A couple who will be able to regularize their situation in the United States after immigration rules change: “We will be able to have dignity” | USA Elections

Kali Pliego’s husband, a 42-year-old public safety teacher, has never been able to volunteer for his young son’s school activities. He has not been able to mortgage the family home. He has no vehicle in his name. He is not even listed as a beneficiary on his wife’s life insurance. Although he is American and they have been married for 17 years, it has not been possible to amend his irregular immigration status in all that time, as he was Mexican by birth (his name has been removed at the request of the interviewer) and who entered the United States more than 20 years ago…

Kali Pliego’s husband, a 42-year-old public safety teacher, has never been able to volunteer in his young son’s school activities. Nor has he been able to mortgage the family home. Neither does he have a vehicle in his name. He is not even listed as a beneficiary on his wife’s life insurance. Although he is American and they have been married for 17 years, in all that time it has not been possible to amend his irregular immigration status, which is Mexican by birth (his name has been removed at the request of the interviewer) and who entered the United States more than 20 years ago. Until now, and before Joe Biden’s administration announced changes to its immigration policy this week, the law required him to leave the country and wait at least 10 years for his case to be processed, despite his marriage.

“We have a school-age child,” says Kali Pliego over the phone from Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she lives. “It’s not possible for my husband to leave for 10 years. The family can’t be separated any longer.”

Although marrying an American usually grants a foreigner a residence permit, in that case irregular immigrants who want to process it must return to their country and wait up to a decade to be able to do so, a penalty imposed by law for illegal migration to the United States. This duration means that, in practice, the vast majority renounce legalization and continue to live in the shadows.

Changes approved by the Biden administration to the immigration system this week will allow at least 500,000 marriages in situations similar to Plegow’s — couples in which one member is a U.S. citizen and the other a migrant with irregular status — to normalize their status without leaving the country.

The measure, which the government will begin to implement at the end of the summer, provides that irregular migrants married to Americans and who have lived in the United States for at least a decade, completed before the 17th of this month, can request an extraordinary authorization, called a “Parole in place(Conditional Freedom). Those who represent a threat to national security or who have ever been deported will not be able to obtain it. If they obtain it, they will have a period of three years to process their residence permit. In the meantime, they will be protected from possible deportation and given authorization to work. Children under the age of 21 of these migrants who are in irregular status may also benefit from the new policy.

The Department of Homeland Security estimates that about half a million people would be able to benefit from these measures, though groups such as American Families United estimate the number of irregular migrants married to Americans at as high as 1.1 million people.

Pliegos met her 20 years ago in Minneapolis in 2004. She had just graduated from university and was going through a period of “a lot of stress” in her life. To relax, he went to a place to dance salsa. On one of those outings, a young man asked her to dance merengue. “I remember it like it was today. In the middle of the dance he smiled at me, one of those huge smiles in which the whole face participates. “There I knew I would fall in love.” They had been dating for three years, two of them long-distance, while she was working in Guatemala. “As soon as I came back, we got married.”

It was 2007. For Pliegos, a special journey began. “We requested adjustment of his immigration status in 2008. And basically we found out that he would have to leave the country for a period of at least 10 years in order to obtain legal status. This is the so-called sentencing law. Our lawyer explained to us that we could delay the process and work to change the law, wait for the law to change, or go ahead and put him off for a decade. So we decided to stay and work to change the law.” He began collaborating as an activist with American Families United.

These circumstances forced many of their decisions as a family. They waited almost a decade to have their son. The child was born in 2016, on the eve of the start of Donald Trump’s presidential term.

“Those first four years of my son’s life were very scary. I remember it as the worst time of my life, because of how difficult daily life became, the anxiety, the fear, the anguish that our family could fall apart, especially because we already had a small child. It should have been a moment of joy, the arrival of the baby, seeing him grow up, and we were always in the shadow of fear, ”the woman explains.

That fear has relatively diminished since Joe Biden came into the White House. “We know we’re not a priority, nobody is going to come looking for my husband, or raid his workplace… but the situation is affecting us every day.”

“My husband doesn’t have a Social Security number (which only Americans or foreigners with a work permit receive, and prove they are in legal immigration status), so he can’t be the holder of any credit we request to buy a car or for the mortgage on our home. For that we depend entirely on his income.” I can’t include you as a beneficiary on my life insurance. You can’t pass a background check on him, so you can’t volunteer for activities at the kid’s school, or coach the kids’ teams, things I’m sure he would love to do.

Fear also influences his work decisions. “He believes he can’t take any day for granted and that’s why he works so much,” says Pliego. “He combines two jobs that require him to be away from home all the time, Monday through Friday. And that means all the housework falls on me: cleaning, cooking, taking the child to school, getting him to his activities. It’s difficult. “I’m very flexible with bedtime because I want my son and his father to be able to bond, and I let the child stay up late so he can greet his father when he gets home.”

In the absence of more specific details of the change announced this week being published – how much it will cost to submit an application, for example – the documents lay out the requirements announced by the administration for the benefit Parole in place,

“We are so grateful that the calls of our family and the other 1.1 million families in our situation were heard, to offer a solution that at least gives us time and a work permit. With a work permit we have dignity, we have choices, we don’t have to endure humiliation in the workplace because it’s too scary to resign and look for something else,” says Kali Pliego.

Will this measure have any impact on your decisions ahead of the November election? “I really want to vote, encourage my family to see that this president, Biden, is the only person on the ballot who has done something positive for my family, and that matters. And that’s a story I’m willing to tell over and over again to anyone who will listen.”

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