The Biden administration will open a new legal immigration pathway for certain immigrants from Ecuador in an effort to discourage people from the South American nation from trekking to the US-Mexico border, according to internal federal documents obtained by CBS News.
The administration will create a family reunification programme that will allow eligible Ecuadorians to fly to the US and apply for temporary work permits if their US-based relatives have sponsored them for immigrant visas, according to the Department of Homeland Security documents.
The initiative is the latest attempt by the Biden administration to reduce illegal border crossings, which surged to an annual high in September, by offering would-be migrants expedited ways to enter the US legally. Over the past two years, officials have revived or created similar family reunification programmes for immigrants from Colombia, Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti and Honduras.
DHS officials, the documents say, hope to “provide an alternative to dangerous irregular migration” through the policy, which was confirmed later on Wednesday by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
“Establishing this process for certain Ecuadorian nationals will ensure that more families have access to legal avenues instead of turning to smugglers to make the dangerous journey,” Mayorkas said in a statement.
Ecuadorian migration to US border soars
The programme will also mark the first time the administration has created a programme specifically for Ecuadorians, who have travelled to the US southern border in record numbers over the past year. In the first 11 months of fiscal year 2023, Border Patrol apprehended nearly 99,000 Ecuadorians who entered the US without authorisation, a 312% increase from fiscal year 2022 and an annual record, according to federal data.
In 2021, when there was another spike in Ecuadorian arrivals at the US border, most migrants from Ecuador flew to Mexico before entering the US illegally. But after Mexico ended visa-free travel for Ecuadorians later that year, more of them tried to reach the US by crossing Panama’s once-impenetrable Darién Gap on foot. Nearly 50,000 Ecuadorian migrants crossed the Darién jungle in 2023 alone, the second highest number of any nationality, according to the Panamanian government.
In recent years, Ecuadorians have faced a struggling economy and an unprecedented wave of violent crime fuelled by drug cartels and gangs. In August, presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was shot dead while campaigning. The State Department advises Americans not to visit certain areas of the country because of the risk of being assaulted, kidnapped or even murdered.
How the new programme will work
To qualify for the Family Reunification Programme, Ecuadorians must have family members in the US who are US citizens or permanent residents. The process begins with US citizens or legal residents sponsoring their relatives in Ecuador for an immigrant visa.
U.S. officials then send invitations to U.S. citizens and permanent residents whose visa sponsorships have been approved, allowing them to petition for their relatives to come to the U.S. much faster than they could under the family-based visa system, which is massively backlogged and numerically limited.
Many immigrants with family members in the US often have to wait years – and in extreme cases more than a decade – for family-based visas to become available.
If selected and approved for the family reunification programme, Ecuadorians would be allowed to enter the US on humanitarian parole without having to wait for a visa. While in the US, they can work legally under parole and wait for their visa to become available. Once that happens, they can become permanent residents.
Another parole programme
The Biden administration has made unprecedented use of parole as part of its effort to divert migration away from the US southern border.
In addition to the family reunification programmes, the administration has created two sponsorship initiatives that have allowed hundreds of thousands of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Ukrainians to enter the US under parole. It is also using parole to process 1,500 asylum seekers a day at the US-Mexico border who have secured an entry date through a phone app.
After officials combined these programmes with stricter asylum rules and an increase in deportations this spring, illegal entries along the southern border fell to a two-year low. But migrant crossings there surged in the late summer and early autumn, testing the strategy.
In September, the US Border Patrol apprehended more than 200,000 migrants, more than double the number in June, when illegal crossings fell to their lowest level since President Biden took office.
