Obama’s huge new immigration plan, explained




Updated by Dara Lind on November 21, 2014, 11:19 a.m. ET @DLind dara@vox.com


1.     President Obama will protect about 4.3 million unauthorized immigrants, including 4 million parents of legal residents, from deportation via a new "deferred action" program.

2.     The White House believes that nearly 5 million unauthorized immigrants will be protected in total, thanks to other reforms.


1) Who will Obama's executive actions help?

 There are two big buckets of relief being granted here.

One is an expansion of a program Obama's already put into place: the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA), which allows young unauthorized migrants who've come here as children (and who meet a few other requirements) to get temporary protection and work permits. 1.2 million immigrants are eligible for DACA already (although only about 600,000 have actually applied for and received protection).
The other is relief for parents of legal residents of the United States.

There are other small forms of relief that are helping some unauthorized immigrants — some of which we'll get to later.
The White House says that in total, nearly 5 million unauthorized immigrants will be protected from deportation. The two major deferred action programs cover about 4.3 million immigrants.


·        270,000 immigrants who will now be covered under the DACA program

o   Immigrants who are older than 30 now, but still entered before they were 16, are now eligible for DACA.

o   Immigrants who entered after 2007, but before 2010, are now eligible for DACA.
 

·        4 million parents of US citizens or green card holders will be covered under a new program.

o   Only parents who've been in the country for at least five years (since January 1st, 2010) will qualify.

o   Parents will qualify even if their citizen or green-card-holding children are over the age of 18.

 The logic behind the new program: US citizens are allowed to apply for their parents to get legal status, once they've turned 21. But there are rules that make it extremely difficult to get legal status in the US if you've ever been unauthorized — especially if you're not willing to risk leaving the US in the hopes that you might get to come back. And before they turn 21 (or get citizenship), there's nothing anyone can do. So granting parents deferred action allows them to stay in the US until their children can get them permanent legal status.

 
2) How will this program work?

In order for the program to be effective when it officially launches (which is expected to be in spring of 2015), people are going to have to apply. And that could be tricky. After all, these are people who've been living in the shadows for years — and have learned that any interaction with government officials could lead to their deportation.

The good news is that the administration, and community groups, have done something of a test run on the new program — via the DACA program in 2012. The push to get unauthorized immigrants to apply for DACA has created an existing infrastructure that can now be built on for the new, expanded relief programs. But in order to build on that, they're going to need more money and more lawyers. And the government agency running the program, US Citizenship and Immigration Services, doesn't have much money to spend on outreach.

 
3) Is the president granting immigrants legal status? Is this a path to citizenship?

No. Only Congress can do that.

Obama is promising certain classes of immigrants that they won't be deported for a three-year span of time. The program will also issue work permits that are valid for the same amount of time. And in most states, deferred action is also enough to make someone eligible for a driver's license. But as soon as the three years are up, if an immigrant hasn't applied for renewal, he or she is vulnerable to deportation again.
And that assumes that the administration — or a different presidential administration — doesn't stop accepting applications or renewals, killing the program slowly over three years — or eliminating it immediately.

 
4) So a future president can just take away these protections?

Yes. The president has a lot of authority to decide who gets deported, but the next president has just as much authority to make different decisions.

A Republican elected in 2016 could strip all the protections Obama has granted. President Ted Cruz (for example) could even, if he wanted, use the information from deferred-action applications to track down immigrants and deport them.
This creates something of a dilemma for the administration. Politically, the Democratic Party has an incentive to highlight how precarious this new program is — so that Latinos will turn out in 2016. But for the program to be effective as policy, the administration needs to play up its security — so that unauthorized immigrants are willing to apply. That means that the same messengers are going to be saying two different things to Latinos: that they should apply now because the program is safe, but that it could be taken away at any time.

 
5) Why is the president doing this now?

 The Obama administration has been promising for years that it only deports "high-priority" unauthorized immigrants — like convicted criminals — rather than immigrant workers with US-born children. But those promises haven't always been accurate — the 400,000 immigrants that were deported each year of Obama's first term included around 80,000 parents of US citizen children (again, each year). The DACA program has demonstrated that formalized protections work much better than vague promises.

President Obama used to argue that he lacked legal authority to take any broad steps to change immigration policy. But in March 2014 he started a review of deportation policy to see if it could be made more humane. That review was stopped to give Republicans one last chance to pass immigration reform in Congress; they didn't take it, and in June President Obama restarted the review — now promising it would cover executive action for all aspects of the immigration system. The administration delayed announcing any changes this fall, but promised that after the midterm elections they would announce major executive actions.
And even though the Democrats got trounced in the midterms, the administration kept that promise. You can look at this as a way to keep Latino voters enthusiastic about the Democratic Party, since they'd soured some on President Obama for setting deportation records. Or you can look at it as the president doing what he believes is right, to protect his legacy.

