It’s a common issue arising in the area of immigration law. A US citizen marries someone in the United States who is here unlawfully and because they entered without a visa they must return to their home country if they want to obtain a green card. In most instances that means that the foreign spouse would be subject to at least a 3 year bar to re-entry and possibly a 10 year bar based on the length of their unlawful presence in the United States. There is an application process through with the 3 or 10 year bar can be waived but it’s lengthy and requires the foreign national spouse to be outside of the United States for a prolonged time, sometimes many years.
That can mean serious hardship to the family, both financially and emotionally, and many simply choose to live in the shadows.
However, circumstances may be changing enough that some people may now choose to come forward.
As reported in today’s New York Times, the Obama administration is proposing a rule changes that would allow a provisional waiver to be granted while the foreign spouse is still inside the United States and also streamline the consular process so that the green card is granted in a matter of weeks rather than months.
“Citizenship and Immigration Services proposes to allow the immigrants to obtain a provisional waiver in the United States, before they leave for their countries to pick up their visas. Having the waiver in hand will allow them to depart knowing that they will almost certainly be able to return, officials said. The agency is also seeking to sharply streamline the process to cut down the wait times for visas to a few weeks at most.
“The goal is to substantially reduce the time that the U.S. citizen is separated from the spouse or child when that separation would yield an extreme hardship,” said Alejandro Mayorkas, the director of the immigration agency.“
This is a developing story and I’ll update it as new information comes in.
A story in the Washington Post exposes the Immigration and Customs Enforcement National Fugitive Operations Program – a program that received over $600 million from congress – as a federally funded racial profiling operation.
The program which, as it is named, is intended to be used to round up fugitives, is an abject failure by that measure. In 2007 nearly 1/2 of the people arrested were not fugitives from the law. The USICE says that number is going down but since they specifically allow non-fugitive arrests to be counted towards the quota that’s nonsense. In fact, it should be zero if they are only going after specific fugitives not stopping minorities at random. Clearly the USICE is simply going up to brown people and asking for their papers – and the video footage in the story supports exactly that conclusion.
In fact, according to the Post, some employees say that they were specifically directed to arrest non-fugitives to boost their arrest numbers. The USCIS and USDHS have declined to actually investigate the claims. That makes sense since it’s official policy.
The video evidence makes it clear the USICE officers were simply stopping men of Hispanic descent without reasonable cause or suspicion. The men detained included, Ernest Guillen, who was merely stopping for a cup of coffee on his way to be with his US citizen son who was receiving chemotherapy at John’s Hopkins and another man who was detained for 18 days even though he was in the United States legally.
The questions for the Obama administration are: 1) are you going to maintain a policy of racial profiling? 2) If you do believe racial profiling to be effective and are going to continue it will you expand it to include other agencies not related to immigration?
Or perhaps it’d be a better idea to use that muscle of yours to get comprehensive immigration reform passed.
Newly appointed Secretary of the DHS, Janet Napolitano (on NPR), shows that there will be little change between the Bush Administration and the Obama Administration with regards to immigration policy.
She’s for a border fence – in places where physically appropriate – but thinks the border needs to be more militarized (more boots on the ground) and also more technologically advanced (more expensive web cams).
She has no view (and probably little understanding of) the push factors that cause people to risk death to come to the US for work and only addresses the pull by saying that she’ll deport more people more quickly and punish employers more harshly.
As far as immigration procedures and policies, she will leave that up to Congress and offers no opinion at all.
Looks like more of the same unless Congress implements comprehensive immigration reform some time soon.
As an aside, someone might want to point out to Secretary Napolitano that the path isn’t from undocumented immigrant to citizen but from undocumented immigrant to permanent resident. It really sounds like she doesn’t know that.
