Joe Biden has used immigration “parole” more than any US president to circumvent an uncooperative Congress, but he is hardly the first.
Presidential power has been a key part of Biden’s strategy to channel immigrants through new and expanded legal pathways and discourage illegal crossings, a radical departure from his rival Donald Trump.
Biden has authorized at least 1 million temporary visits, which generally include disability. Trump said during his campaign to return to the White House that he would end the “outrageous abuse of parole.”
Parole, which was established under a 1952 law, allows the president to admit people “only on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public interest.” It has since been ordered 126 times by every president except Trump, according to David Bier of the pro-immigration Cato Institute.
The Associated Press spoke to immigrants who arrived during four major waves of releases over the past 72 years.
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Edith Lauer was a 14-year-old student when she left Budapest with her parents and older sister Nora in November 1956. Her parents felt unsafe after Soviet tanks invaded and crushed a short-lived uprising against the Moscow-controlled government. Many fled, including about 32,000 on parole in the United States.
“They knew that if they waited they would be arrested, (possibly) tried in a communist trial … and or executed,” Lauer, 81, recalled from her home in Cleveland.
The four went to a military base in Munich, where they stayed for weeks until her mother’s cousin sponsored them and offered his home in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Edith Lauer arrived by military plane at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, a former army camp that had been converted into Hungarian refugee housing.
“My God, this is freedom, democracy, it was just a completely different world,” she remembers thinking. “I recognized that very, very quickly, and… everyone was so welcoming and so wonderful.”
Her father, a lawyer and the only one in the family who spoke English, became a librarian at the Library of Congress. Her mother started as a dishwasher and went to work in a laboratory producing monkey serum.
In 1963, Lauer married an American student she met at the University of Maryland, who later became a business manager. She graduated from Texas A&M University and became a teacher. She has two daughters and two grandchildren and has founded a nonprofit organization to promote understanding for her people.
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The Vietnam War era caused an exodus from Southeast Asia, resulting in approximately 340,000 people being released on parole.
Kim-Trang Dang was a 25-year-old law student working as a teacher when she left Saigon with her then-husband, two siblings and five other family members. Her father and two sisters had left days earlier. It was April 1975, just before the capital of South Vietnam fell to North Vietnamese communist forces.
They drove half an hour in the middle of the night to a river port where a boat was waiting. There were bombs and fire in the streets, but they were told that an American military ship would pick them up at sea.
They went to Subic Bay, the Philippines, and then to Guam before being transferred to a camp at Fort Chaffee, a military installation in western Arkansas, where they waited for about a month for a sponsor who could take them The United States.
The sponsor offered them his house in Tampa, Florida. Kim-Trang got a job at a shrimp factory, where she peeled shrimp skin eight hours a day and had English lessons in the evenings. She moved to San Diego in the 1980s and got a job as a social worker at a Catholic organization, retiring after 23 years.
Kim-Trang, 73, has three U.S.-born children and five grandchildren.
“I’m glad I have freedom here and don’t live under communism,” she said. “When I met them, the Americans were very nice… They opened their arms to us. If they don’t open their arms, we won’t know where to go.”
She had her own company in care for the elderly. Now she volunteers as president of a Vietnamese service organization. She became an American citizen in 1980.
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Mabel Junco, who arrived in Key West, Florida in a fishing boat rented by her uncle, was one of about 125,000 Cubans paroled in 1980. They were processed in refugee camps in South Florida.
Junco’s family disapproved of the Cuban government, and in April 1980, leader Fidel Castro unexpectedly announced that any Cuban who wanted to could leave the island from the port city of Mariel.
Mabel, then eleven, was dependent on an uncle who had lived in Miami for almost ten years. He rented a fishing boat for her, her parents and older sister, who was 16. They left their home in Havana for the port city of Mariel and discovered that the boat was in poor condition and full of people.
Mabel, her mother and her sister boarded another boat containing women and children. Her father and uncle remained in the damaged boat, which was towed by another boat, until a U.S. Coast Guard vessel rescued them. After a night of sailing, they reunited in Key West as part of what became known as the Mariel boat lift.
After living with the uncle for about three months, the family moved into a rented one-bedroom apartment. The parents obtained a work permit and left early in the morning and returned in the evening. The two girls walked to and from school alone, cooked and did the housework.
The mother, who was a seamstress in Cuba, worked in a clothing factory in Miami. The father drove trucks, just like in Cuba, until a few years later he opened a transport company for the elderly. Four years later the family had their own house, with a room for each person.
“In Cuba, things were very difficult, very bad,” says Junco, now 55 and a teacher in Jacksonville, Florida. “Living here has given us many opportunities, we have fought forward… my parents always taught us that you come to work, and that you don’t get anything for free from the government.”
Junco married a Cuban who left the island when he was three years old. They have two daughters, 30 and 26.
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Berioskha Guevara has no words to describe her happiness in the United States. After decades of fear as a political opponent in Venezuela and struggling to buy basic products like milk and bread, the 53-year-old chemist feels she is dreaming.
Guevarra and her 86-year-old father came to the US thanks to the sponsorship of her brother, a pharmacist who left after Hugo Chavez took power in 1999.
“Now we are like in paradise,” said Guevara, who arrived in July 2023. “I can’t stop smiling, making plans and thanking God because without parole I would never have been able to fulfill my dreams the way I am living them now. .”
More than 7.7 million Venezuelans have fled the country as it entered an economic downturn over the past decade. They are increasingly heading to the United States, prompting the Biden administration to parole 30,000 people a month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
Texas and 20 other states have filed a lawsuit, saying the administration “effectively created a new visa program – without the formalities of Congressional legislation” but not challenging the widespread parole for Afghans and Ukrainians. A judge has yet to rule after a trial in August.
In Venezuela, Guevara graduated in 2003 with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and spent the past decade working for a foreign private oil company, earning $200 a month. It was a relatively good salary for Venezuelans, but inflation was very high and food scarce. She feared she would be arrested for being an opponent of the government.
In the US, she got a job at a supermarket four months after applying for a work permit. She is looking for work that will allow her to use her chemistry background while living with her father in her brother’s one-bedroom apartment in Orlando, Florida.
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Associated Press writer Elliot Spagat in San Diego contributed.