(Washington) Senior White House officials said that President Joe Biden’s immigration bill, which aims to pave the way for the naturalization of 11 million illegal immigrants, will be unveiled Thursday and put on the legislative path.
“It has been a commitment by the president from day one, which is his vision of what it takes to reform the system,” a senior administration official told reporters.
Two of the elected Democrats, Linda Sanchez and Bob Menendez, will present the initiative, respectively, to the Senate and House of Representatives.
The bill plans to pave the way for obtaining US citizenship for the nearly 11 million irregulars, who can prove their presence in the United States in 1is being January 2021.
The reform would also benefit the “dreamers,” the approximately 700,000 young people who entered the United States illegally during their childhood and who have lived there ever since.
New Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorcas, who was the Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security under President Barack Obama, implemented the DACA program aimed at protecting these “dreamers” from deportation.
But Donald Trump, who made fighting illegal immigration one of the indicators of his presidency, scrapped it in 2017, opening a period of extreme uncertainty for these young people.
People with temporary protected status, which prohibits the deportation of citizens of countries affected by natural disasters or conflict, and agricultural workers who can prove that they work in the United States, will also be able to obtain a residence permit.
The Biden administration took the opposite view from its first day of the controversial immigration measures under the Trump administration. In particular, the new Democratic president annulled the decree banning citizens of Muslim-majority countries (Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen) from entering the United States.
Starting this week, it will put an end to Donald Trump’s controversial immigration policy of returning asylum seekers to Mexico while their case is being considered.
This policy, implemented in 2019, did not apply to Mexicans, but rather forced asylum seekers who arrived in the United States via Mexico to stay there until their requests were heard. It has been severely criticized by civil rights groups. At least 70,000 asylum seekers, most of them from Central America, were returned to Mexico under this program, causing a humanitarian crisis.
