The husband of Kali Pliego, a 42-year-old public safety educator, has never been able to volunteer in his young son’s school activities. He has also not been able to hold the mortgage on the family home. Nor have a vehicle in her name. Not even appearing as a beneficiary on his wife’s life insurance. Although she is American and they have been married for 17 years, in all this time it has not been possible to amend the irregular immigration status of him, who was Mexican by birth (his name is omitted at the request of the interviewee) and who entered the United States more than 20 years ago. years. 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 to be able to process his case, despite his wedding.
“We have a school-age child,” explains Kali Pliego by phone from Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she lives. “It is not feasible for my husband to leave for 10 years. Now the family cannot be separated.”
Although being married to an American generally gives a foreigner a residence permit, irregular immigrants in that situation who want to process it must return to their country and wait a decade to be able to do so, a penalty provided by law for illegal stays in USA. This period means that, in practice, the vast majority renounce legalization and choose to continue living in the shadows.
The changes approved by the Biden Administration in the immigration system this week will allow at least 500,000 marriages in the same circumstances as the Pliego – couples in which one of their members is a US citizen and the other is a migrant with irregular status – to normalize their situation without having to leave the country.
The measure, which the Government will begin to apply 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 exceptional authorization, called “parole in place” (conditional freedom). Those who represent a threat to national security or have ever been deported will not be able to obtain it. If they receive 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 will have authorization to work. Children under 21 years of age of these migrants who are also in an irregular situation may also benefit from the new policy.
The Department of Homeland Security estimates that around half a million people will be able to benefit from these measures, although groups such as American Families United estimate that irregular migrants married to Americans reach 1.1 million people.
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The Pliegos met 20 years ago, in 2004, in Minneapolis. She had just graduated from college and was going through a “lots of stress” period in her life. To relax, she went to a place to dance salsa. On one of those outings, a young man asked her to dance merengue. “I remember it as if it were today. In the middle of the dance she smiled at me, one of those huge smiles in which her entire face participates. There I knew that I was going to fall in love with her.” They were dating for three years, two of them long distance while she worked in Guatemala. “As soon as I came back, we got married.”
It was 2007. For the Pliegos, a particular odyssey began. “We requested an adjustment of his immigration status in 2008. And basically we found out that the path to acquiring legal status required him to leave the country for a minimum period of 10 years. It is the so-called punishment law (sic). Our lawyer explained to us that we could delay the process and act to change the law, wait for the law to change, or move forward and have him go away for a decade. So we chose to stay here and work to change the law.” She 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 her child. The child was born in 2016, on the eve of Donald Trump beginning his presidential term.
“Those first four years of my son’s life were a scary time. I remember it as the worst time of my life, because of how difficult daily life became, the worry, the fear, the anguish that our family could be separated, especially because we already had the little one. It should have been a moment of joy, the arrival of the baby, watching it grow, and we were always under the shadow of fear,” explains the woman.
After the arrival of Joe Biden to the White House, that fear relatively diminished. “We know that we are not a priority, that no one is going to come look for my husband, or carry out a raid on his workplace… But the situation continues to impact us every day.”
“My husband does not have a Social Security number (which only Americans or foreigners with a work permit receive, and proves that they are in legal immigration status), so he cannot be the holder of any credit that we request, to buy a car or for the mortgage on our house. For that we depend solely on my income. I cannot include you as a beneficiary on my life insurance. He can’t have a background search done on him, so he can’t volunteer for the child’s school activities, or to coach the kids’ teams, things I’m sure he would love to do.”
Fear also conditions their work decisions. “He believes that he cannot take any day for granted, and that is why he works a lot,” says Pliego. “He combines two jobs that require him to be away from home all the time from Monday to Friday. And that means that all the housework falls on me: cleaning, cooking, taking the child to school, taking him to his activities. It’s hard. I am very flexible with bedtimes, because I want my son and his father to be able to interact and I let the boy stay up late so he can greet his father when he comes home.”
In the absence of the more specific details of the change announced this week being published – how much it will cost to submit the application, for example – the Documents meet the requirements announced by the Administration to benefit from the parole in place.
“We are very grateful that the calls of our family and those of other 1.1 million families in our situation have been heard, to offer a solution that at least allows us to gain time and a work permit. With the work permit we have dignity, we have options, we do not have to suffer indignities in the workplace because it is 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 elections? “I really want to vote, to 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 it is a story that I am willing to tell over and over again to anyone who will listen.”
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