 
6) Is it legal for the president to just do this without Congress?

When it comes to immigration, the executive branch has a lot of authority to decide who to deport and who not to deport. Even the conservative legal experts of the Federalist Society agree that Obama has the authority to take actions of this sort.

There's been some argument that tools like deferred action are supposed to exist for very rare individual cases — not to protect millions of unauthorized immigrants, like Obama did with the DACA program and is doing again now. But it's difficult to argue that it was legal to let 1.2 million immigrants apply for deferred action, but not legal to let another 4 million do it.

 
7) Has a president ever done anything like this before?

Presidents have frequently protected unauthorized immigrants from deportation in the past — but never on this scale.

Deferred action has been used a few times in the past — even before the Obama administration created DACA — to protect small groups of people, like foreign students affected by Hurricane Katrina.
The closest historical parallel is probably a program called the Family Fairness program from 1990. George H. W. Bush used executive authority to allow family members of immigrants who were getting legalized through the Reagan amnesty to apply for protection from deportation, covering about 1.4 million people — 40 percent of the unauthorized population at the time. (Likewise, the president's new action covers about 40 percent of the unauthorized population today.)

In both cases, executive action covers people who are going to be eligible for legal status eventually, through their relatives — but are currently at risk of being deported. For Bush, it was the spouses and children of amnesty recipients who'd gotten legal status, but not citizenship. For Obama, it's the parents of US citizens and legal permanent residents.


8) What can Republicans do to stop Obama?

Republicans are united in their displeasure at this development, and they have several options for expressing it. One thing they acknowledge they can't do is "defund" executive action. The US Citizenship and Immigration Services is funded by application fees, not congressional appropriations. But Congress could pass a law rescinding or narrowing presidential deferred action authority.

The Republican House tried to do this earlier in 2014, for the DACA program, passing a bill that would have prevented anyone new from signing up, and preventing current beneficiaries from renewing. Democrats controlled the Senate, so it didn't come to the floor there. Once Republicans take control of the Senate in the New Year, they could pass a similar bill — but Obama would almost certainly veto it.

Rather than a standalone bill, Congress could attach riders killing Obama's immigration programs to the annual appropriations bills. If Obama vetoed the bills (or if Senate Democrats filibustered them) then we'll have another government shutdown.

They can also try to sue to stop the new program — maybe by adding it to their planned lawsuit against the administration over Obamacare's employer mandate.
 

9) What are the other changes Obama is making to immigration policy?

Reforming Secure Communities: The White House is making major changes to its signature immigration enforcement program, called "Secure Communities." Secure Communities sends the fingerprints of anyone booked into a local jail to immigration officials; federal agents can then ask the local cops to hold the inmate, so they can pick him up. Federal officials have come under serious fire for using Secure Communities as a dragnet to deport plenty of unauthorized immigrants who aren't serious criminals, and dozens of cities and states have said that they're only going to honor federal requests to pick up an immigrant in certain cases.

Now, the federal government is following that lead: it's only going to ask state and local officials to hand over an immigrant after she's been convicted of a serious crime (or a third misdemeanor). And even then, instead of asking the state or local jail to hold the immigrant after she would otherwise be released (so ICE agents can pick her up), federal agents will just ask local law enforcement to let them know when the immigrant's due to be released so they can take custody at that point.

Reforming deportation priorities: The Obama administration's boasted for the last several years that most of the people they're deporting are "priorities" for deportation. But those priorities were attacked for being way too broad. Now, the administration is overhauling its priorities. The new priorities target immigrants who've been convicted of serious crimes, and people who entered the US, or were ordered deported, in 2014.

Adhering to these new priorities is going to depend on ICE field agents — who've been extremely resistant to any attempt to limit deportations. But to impose some accountability, an agent's now going to have to prove to his office's director that someone should be deported even though she's not a priority.

Spouses of green-card holders can now apply for legal status in the US: Currently, green-card holders can apply for visas for their spouses, but if the spouse is already in the US as an unauthorized immigrant, that gets extremely hard. A few years ago, the Obama administration started letting spouses of US citizens stay in the US while applying for a waiver that would let them get legal status — instead of having to wait for months outside the country without knowing if they could return. Now, that's being expanded to green-card holders as well. The White House Council of Economic Advisors estimates this will create somewhere between 104,000 and 167,000 new work permits.
More work permits for recent graduates: The administration is looking to expand a program that lets foreign students in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields work in the United States for up to 2 1/2 years or so after they graduate.

