Editor’s note: This story first appeared on palabra, the digital news site by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

By Susan Ferriss

On June 18, President Joe Biden unveiled a plan to allow an estimated 500,000 undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens to apply for “parole in place.” This would provide them with work permits, protection from deportation and a chance to avoid a harsh punishment: exile from the United States, usually for 10 years or even more before they can become eligible for legal resident green cards.

It’s a bold order that may finally end the nightmares many families have lived through for more than two decades.

Biden’s move also triggered a flood of thoughts and memories for me.

I’ve long been familiar with how political opposition has blocked U.S. citizen spouses from doing what these Americans call the “right thing.” In real life, when they step up to officially sponsor a wife or husband, the punishment of exile is a high risk.

As expected, immigration hardliners, including Donald Trump, howled in protest when Biden announced his executive action. But for American “mixed status” couples, this is the moment they’ve been waiting for since the turn of the century.

‘The system doesn’t have a heart. And it doesn’t have a brain.’

I know because that’s how long I’ve been interviewing them as a reporter specializing in immigration.

Over the last 20 years, Americans married to undocumented people have told me they blame a federal rule dating from 1996 for needlessly undermining family stability and their children’s welfare. The rule has done nothing, they say, to deter migrants from crossing the border. Nor has it addressed the root causes of those unauthorized crossings.

Approved by Congress, the 1996 rule requires U.S. immigration officers to impose a bar – or exile – on undocumented spouses who’ve lived in the United States for more than a year before they can become eligible for green cards.

The policy has forced American spouses to make brutal choices: They can forget about stepping forward to seek a green card, and hope that their spouses are not discovered and deported; follow the spouse into exile; or remain home, struggling to raise kids alone and cope with separation.

Collateral damage

Back in 2007, I interviewed Jerald Peterson of Oklahoma about this dilemma. A staunch Republican, he was a retired CIA station chief who’d served in Mexico, among other countries.

His daughter had met and married an undocumented man who was her co-worker at a plant nursery in Oklahoma. When her husband applied for a green card and was barred from eligibility, she moved to Mexico with their baby to keep the family together. Peterson sent a letter of protest to President George W. Bush.

“For years, the U.S. turned a blind eye to Mexicans illegally entering the U.S. ... to satisfy a demand for workers,” Peterson wrote.

Peterson said that he thought 9/11 necessitated focusing on border security generally. But he didn’t see how turning Americans in loving, stable relationships into “collateral damage” served national security.

The myth persists that marrying a U.S. citizen guarantees a green card and protection from deportation. But the risks of having an undocumented spouse apply for a green card are more commonly known today than when Peterson spoke to me.

In the early 2000s, the exile policy was still relatively new. Many Americans assumed that they’d have to pay fines, fees and that their spouse would have to pass a background check to secure a green card. The 1996 law made the bars mandatory for undocumented people who came in illegally and stayed beyond one year. Bars can be longer for people who entered illegally more than once. If people have crossed illegally more than once, which has been fairly common for many migrants, or accused of being untruthful, their exile can be longer than 10 years or even for life, as I described in a story I wrote in 2012 for the Center for Public Integrity.

Notably, in practice, the bars kick in if an undocumented spouse leaves the United States. The Catch-22 is that the spouses must leave at some point to attend green card interviews with U.S. consular officials back in their home countries. Many couples told me in the early 2000s that their immigrant spouses only learned that they’d be barred when visa officials explained it to them at the interviews.

A new hope

If Biden’s plan isn’t blocked by a legal challenge, half a million undocumented spouses — if they’ve been here for at least 10 years — won’t have to return to their countries for the green card process. Instead, they will first apply for parole in place, an interim status that also allows them to get legal work permits. Later they can apply for green cards and do their interviews on U.S. soil. An estimated 50,000 minor stepchildren of U.S. citizens could also benefit.

Some people I interviewed years ago told me that even today they have trouble convincing friends that they couldn’t smoothly obtain green cards for their spouses. Before they learned the hard way, they also thought that since theirs were honest marriages – often with children – that U.S. officials would certainly show them mercy.

They were wrong.

In 2007, when I spoke to former CIA station chief Jerald Peterson, I was covering immigration at the Sacramento Bee newspaper in California. Calls started coming in from people whose spouses had been forced out.

One of those stunned by the severity of the 1996 rule was Jose Luis Negrete, a U.S. Marine combat veteran who’d served in the Gulf War and Somalia. His undocumented wife was already into her fourth year of exile in Mexico. He showed me his military uniform and photos of his wife and children. He was struggling, raising two little boys on his own while working and maintaining households in two different countries.

“I don’t deserve this,” Negrete told me. He lived in a rural area in California where agribusiness is utterly dependent on Mexican immigrant workers. His two sons desperately missed their mother.

“One of them cries himself to sleep every night. I hear him,” Negrete said. “They think we’re getting divorced. They don’t understand this immigration stuff.”

Since 2013, immigration rules have included more discretion for spouses of military service members and veterans.

Another Californian, Genero Martínez, told me that his wife had been barred since 2002 and was in her native El Salvador with their 4-year-old child. Their 8-year-old had returned to live with him because he became sick too frequently. “He was sleeping in a room with 10 people, and had to go to the bathroom in a hole in the ground,” Martínez said.

Martínez had given up a good-paying job with health insurance because the hours were too long and he was unable to spend enough time with his sons. He had also declined to enroll his son in public health insurance because he feared it could jeopardize his wife’s return one day.

Oblivious lawmakers

By 2006, Americans who’d been hurt by this exile policy formed an advocacy group, American Families United. They took their crisis and their cause to the politicians, hoping it would generate change.

