The Biden administration will soon open a new immigration program to allow some Central Americans and Colombians to legally enter the US and discourage would-be migrants from those countries from traveling north to illegally cross the US southern border, officials said known Friday.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) initiative, which officially kicks off July 10, will allow eligible migrants from Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to fly to the United States and obtain state work permits if they have relatives who are US citizens or legal residents who have submitted visa applications on their behalf.
As part of a broader plan to tackle illegal border crossings along the US-Mexico border, the Biden administration earlier this year committed to accepting up to 100,000 Central American migrants under this program, known as the Family Reunification Parole Process. Officials have not given a timeframe for fulfilling this pledge, nor a cap for Colombian applicants.
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To qualify for the program, migrants must have ties with the United States. The process begins with US citizens or permanent residents filing immigrant visa applications on behalf of relatives from these four countries. Eligible family members include adult children and siblings of US citizens and children and spouses of US permanent residents.
Once these applications are approved, American citizens or resident applicants may receive an invitation to apply for their relatives to enter the United States much more quickly than would have been the case under the backward and limited visa system. Some prospective immigrants with US family members often have to wait years—and in some cases more than a decade—for immigrant visas to become available.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesman said the State Department plans to send out invitations for the program later in July.
If selected and approved, dependents may enter the country on humanitarian parole, which also allows them to legally work in the United States. These migrants could be granted permanent residency or a green card once their visa is available.
Anyone illegally crossing the US-Mexico border or intercepted at sea en route to US soil after July 10 will be disqualified from the trial.
According to government figures, more than 70,000 people could qualify for the program immediately. At the end of May, 17,400 Colombians, 32,600 Salvadorans, 12,800 Guatemalans and 10,700 Hondurans were awaiting the backlog of family-related immigrant visas with approved petitions. However, officials said the government does not expect all of these migrants to be invited into the scheme.
In announcements on the implementation of the program, the government called it “an alternative to irregular migration to relieve pressure on the south-west border”.
“The Department has demonstrated that expanding safe, orderly and lawful pathways combined with strong enforcement is effective in reducing dangerous, irregular migration to the United States,” Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement.
According to the federal government, so far in fiscal year 2023, more than 126,000 Colombians, 115,000 Guatemalans, 41,000 Salvadorans and 110,000 Hondurans have been processed by US immigration officials at the southwest border.
Early in President Biden’s presidency, his administration revived two similar Obama- and Bush-era probation programs for Cubans and Haitians with US relatives.
The Biden administration has made expanding legal migration a cornerstone of its revised strategy to reduce illegal crossings along the southern border, which hit record levels in 2022.
Officials have also used the probation power to accommodate up to 30,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans with US citizens each month and to process tens of thousands of asylum seekers in Mexico who have secured an appointment to enter the US via a government app .
At the same time, the government has increased deportations and tightened asylum regulations for migrants who do not use these programs.
A regulation issued in May bans migrants from being entitled to asylum if they enter the US illegally without first seeking humanitarian protection in another country. Those who cannot prove that they deserve an exception to the rule face deportation and a five-year ban on re-entering the country.
The government attributes those measures to a significant drop in illegal border crossings since May, when US officials repealed a pandemic-era regulation called Title 42 that allowed them to expel migrants on public health grounds.
After peaking at 10,000 before Title 42 expired, daily illegal border crossings have fallen to under 4,000 in recent days.
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Camilo Montoya Galvez