A group of people cross the Rio Grande, the natural border between the United States and Mexico, on October 6. ADREES LATIF (Portal)
New Path to the United States for Ecuadorians. The administration of President Joe Biden announced this Wednesday a program that will benefit one of the nationalities that have migrated the most to the North in recent months. The Department of Homeland Security announced this morning the initiative that will facilitate legal immigration for family members of Ecuadorians who are permanent residents of the United States. In this way, the democratic government wants to stop the pace of irregular border crossings, which in 2023 reached the highest level in four years.
“This process creates legal migration pathways for some Ecuadorians before they have to surrender to human traffickers along a dangerous path,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said Wednesday. “Those who do not use the family reunification program or another legal and safe route to the United States will continue to face harsh consequences,” warned the border guard, who has accelerated the pace of deportations. Mayorkas and the administration have come under sharp criticism in recent days after it was announced that they had given the green light to continue Donald Trump’s wall on the border with Mexico.
The immediate family members of Ecuadorian citizens who already reside in the United States are eligible for the new program. It is particularly aimed at children, siblings of US citizens, husbands and wives, and children of people who have the so-called green card. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs must grant an invitation to the relatives of an Ecuadorian citizen who lives in the country and has initiated the process. The I-130 visa process can take up to three years, according to Homeland Security.
With Biden’s arrival in the White House, the administration has developed tailored programs for immigrants from Cuba, Venezuela, Haiti, Colombia and Central American countries. This is the first time that the executive has made an appeal to the citizens of Ecuador, a country that has suffered in recent months from a crisis of insecurity, exacerbated by the assassination of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio, shaking the country’s political stability.
The internal situation was reflected in the number of immigrants detained. In the first 11 months of fiscal year 2023, which began in October 2022, border authorities detained nearly 99,000 Ecuadorians, according to Customs and Border Control data. This is a 312% increase compared to the number of arrests of Ecuadorians in fiscal year 2022.
As of January 2023, Ecuadorians made up the main group of irregular immigrants detained. The influx has been increasing since the end of 2022. Between October and December last year, around 35,500 citizens of the South American country arrived, according to immigration authorities. In November alone, 12,000 arrests were documented, a number almost 20 times higher than the same period in 2021.
Most Ecuadorians flew to Nicaragua or Mexico, countries that did not require special visas from that country’s citizens. However, in September 2021, Mexican authorities introduced a special visa in an attempt to slow the pace of more frequent travel to the north. The year 2021 ended with 97,000 meetings of Ecuadorians crossing the border. Since then, citizens of Ecuador have joined the South American exodus crossing the dangerous Darien jungle.
President Joe Biden hosted Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso at the White House last December. The American took advantage of the meeting to announce a $13.5 million investment by the Development Bank in Ecuador and agreed on greater cooperation in the security sector and against gangs and drug trafficking gangs that have led to various episodes of violence in local prisons in more than 400 Sacrifice.
At this meeting, Lasso spoke about regional commitments to orderly migration. The president was one of the leaders who signed the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection. Ecuador has granted temporary protected status to Venezuelan citizens to prevent them from being deported. The United States, on the other hand, has opened immigrant processing centers in Colombia, Costa Rica and Guatemala, and there were negotiations with Quito to set up another one in the Lasso-ruled territory, but these did not materialize.
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