More than any other US president, Joe Biden has employed humanitarian parole for immigrants as a means of getting around a Congress that hasn’t offered the required support. He’s not the first, though, to do this.
In sharp contrast to what his opponent, Donald Trump, did, Biden has made the use of presidential power the focal point of his plan to direct immigrants through new and enlarged legal paths while discouraging illegal crossings.
At least one million temporary visits to the United States were approved by Biden, most of which included work permits. During his presidential campaign, Trump pledged to put an end to the “outrageous abuse of humanitarian parole.”
A 1952 statute established humanitarian parole, which permits admission “exclusively on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or great benefit to the public,” gives the president this authority. Since then, every president save for Trump has ordained it 126 times, according to David Bier of the pro-immigration Cato Institute.
In the last 72 years, there have been four significant waves of humanitarian parole, and the Associated Press met with migrants who arrived at those times.
VELEZUELA, 2023
Berioskha Guevara finds it impossible to express how content she is to be living in the United States. As an opponent of Venezuela’s government for decades, the 53-year-old chemist has struggled to afford basic necessities like milk and bread, and now she feels as though she is dreaming.
Guevara’s brother, a pharmacist who departed Venezuela following Hugo Chavez’s takeover in 1999, provided sponsorship for him and his 86-year-old father to immigrate to the United States.
Following his arrival in July 2023, Guevara remarked, “Now it’s like being in paradise.” He continued, speaking in English about humanitarian parole, “I haven’t stopped smiling, making plans, saying thank God because without parole I would never have been able to live my aspirations like I do now.”
In the ten years since Venezuela entered a severe economic crisis, more than 7.7 million people have left the nation. The Biden administration is being forced to grant 30,000 humanitarian parole per month to individuals from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela as a result of their rising migration toward the United States.
While Texas and twenty other states filed a lawsuit, they did not contest widespread humanitarian parole for Afghans and Ukrainians, claiming that the federal government “essentially created a new visa program, without the formalities of an act of Congress.” A judge’s decision after the August trial is still pending.
After earning his chemistry degree in Venezuela in 2003, Guevara spent the next ten years working for a foreign oil business, earning roughly $200 per month. Although the South American nation offered a comparatively respectable income, food was in short supply and inflation was excessive. She was afraid that as a government opponent, she would be taken into custody.
Four months after filing for a work permit in the US, he was hired by a supermarket. Now living in his brother’s one-bedroom apartment in Orlando, Florida with his father, he’s searching for a job where he can use his experience in chemistry.
1980s Cuba
Mabel Junco was one of approxim
ately 125,000 Cubans granted humanitarian parole in the United States in 1980. She came at Key West, Florida, on a fishing boat that her uncle had leased. In South Florida’s refugee camps, they underwent processing.
The family of Junco was opposed to the Cuban government. Unexpectedly, in April 1980, President Fidel Castro said that Cubans might leave the island through the port of Mariel.
Mabel, then eleven years old, was dependent on an uncle who had spent almost a decade living in Miami. She, her parents, and her sixteen-year-old older sister rented a fishing boat from him. When they arrived at the port of Mariel from their Havana residence, they discovered that the boat was crowded and in poor shape.
Another boat filled with women and children was boarded by Mabel, her mother, and her sister. Until they were rescued by a U.S. Coast Guard vessel, his father and uncle remained on the damaged boat that was being pulled by another. They reconnected in Key West as part of what became known as the Mariel Boatlift after spending a night at sea.
The family stayed at the uncle’s house for roughly three months before moving into a rented one-bedroom apartment. With work licenses in hand, the parents left the house early in the morning and returned in the evenings. Alone, the two girls cooked and cleaned the house before walking to school.
The mother worked in a Miami clothing industry as a seamstress originally from Cuba. Similar to the Caribbean island, his father drove trucks before starting an elderly transportation business a few years later. After four years, each member of the family had a room in their own home.
“It was really hard, very horrible in Cuba,” stated Junco, a 55-year-old Jacksonville, Florida teacher. “Life has provided us with numerous opportunities here, and we have persevered… We were constantly taught by our parents to go to work and that nothing is provided for free by the government.”
At the age of three, Junco married a guy from Cuba who had left the island. Their two daughters are 26 and 30 years old.
Vietnam, 1975
Approximately 340,000 people were granted humanitarian parole by the United States following the Vietnam War, which caused a mass exodus from the Southeast Asian nation.
When Kim-Trang Dang, then a 25-year-old law student, left Saigon with her then-husband, two brothers, and five other family members, she was employed as a teacher. A few days ago, his father and his two sisters had fled the nation. It was April 1975, just before communist forces from North Vietnam captured the capital of South Vietnam.
It was the dead of night, and they drove for thirty minutes to a riverbank port, where a boat was waiting for them. They were informed that they would be picked up on the high seas by a U.S. military ship, notwithstanding the explosives and gunfire that were occurring in the streets.
They traveled to Guam and Ubic Bay in the Philippines before being moved to a camp at Fort Chaffee, a military base in western Arkansas, where they remained for around a month while they awaited a sponsor who could arrange for their departure and permanent residence in the United States.
The sponsor made them an accommodation offer in Tampa, Florida. After landing a position at a shrimp mill, Kim-Trang worked eight hours a day peeling shrimp and attended nighttime English sessions. After relocating to San Diego in the 1980s, she worked for a Catholic organization for 23 years before retiring as a social worker.
Kim-Trang, 73, has five grandkids and three children born in the United States.
“I’m happy that I don’t live under communism and that I have freedom here,” he remarked. “The Americans were genuinely friendly when I first met them. They welcomed us with open arms. We wouldn’t know where to go if they didn’t welcome us.”
She started her own senior care company. Currently, she serves as the president of a Vietnamese-serving nonprofit volunteer. In 1980, he obtained U.S. citizenship by naturalization.
1956 in Hungary In November 1956, Edith Lauer, along with her parents and elder sister Nora, departed Budapest as a 14-year-old student. Following the invasion of the nation by Soviet tanks to put down a brief rebellion against the then-Moscow-controlled government, his parents did not feel comfortable. A large number of individuals left, including over 32,000 who were granted humanitarian parole in the US.
Lauer, 81, stated from his Cleveland home, “They understood that if they waited they would be imprisoned, (perhaps) go to a communist trial… and/or they would be executed.”
The four of them traveled to a military installation in Munich, where they stayed for a few weeks until being provided a place to live in Silver Spring, Maryland, by a mother’s cousin.
Arriving in Camp Kilmer, New Jersey—a former military installation converted to housing Hungarian refugees—Edith Lauer boarded a military plane.
He recalls thinking, “My God, this is freedom, democracy; it was just a whole different universe.” “Everyone was really kind and kind, and I realized it very, very early on.”
The sole English-speaking member of the family and a lawyer, his father went on to work as a librarian at the Library of Congress. Her mother began her career in the lab doing dishwashing and subsequently moved on to create monkey serum.
Lauer married an American student in 1963 who had become a business leader after meeting her at the University of Maryland. After earning her degree from Texas A&M, she went on to work as a lecturer. In addition to founding a non-profit organization to advance his people’s culture, he has two daughters and two grandchildren.
From San Diego, reporter Elliot Spagat of the Associated Press contributed to this story.