President Joe Biden’s latest executive order on immigration gives legal protections to about half a million undocumented immigrants who are married to American citizens, preventing their deportation and providing a streamlined pathway to citizenship for them and their children. The announcement is being welcomed by immigrant rights groups, but comes just weeks after Biden signed another order giving himself far-reaching power to shut down the U.S. border with Mexico to limit asylum requests. The two executive orders “could not be more different from each other,” says Congressmember Delia Ramirez of Illinois. She attended Tuesday’s White House ceremony with her husband Boris Hernandez, who came to the U.S. as a teenager and would qualify for protections under the new rule, and says Biden must offer an alternative to hard-line Republican policies. “Be the administration that shows the stark difference between Donald Trump and Joe Biden as it pertains to immigration. Tuesday was a good step in that direction. What he did two-and-a-half weeks ago was not,” says Ramirez.
