Professional Responsibility to investigate criminal and administrative misconduct, and requires the issuance of department-wide policies governing the use of force. The bill directs the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to study the impact of DHS’s authority to waive environmental and state and federal laws to expedite the construction of barriers and roads near U.S. borders and provides for additional rescue beacons to prevent needless deaths along the border. The bill authorizes and provides funding for DHS, in coordination with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and nongovernmental experts, to develop guidelines and protocols for standards of care for individuals, families, and children in CBP custody.

• ●  Crack down on criminal organizations.​ The bill enhances the ability to prosecute individuals involved in smuggling and trafficking networks who are responsible for the exploitation of migrants. It also expands investigations, intelligence collection and analysis pursuant to the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act to increase sanctions against foreign narcotics traffickers, their organizations and networks. The bill also requires the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and DHS, in coordination with the Secretary of State, to improve and expand transnational anti-gang task forces in Central America.

  ADDRESS ROOT CAUSES OF MIGRATION

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• ●  Start from the source. ​The bill codifies and funds the President’s $4 billion four-year inter-agency plan to address the underlying causes of migration in the region, including by increasing assistance to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, conditioned on their ability to reduce the endemic corruption, violence, and poverty that causes people to flee their home countries. It also creates safe and legal channels for people to seek protection, including by establishing Designated Processing Centers throughout Central America to register and process displaced persons for refugee resettlement and other lawful migration avenues—either to the United States or other partner countries. The bill also re-institutes the Central American Minors program to reunite children with U.S. relatives and creates a Central American Family Reunification Parole Program to more quickly unite families with approved family sponsorship petitions.

• ●  Improve the immigration courts and protect vulnerable individuals. ​The bill expands family case management programs, reduces immigration court backlogs, expands training for immigration judges, and improves technology for immigration courts. The bill also restores fairness and balance to our immigration system by providing judges and adjudicators with discretion to review cases and grant relief to deserving individuals. Funding is authorized for legal orientation programs and counsel for children, vulnerable individuals, and others when necessary to ensure the fair and efficient resolution of their claims. The bill also provides funding for school districts educating unaccompanied children, while clarifying sponsor responsibilities for such children.

• ●  Support asylum seekers and other vulnerable populations.​ The bill eliminates the one-year deadline for filing asylum claims and provides funding to reduce asylum application backlogs. It also increases protections for U visa, T visa, and VAWA applicants, including by raising the cap on U visas from 10,000 to 30,000. The bill also expands protections for foreign nationals assisting U.S. troops.

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Georgia Con Ganas: We'll Never Give Up

Latinos Win in Georgia !

 

We just made history: We pulled off the biggest Latinx voter turnout operation in Georgia history and contacted EVERY Latinx voter in the state!   The polls recently closed, so we don’t yet know the results of the election.But we do know this: When the surprise runoff was announced, we put our heads down and hit the pavement, working with our partners GLAHR Action network to hire 200 organizers and recruit an army of hundreds of volunteers.    In just 8 weeks, our team broke record after record. We knocked on 321,000 doors, made 276,000 phone calls, and sent 377,000 text messages to get our gente to the polls and build power for our community.    Thank you to each and every one of you who participated in our phone and text banks, joined our door knocking, or helped amplify our message. Here is a little bit more of what we would like to highlight: Check out the video released today telling the history of our organizing in Georgia</strong>. Read this twitter thread from Mijente’s political director about our field work and how we were able to reach every Latinx vote.  Share this speech by Adelina Nicholls about how Georgia won’t have another election without the Latinx community and people of color. Read this story about the impact of our organizing.    But we still have lots of work to do. So we have an important question: If you are Latinx, Boricua, or Chicanx, will you become a Mijente member today and join the fight for justice and radical change?   As AOC said yesterday: Mijente “no juegan.” And she’s right. We throw down for our gente and run history-making campaigns. But the numbers don’t tell the whole story.    For example, earlier today, two of our organizers, Julio and Sandra, were asked to stick around at their local polling location to help dozens of Spanish speaking voters who needed assistance casting their ballots because the polling location did not have interpreters. Without Julio and Sandra -- and dozens of other organizers like them across the state -- it’s possible that hundreds or even thousands of our people could be disenfranchised.    Our victory today is of a lineage of long term, grassroots community organizing by organizations like GLAHR Action Network and Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights who have been on the front lines for human and civil rights for the growing Latinx community in Georgia.    Victories like the one today will only embolden community members who are everyday discovering their power and potential.    But we have a lot of work ahead of us. And we’re going to need to work together and organize together to ensure our communities are treated with the respect and dignity they deserve. Mijente is a national movement of everyday Latinos standing up to the injustices and building safety for our gente. We are organizers, teachers, caretakers, healers, lawyers, council members, and so much more — each of us doing what we can.   Join us by becoming a member today.   En la lucha,  Tania Unzueta Political Director