The program's called Optional Practical Training, and it currently allows students to work in the US for a year after graduation — but if they're STEM professionals, they can apply to stay for an additional 17 months.
The OPT program was expanded in 2012, to cover more fields of study. It's estimated that anywhere from 100,000 to 200,000 immigrants are currently in the US under the OPT program. Senior administration officials are planning further revisions to the system that should lead to 10,000-36,000 more OPT visas.

Making it easier for foreign entrepreneurs to get visas. The administration is planning a more expansive use of its parole authority to make it easier for foreign entrepreneurs who invest in job-creating businesses to move to the United States. CEA envisions 33,000-53,000 new migrants via this channel.


Read the entire article here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DHS Announces Temporary Protected Status Designations for Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone




Release Date: November 20, 2014

WASHINGTON— Due to the outbreak of Ebola virus disease in West Africa, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson has announced his decision to designate Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone for Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for 18 months.  As a result, eligible nationals of Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone who are currently residing in the United States may apply for TPS with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). The Federal Register notices provide details and procedures for applying for TPS and are available at www.uscis.gov/tps.

The TPS designations for the three countries are effective Nov. 21, 2014 and will be in effect for 18 months. The designations mean that eligible nationals of Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone (and people without nationality who last habitually resided in one of those three countries) will not be removed from the United States and are authorized to work and obtain an Employment Authorization Document (EAD). The 180-day TPS registration period begins Nov. 21, 2014 and runs through May 20, 2015.

To be eligible for TPS, applicants must demonstrate that they satisfy all eligibility criteria, including that they have been “continuously residing” in the United States since Nov. 20, 2014 and “continuously physically present in” the United States since Nov. 21, 2014.  Applicants also undergo thorough security checks.  Individuals with certain criminal records or who pose a threat to national security are not eligible for TPS. The eligibility requirements are fully described in the Federal Register notices and on the TPS Web page atwww.uscis.gov/tps

Liberians currently covered under the two-year extension of Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) based on President Obama’s Sept. 26, 2014 memorandum may apply for TPS. If they do not apply for TPS within the initial 180-day registration period, they risk being ineligible for TPS because they will have missed the initial registration period. Liberians covered by DED who already possess or have applied for an EAD do not need to also apply for one related to this TPS designation. However, such individuals who are granted TPS may request a TPS-related EAD at a later date as long as the TPS designation for Liberia remains in effect.

Applicants may request that USCIS waive any or all fees based on demonstrated inability to pay by filing Form I-912, Request for Fee Waiver, or by submitting a written request. Fee-waiver requests must be accompanied by supporting documentation. USCIS will reject any TPS application that does not include the required filing fee or a properly documented fee-waiver request.

President Obama to Announce Executive Immigration Action Thursday, 11/19/14, at 5pm



President Obama will announce executive immigration changes during a live national television broadcast Thursday (November 19) at 5pm (California time).


 
 
Stay tuned for the details! For more information about this new program or to find out if you might be eligible, please contact our office.
 

Arnold S. Jaffe
Kraig W. Rice
Attorneys at Law

330 E. Carrillo
Santa Barbara, CA 93101
(805) 897-0066
arno@arnolaw.com

Obama Said to Plan Moves to Shield 5 Million Immigrants


WASHINGTON — President Obama will ignore angry protests from Republicans and announce as soon as next week a broad overhaul of the nation’s immigration enforcement system that will protect up to five million undocumented immigrants from the threat of deportation and provide many of them with work permits, according to administration officials who have direct knowledge of the plan.

Asserting his authority as president to enforce the nation’s laws with discretion, Mr. Obama intends to order changes that will significantly refocus the activities of the government’s 12,000 immigration agents. One key piece of the order, officials said, will allow many parents of children who are American citizens or legal residents to obtain legal work documents and no longer worry about being discovered, separated from their families and sent away.

That part of Mr. Obama’s plan alone could affect as many as 3.3 million people who have been living in the United States illegally for at least five years, according to an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute, an immigration research organization in Washington. But the White House is also considering a stricter policy that would limit the benefits to people who have lived in the country for at least 10 years, or about 2.5 million people.

Extending protections to more undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children, and to their parents, could affect an additional one million or more if they are included in the final plan that the president announces.

Mr. Obama’s actions will also expand opportunities for immigrants who have high-tech skills, shift extra security resources to the nation’s southern border, revamp a controversial immigration enforcement program called Secure Communities, and provide clearer guidance to the agencies that enforce immigration laws about who should be a low priority for deportation, especially those with strong family ties and no serious criminal history.

