By Marina Lambrinou
On June 24, 2024, President Biden signed a flurry of executive orders providing renewed hope to the immigrant community and its allies. The highlight of these was providing a pathway, also known as “parole in place” to legalized status for the undocumented spouses and children of U.S. citizens, opening the door for around 500,000 mixed-status families to sponsor their undocumented family members without having to leave the country for a protracted period of time. Additionally, the administration moved to facilitate the work permit acquisition process for DACA recipients and other Dreamers who earned a degree at an accredited higher education institution in the United States and received an offer of employment in their field of study.
These measures have been promoted as a strategy to “keep families together” amid longstanding policies resulting in migrant family separations. However, even though these developments should be applauded and celebrated, concerns remain for segments of the non-citizen population left out of these status relief granting actions, notably, the undocumented parents of U.S. citizens.
As mixed-status families composed of undocumented parents and U.S. born children continue to proliferate across the United States, the policy generated dichotomies of citizen/non-citizen and undocumented/documented, which also give rise to binary premised discourses of deservingness, are rendered not only morally bankrupt, but also completely misaligned with the realities of people’s lives. People as young as adolescents and children born in the United States are subjected to the ripple effects of illegality experienced by their parents as a result of non-status. In most U.S. states, undocumented people are banned from driving, accessing Medicaid, CHIP benefits, and other forms of public assistance. Moreover, a multitude of U.S. states block undocumented students from accessing in-state tuition and financial aid at public universities, severely impeding their upward social mobility and ensuring that they remain trapped in low-wage, low-skill, and physically arduous jobs that offer no benefits or health coverage.
All of these issues do not only impact undocumented individuals themselves; they profoundly affect their families, including U.S. born children who experience these challenges alongside their parents and have to live with the looming fear and trauma of parental loss due to deportation. For example, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) under the Trump Administration proposed a ruleprohibiting access to public and subsidized housing for mixed-status families. While the rule was subsequently rescinded by the Biden administration, it is an illustration of some of the ways in which federal, state, and local governments routinely discriminate against mixed-status families. Additionally, during the pandemic, which has had more adverse impacts on communities of color and minoritized people, mixed-status families were excluded from federal pandemic stimulus checks designed to provide relief under the Congressional CARES Act.
Given that mixed-status families will continue to increase, immigrant community activists and policy advocates need to spotlight these families’ experiences and particular challenges to illustrate the arbitrary distinction between citizenship status. Focusing on immigration status to judge the worth of a person is not only morally wrong but also no longer a pragmatic notion. Additionally, these reductionist frameworks give rise to hierarchies. Zeroing in on the distinctions between citizens and the undocumented makes invisible mixed-status households.
Thus, it is paramount that allies to the immigrant community shift the migrant policy discourse to focus more on mixed-status households. Shifting the focus to these families will help combat one-sided discourses praising young people demonstrating high-achieving academic ability while vilifying their parents, siblings, or other members of their communities. Highlighting the existence of mixed-status households demonstrates that young people do not exist in isolation from their parents, siblings, or other family members and that their experiences and challenges are organically interconnected in ways that current policy does not reflect. If rhetorically pro-immigrant politicians and the majority of the American public truly wish for these young people to become integrated into U.S. society as recent polls suggest, then we cannot, as a country, allow for family separation to be the price to pay for segmented integration. We also cannot allow the status quo, where these policies continue to affect a score of children who are U.S. citizens with deported parents.
The first and only time that status relief for the parents of U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents was addressed was in 2014 when the Obama administration designed the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents Act (DAPA) policy, a policy that was fought by the courts and buried by the Trump administration. If we are to truly uphold this administration’s promise to keep families together, then we need to do more, and we need to do better for immigrant families. A DAPA-type policy would extend the kinds of protections afforded under President Biden’s recent executive order to many more immigrant families and further shield immigrant communities from deportation and secure their future so that they can keep contributing to American society.
Marina Lambrinou, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Center for Equity, Leadership, and Social Justice in Education (CELSJE)
School of Education
Loyola University Maryland
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