Indira Solís managed to fulfill in one week a dream for which she had fought for more than seven years since she arrived in the United States: to be reunited with her eldest son, who had stayed in Havana.
Solís had come to the United States through a family reunification program after being claimed by her husband, but she only traveled with her youngest son.
Jorge Zamora, her eldest son, stayed in Cuba because, not being the biological son of her current husband, she could not claim him. Once she obtained residency in the United States, the woman herself filed a petition that she says took years, although in the end, “it didn’t work out because she finally brought it through the parole humanitarian”.
This woman, who works as a broadcaster in Miami, Florida, found out about the benefit of the humanitarian parole when the president Joe Biden made the announcement at the beginning of January and comments that he was interested because he had already applied for other types of humanitarian permits.
In the same way, he had applied for his eldest son through family reunification, but these programs had been affected by the withdrawal of embassy personnel in Havana after alleged sonic attacks to diplomats. Subsequently, the COVID-19 pandemic -among other reasons- further lengthened the process.
“Right now the visa bulletin remains static, the visa categories do not change and they are waiting for a miracle practically despite the fact that the Cuban embassy has already announced that it is going to start processing all the visa categories… that was what led me to delve deeper into this topic, into this new parole”, Solís stressed to the Voice of America.
Unlike these other procedures, this Cuban assures that she “did not think twice” and applied for the parole. “They were very brief steps, the documentation is not the same, it is much less documentation than the previous claims or the previous processes and, definitely, it was a process that I do not believe because I put my son in the United States in less than one week”.
Indira applied on January 6 for humanitarian parole and it was approved four days later. Her son arrived in the US on the 13th of the same month.
What there was some work on was internet access since “it is intermittent in Cuba,” the woman explained to the VOAso his son had to install a VPN in order to expedite the process.
“Definitely, it was very easy, very few steps and very little documentation on top of that,” he reiterated. “The requirements are very few.”
“I did not expect”:
It was not until this year that he was finally able to meet again with his son Jorge, at 21 years old. “The complicated there [en Cuba] It was a mistake when taking my photo, in addition to the internet. I had to download a VPN”, commented the young man in a Facebook Live journalist Mario J. Pentón, also of Cuban origin.
“I did not expect this,” added the young beneficiary and explained that it was not so complicated once he was at the Miami airport. “They took care of me quickly and now I’m here,” he commented.
Your mother indicates that she did not need a lawyer or legal assistant to guide her and meet the requirements to apply for the parole humanitarian, since it indicates that “this process is designed so that the same petitioner and the beneficiary apply on their own.”
“We did it ourselves. I, from my house, applied his little brother, who was the one who helped me a lot, who put his hand on the entire form and, then, [fue] when USCIS began to send the email ‘available to the beneficiary in Cuba,'” explains Solís.
After the notification, they entered the links, downloaded the corresponding application, CBP-One, and the process was carried out in its entirety, the Cuban mother concluded.
This program was initially open to VenezuelansY was later expanded for Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans.
immediate “impact”
The White House reported this Wednesday that, although they still cannot share exact figures for the arrivals of Cubans, Nicaraguans and Haitians at the southern border, “an impact is already being seen” by the parole program.
“The numbers of migrants arriving from those countries (Cuba, Nicaragua and Haiti) are low and we hope to share more details in the future. Additionally, the first people authorized to live and work legally in the US under the expansion of the humanitarian parole program began to arrive last Tuesday, just five days after the announcement of the measure,” said Biden administration spokeswoman Karine Jean. -Pierre, at a press conference.
The White House press secretary announced that “hundreds more have been vetoed and approved for travel, and can now buy a ticket to the US.” Likewise, she reaffirmed President Joe Biden’s requests to Congress to approve his proposals for managing the immigration crisis, including the authorization of additional funds for border management.
“Biden has made the necessary decisions and he is going to continue to take the security situation at the border very seriously, but again, Congress needs to act, the Republicans need to act, and if they really care about that issue, this is it. an opportunity to reach out from across the aisle and work with us on this,” emphasized Jean-Pierre.
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