WASHINGTON — President Biden is set to announce new initiatives Tuesday to ease the path to permanent residency for migrants living in the US illegally while married to Americans, according to multiple reports.
The 81-year-old president’s actions to speed up lawful status for people living in the country without legal permission follows his election-year executive order on June 4 that threatened to shut down the US-Mexico border to asylum processing if the average number of illegal arrivals crosses 2,500 per day in a week.
The new policy will allow an estimated 500,000 non-citizen spouses and roughly 50,000 of their children to apply for lawful permanent resident status that they are already eligible for without leaving the country, officials familiar with the plan told the Washington Post and the New York Times.