Help protect immigrant family caregivers!

SIGN ON: Tell DHS & DOJ to work together and help immigrant family caregivers!

Not only are immigrants 27 percent of the direct care workforce, including home health aides, personal health aides, and nursing assistants, many immigrants are caring for family members as well.

“My wife is my caregiver. I am a U.S. Army Disabled Veteran and USCIS does not want to grant her citizenship. We have been together and married for over 20 years.”
- Esteban, MomsRising member

Too often, immigrants, like Esteban’s wife, carry out significant caregiver responsibilities for their U.S. citizen spouses or children but live in immigration limbo without a pathway to citizenship or permanent status.

But there’s a simple solution! And it’s within the government’s hands to resolve this, keep families together, and support caregivers. Under current laws, already in place, certain immigrants who have lived in the U.S. for 10 years, have passed background checks, and whose removal from the country would cause exceptional & extremely unusual hardship to a U.S. citizen (or green card holder) family member may request “cancellation of their removal” before an immigration judge. What this means is certain individuals, who are already in removal proceedings, could ask the judge to “cancel” their removal if they’re a family caregiver like Esteban’s wife. But the current process requires immigrants to already be in removal proceedings. We need to make this process more accessible for family caregivers.

Here’s the solution: We need the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to direct their office of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to collaborate with the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR). (Yes, it's a complicated alphabet soup!) Together, these two offices, USCIS and EOIR, would work together on rule making for a streamlined cancellation of removal process.

References:

[1] PHI: Bridging the Gap: Enhancing Support for Immigrant Direct Care Workers and Meeting Long-Term Care Needs

Let’s get government agencies to work together to help protect immigrant family caregivers!!!

We urge you to support immigrant caregivers and their families. We know we currently have a broken immigration system and while we support a wider bundle of policies to protect long-term residents, we want to highlight the efforts your offices can commit to right now to support family caregivers.

Not only are immigrants 27 percent of the direct care workforce, including home health aides, personal health aides, and nursing assistants, many immigrants are caring for family members as well.

We need to make it easier for family caregivers, not harder. And removing more family caregivers from our communities will not only separate families, but also exacerbate the labor shortage in the caregiving professions. We encourage your offices, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR), to work together on a joint effort and facilitate access to the cancellation of removal process for immigrant family caregivers.

This action could help protect thousands of immigrant family caregivers whose removal from the country would otherwise cause exceptional & extremely unusual hardship to a U.S. citizen (or green card holder) family member. This could also help keep families together and protect parents with children who are U.S. citizens.

Please show your support for the moms, dads, and others who are caring for their loved ones by supporting all efforts to protect immigrant families and immigrant family caregivers.

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