Biden Backtracks- Already !

 

Reversal of Trump immigration policies will ‘take time,’ Biden team says

Maria Sacchetti

Top advisers to President-elect Joe Biden said Tuesday they will not immediately roll back asylum restrictions at the Mexican border and other Trump immigration policies, tamping down expectations for the kind of swift reversals Biden promised on the campaign trail.

Speaking to reporters on a conference call, several members of the Biden transition team said the incoming administration would “need time” to undo “damage” to the U.S. immigration system and border enforcement policies that have severely limited the ability of asylum seekers to qualify for humanitarian protection.

The transition officials echoed statements made by Susan E. Rice, Biden’s incoming domestic policy adviser, and Jake Sullivan, his pick for national security adviser, in an exclusive interview published Monday with the Spanish wire service EFE urging patience with their immigration agenda.

Rice told EFE that Biden will use executive authority to implement his immigration agenda, but her cautious statements appeared to reflect the incoming administration’s worries that easing up too quickly on Trump’s enforcement system could trigger a new migration surge at the border.

“Migrants and asylum seekers absolutely should not believe those in the region peddling the idea that the border will suddenly be fully open to process everyone on Day 1. It will not,” Rice said, according to a translation of the interview transcript.

Immigrant advocacy groups and others who deplore Trump’s policies have pushed Biden to embrace wholesale changes to a U.S. enforcement model designed to deter illegal migration through a system of detention and deportation.

Biden’s policies on immigration

Rice told EFE the new administration would offer a “transformative vision for addressing migration in our region” and would work to build “a fair, humane, and orderly immigration system.”

“We will be able to take some steps to change policies right away,” Rice said. “Others will take time to put in place, and the situation at the border will not transform overnight due in large part to the damage done over the last four years. But we are committed to addressing it in full.”

Rice said Biden will not immediately end the practice of rapidly “expelling” migrants to Mexico, measures implemented by the Trump administration in March, citing public health concerns. The measures allow U.S. agents to wave off normal asylum procedures and promptly return most border-crossers to Mexico, an arrangement Homeland Security officials say is needed to prevent further spread of the coronavirus inside border stations and detention centers.

Rice told EFE “processing capacity at the border is not like a light that you can just switch on and off.”

Said Rice: “Our priority is to reopen asylum processing at the border consistent with the capacity to do so safely and to protect public health, especially in the context of covid-19. This effort will begin immediately, but it will take months to develop the capacity that we will need to reopen fully.”

Similarly, Sullivan told EFE that the administration would not immediately end the Migration Protection Protocols that Biden had promised to terminate on his first day in office. Under those Trump measures, asylum seekers are sent back to Mexico to wait outside U.S. territory — some in squalid tent camps — while their claims are processed in U.S. courts.

Biden vows to ‘restore and defend’ legal immigration, reversing Trump administration visa policies

“MPP has been a disaster from the start and has led to a humanitarian crisis in northern Mexico,” Sullivan said. “But putting the new policy into practice will take time.”

Rice and Sullivan told EFE that Biden will hold to his commitment to immediately introduce legislation creating a path to citizenship for 11 million people in the United States illegally. Such a proposal will face long odds in a divided Congress.

“We need legislative changes to make enduring repairs to our immigration system, and the president-elect will share his vision with Congress,” Rice said. “He is committed to working collaboratively with members of Congress to achieve the needed reform that has long eluded the country.”

Officials from Biden’s transition team said Tuesday the president-elect will suspend deportations from the U.S. interior while it “sorts out” new policies for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Rice and Sullivan told EFE the Biden administration would redouble efforts to stem emigration from Central America by creating jobs, battling corruption and improving security. Biden “will work to promptly undo” Trump’s deals with Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador allowing U.S. authorities to transfer asylum seekers to those countries, Sullivan said.