But bills that would have instituted reforms similar to Biden’s plan languished in Congress. Still, the spouses kept trying. Even when the unsympathetic Donald Trump was president they gathered to lobby in Washington, D.C. I met up with them once for a story. They tried to remain upbeat but were dismayed that some legislators were oblivious to the 1996 rule that threatened their family unity.

In 2012, I profiled families for “Separated by Law.” Couples were on a rollercoaster of emotion as proposals to approve a path to legal status generally fizzled in Congress. Republicans fought over how harsh their stances on immigration should be.

That same year, Chris Xitco, a Los Angeles native, told me about meeting his Mexican wife at work at a produce packing company. He’d learned Spanish surfing in Mexico and they’d hit it off. After they married, he took his wife to a federal building and casually asked where they could go to fill out papers to obtain a green card. A security guard turned the couple around and told them to look at a government website to apply.

By the time Xitco’s wife was interviewed in Mexico, the couple had a 16-month-old daughter. His wife was given a minimum 10-year bar, sending Xitco into shock.

“The system doesn’t have a heart. And it doesn’t have a brain,” he told me in 2012.

The couple found a home near Tijuana where the mom and the baby would have to live. Xitco began years of grueling weekend drives over the border to visit. To cut costs, he slept on a bed in a warehouse in L.A. during weekdays. A second child was born. Xitco worried constantly about his family’s safety. He had no idea then when the ordeal would be over.

His wife was allowed to return five years ago, after 11 years of exile. That was just in time for her to help nurse Xitco’s parents in their final days.

“They fell in love with her,” Xitco told me recently. “Who wouldn’t?”

‘It is most definitely time to take a good, hard look at this section of the law.’

Another U.S. citizen who spoke to me in 2012 was a San Diego software engineer whose wife had been dumped, at night, over the border into Tijuana after she’d lost a bid for asylum. A mom with two children, she’d been stopped by local police for driving too slowly and was turned over to immigration officers. The couple thought that her escape from violence in Mexico years earlier, if not their marriage, might help her win asylum.

It didn’t.

Separated from her 10-year-old and her husband, the engineer’s wife spent the early days of her 10-year bar sobbing while standing at night on a pedestrian bridge separating Tijuana and San Diego.

And, Anita Mann, a North Carolina native, tried to uproot herself and live with her barred husband and their three young children in Mexico. It proved too hard. After more than 10 years and three interviews, the husband was finally let back in. But the family’s lost years can’t be restored.

“My kids basically grew up without their father around,” Mann recently told me.

Punishment that fits the offense?

In 2012, I also spoke with Jessica Vaughan, then an adviser and now policy director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C. The center advises politicians and has pushed for hardline measures against the undocumented and rollbacks on legal immigration.

Back in 2012, Vaughan conceded that the punishing bars likely hadn’t made a dent in illegal migration, as supporters suggested it would because of the harsh consequences. While she believed the punishment was “proportionate to the offense” of entering illegally, Vaughan also told me: “It is most definitely time to take a good, hard look at this section of the law.”

Today, however, the center has joined a hardline chorus attacking Biden’s plan for spouses, calling it a “de facto amnesty” beyond his power.

Critics also attacked President Barack Obama in 2013 when he authorized a tweak to allow certain couples a chance to try to avoid lengthy separation.

The plan has allowed couples to apply for a provisional waiver from exile before leaving for an interview abroad. Before then, waivers could only be sought after an undocumented spouse had been interviewed and barred.

The Obama tweak has allowed some to find out if they have a good shot at a waiver before they return to home countries for an interview. But there are no guarantees that provisional approvals will hold.

Lawyers who are best at helping families with this application can be expensive. And entering the United States illegally multiple times can still be a disqualifier. The basis for a waiver also has to be demonstrably beyond the American spouse’s expected heartbreak and financial hardship of separation. Couples have told me, for example, that the misfortune of a U.S. spouse suffering a debilitating health condition has been crucial.

Bethany Gonzalez, a Denison, Iowa, resident told me in 2012 that her emotional and financial distress were not enough to bring her husband back. Her husband had worked in Iowa’s meatpacking industry. Gonzalez sought help from her congressman at the time, the immigration hardliner Steve King. He bluntly said her option was to take her two sons and go live in Mexico if she wanted her family to be together.

Most of the people I’ve spoken with over the years are intensely private and only reluctantly talked openly about their crises. Some have been reunited now and don’t want to relive details publicly. Some were unable to make their marriages work. Some couples who’ve been separated, or who are living abroad in exile, are anxious to know if there might be action that helps them.

The first story I did about mixed-status couples in crisis was a collaboration in 2004 with my former colleague Juan Castillo at the Austin American-Statesman newspaper in Texas. Juan had heard about a young Austin couple upset because the husband was stuck in Mexico serving out a bar of at least 10 years.

They had a 2-year-old son.

Juan interviewed the American wife, Courtney. I was the Mexico City correspondent, so I interviewed the husband, Fernando, in a small rural village. He was basically in mourning. He was doing ranch work, earning a fraction of what he had made managing restaurant kitchens in Austin.

“I would trust him with anything,” the owner of a restaurant told Juan, vouching for Fernando. He had been Courtney’s co-worker at the restaurant.

Fernando sadly gazed at photos of his wife and son. They’d tried to live in Mexico, but it was impossible to earn enough money and the baby fell ill. “How could he go to school here,” Fernando said of his boy, “and then go back to Austin and try to fit in?”

As Juan reported in 2018, the couple’s marriage didn’t survive.

Susan Ferriss is a senior editor at the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. In more than four decades of reporting, she’s won awards from the Overseas Press Club, the Inter American Press Association, and numerous other honors for the coverage of immigration and Latin America. In 1997 she co-authored the biography “The Fight In The Fields: Cesar Chavez And The Farmworkers Movement.” @susanferriss