By Kristina Cooke and Ted Hesson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – When news broke about the U.S. president Joe Biden‘s plan to provide a path to citizenship for certain immigrants who entered the country illegally and are married to U.S. citizens, Pennsylvania-based immigration attorney Bridget Cambria didn’t have to think long about clients she could help.
Over the years, she had met many such couples and explained to them how difficult it would be for the immigrant spouse to obtain legal permanent residency in the US. The process in most cases required the immigrant to leave the country, potentially enduring years of family separation before being eligible to return.
“When I called them, it was nice to tell them something happy for once,” Cambria said. “Some were crying, most were just in disbelief or shock.”
Biden’s move on Tuesday to allow hundreds of thousands of spouses of American citizens to legalize their immigration status without leaving the United States is a huge development for the families involved, but it is also a high-stakes political gamble in an election year.
Biden, a Democrat who is seeking another term in November, has struggled with high levels of illegal immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border. His Republican challenger, the hardliner Donald Trumphas pushed the message that immigrants commit more violent crimes than U.S. citizens, despite statistics to the contrary, and are “poisoning the blood” of the country.
Biden has walked a political tightrope in recent months, tightening his stance on border enforcement while trying not to alienate liberal voters and Latinos. The Democrat defeated Trump in 2020 when Biden promised a more humane approach to immigration, a stark contrast to Trump’s four years in power.
When it comes to immigration policy, registered voters prefer Trump over Biden by a margin of 17 percentage points, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in mid-May.
One of the couples who called Cambria, the Pennsylvania immigration lawyer, was Carmen Miranda56, and her husband Francisco Cortez, 52, of Reading, Pennsylvania.
Miranda met Cortez, a Mexican, through a friend in her early twenties. He had entered the country illegally in 1987 and she was a single mother of two young children. They dated for several years before getting married in 2003.
Miranda, who has multiple sclerosis and dwarfism and relies on Cortez to support her, said she was excited when Cambria called her with the news.
“We waited and waited for so, so long,” Miranda said. “I’m sorry if I start crying.”
Miranda said she wouldn’t have been able to make it without Cortez if he had left the country to apply for legal status and ended up in a no man’s land for years. “I need him here,” she said.
Genaro Vicencio, 24, who crossed the border from Mexico at the age of 10, met his American wife Cindy Maduena when they were both teenagers. They have a 6 year old son.
Vicencio, who lives in Temple, Pennsylvania, said he was constantly afraid that he would have to leave the U.S. for a long time and that his son would grow up without a father. He’s still trying to understand the magnitude of the announcement for his family, he said.
“It’s that I don’t have to worry, ‘Will my son have a father?’ Will my family be stable?,” he said. “Every morning I had to wake up and think about that. This is a huge stress reliever.”
Vicencio hopes that obtaining legal status will allow him to expand his painting and electrician business and access business loans, he said.
But most of all, he said, he is happy to start building a stable future in the United States.
“I know some people in this country might say, ‘Oh, it’s not a great country.’ This is a beautiful country. I love it.”
(Reporting by Kristina Cooke in San Francisco and Ted Hesson in Washington; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