“As currently written, the outgoing administration’s so-called ‘asylum cooperative agreements’ deny the right to apply for asylum in the United States to desperate asylum seekers rather than helping create alternative pathways to protection,” he said.

The Obama administration also prioritized controlling the border and swiftly deported tens of thousands of migrants seeking work in the United States. As vice president, Biden traveled to Central America as part of a push to foster investment in migrants’ home countries so that they would not feel compelled to leave home.

But dramatically more people are arriving at the border to seek asylum — meaning they feel their lives are at risk in their homelands — posing a new challenge for Biden, because advocates say many of their fears are real.

Trump has alleged that migrants are seeking asylum because it is easier to gain entry into the United States, and his administration has implemented different programs to hold them at bay. Thousands who attempted to cross at legal ports of entry were sent to Mexico and added to waiting lists, a process called “metering” that Biden transition team officials have promised to end.

More than 65,000 others crossed the border and were sent to Mexico under Trump’s Migrant Protection Protocols; of these, about 23,000 remain in shelters and camps along the border, according to a new report by Human Rights First, a nonprofit organization that has been tracking conditions on the border.

Officials also have expelled at least 8,800 unaccompanied minors and thousands of adults, many to the nations they fled, under the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention order barring entry during the pandemic, the report said.

Kennji Kizuka, a senior researcher and policy analyst Human Rights First, said migrants in Mexico are struggling to make a living and to protect themselves in high-crime border cities. Human Rights First has tracked at least 1,300 acts of violence against migrants in Mexico, including murder.

“We want them to adopt all the safety measures that are needed,” he said of the Biden administration. “At the same time, there needs to be some sense of urgency. There are a lot of refugees who are in danger in Mexico and who can be processed safely.”

He said many were headed to the United States in part because they have family here who can shelter them.

“It can’t all happen on Day 1,” he said. “But it also shouldn’t wait until June.”

In their statements Monday and Tuesday, Biden officials did not address the incoming administration’s plans for the $15 billion border wall project, but the president-elect said during the campaign he would not build “another foot” of the barrier.

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Guides to the DACA Decision

DACA

On December 4, 2020 a federal judge ordered the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to fully restore the original DACA program.


What does this mean for me?

USCIS must start accepting initial DACA requests from first-time applicants.

Effective December 4, 2020, USCIS must begin to process DACA first-time requests. This includes all people who were eligible for the program but were not able to apply before the September 2017 termination, and those who applied after the June 2020 Supreme Court decision but had their request rejected.

A person can be eligible for DACA if they:
Were born after June 15, 1981;
Came to the United States before their 16th birthday;
Were physically present in the U.S. on June 15, 2012 and when applying for DACA;
Had no lawful status on June 15, 2012;
Have continuously resided in the U.S. since June 15, 2007 until the present;
Meet certain educational requirement or were honorably discharged from the U.S. Armed Forces; and
Have not been convicted of certain crimes

Individuals who are interested in applying for the program should consult a legal service provider to see how they can prepare and file a request. To find a legal service provider in your area, visit: https://bit.ly/ianimmhelp.

USCIS must process applications according to the 2012 DACA Program requirements.
All applicants who are eligible to renew their DACA can continue to submit their DACA renewal applications. This includes people who currently have DACA, whose DACA has expired, and those whose DACA was terminated, but are still eligible.

USICS will automatically extend all DACA grants issued for one year to two years.
People who applied and had their applications processed after the publication of the July 28, 2020 memo were issued DACA protections valid for one year. Now that the Court invalidated this memo, these DACA protections will be automatically extended to two years. Recipients should receive notice from USCIS indicating this extension of their case.

USCIS will process Advance Parole request for DACA recipients who can demonstrate they need to travel due to education, employment, or humanitarian reasons.
DACA recipients can apply for an international travel permit called “Advance Parole” if they can show they need to travel for “humanitarian, education, or employment” purposes. It is important that people consult a legal service provider before they apply for and travel on advance parole to discuss any risks, including COVID-19 restrictions.




Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA/DAPA) | ILRC This is ILRC's statement. and next steps.