A new enforcement memorandum, which will direct the actions of Border Patrol agents and judges at the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and other federal law enforcement and judicial agencies, will make clear that deportations should still proceed for convicted criminals, foreigners who pose national security risks and recent border crossers, officials said.

White House officials declined to comment publicly before a formal announcement by Mr. Obama, who will return from an eight-day trip to Asia on Sunday. Administration officials said details about the package of executive actions were still being finished and could change. An announcement could be pushed off until next month but will not be delayed into next year, officials said.

“Before the end of the year, we’re going to take whatever lawful actions that I can take that I believe will improve the functioning of our immigration system,” Mr. Obama said during a news conference a day after last week’s midterm elections. “What I’m not going to do is just wait.”

The decision to move forward sets in motion a political confrontation between Mr. Obama and his Republican adversaries that is likely to affect budget negotiations and debate about Loretta E. Lynch, the president’s nominee to be attorney general, during the lame-duck session of Congress that began this week. It is certain to further enrage Republicans as they take control of both chambers of Congress early next year.

A group of Republicans — led by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, Senator Mike Lee of Utah and Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama — is already planning to thwart any executive action by the president on immigration. The senators are hoping to rally their fellow Republicans to oppose efforts to pass a budget next month unless it explicitly prohibits the president from enacting what they call “executive amnesty” for people in the country illegally.

“Our office stands ready to use any procedural means available to make sure the president can’t enact his illegal executive amnesty,” said Catherine Frazier, a spokeswoman for Mr. Cruz.

But the president and his top aides have concluded that acting unilaterally is in the interest of the country and the only way to increase political pressure on Republicans to eventually support a legislative overhaul that could put millions of illegal immigrants on a path to legal status and perhaps citizenship. Mr. Obama has told lawmakers privately and publicly that he will reverse his executive orders if they pass a comprehensive bill that he agrees to sign.

White House officials reject as overblown the dire warnings from some in Congress who predict that such a sweeping use of presidential power will undermine any possibility for cooperation in Washington with the newly empowered Republican majority.

“I think it will create a backlash in the country that could actually set the cause back and inflame our politics in a way that I don’t think will be conducive to solving the problem,” said Senator Angus King of Maine, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats and supports an immigration overhaul.

The question of when the president should make the announcement is still being discussed inside the West Wing, officials said. Announcing the actions quickly could give Mr. Cruz and others a specific target to attack, but it would also allow immigration advocates to defend it. Waiting until later in December could allow the budget to be approved before setting off a fight over immigration.

Although a Republican president could reverse Mr. Obama’s overhaul of the system after he leaves office in January 2017, the president’s action at least for now will remove the threat of deportation for millions of people in Latino and other immigrant communities. Immigration agents are to instead focus on gang members, narcotics traffickers and potential terrorists.

Officials said one of the primary considerations for the president has been to take actions that can withstand the legal challenges that they expect will come quickly from Republicans. A senior administration official said lawyers had been working for months to make sure the president’s proposal would be “legally unassailable” when he presented it.

Most of the major elements of the president’s plan are based on longstanding legal precedents that give the executive branch the right to exercise “prosecutorial discretion” in how it enforces the laws. That was the basis of a 2012 decision to protect from deportation the so-called Dreamers, who came to the United States as young children. The new announcement will be based on a similar legal theory, officials said.

The White House expects a chorus of outside legal experts to back it up once Mr. Obama makes the plan official. In several “listening sessions” at the White House over the last year, immigration activists came armed with legal briefs, and White House officials believe those arguments will quickly form the basis of the public defense of his actions.

Many pro-immigration groups and advocates — as well as the Hispanic voters who could be crucial for Democrats’ hopes of winning the White House in 2016 — are expecting bold action, having grown increasingly frustrated after watching a sweeping bipartisan immigration bill fall prey to a gridlocked Congress last year.

“This is his last chance to make good on his promise to fix the system,” said Kevin Appleby, the director of migration policy at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. “If he delays again, the immigration activists would — just politically speaking — jump the White House fence.”

Some groups, like the United We Dream network, the largest organization of young undocumented immigrants, are preparing to deploy teams to early 2016 states like Iowa and New Hampshire to hold presidential candidates accountable and press for more action.

“From our perspective, the president has the power, the precedent and the priority for action on his side,” said Clarissa Martínez-De-Castro, deputy vice president of NCLR, also known as the National Council of La Raza. The opportunity “to go big and bold is what will allow the country to derive the biggest benefit on both the economic side and the national security side.”

President’s Executive Actions on Immigration Should Spur Congressional Action



 

For Immediate Release


President’s Executive Actions on Immigration Should Spur Congressional Action 

November 6, 2014

Washington D.C. – From the perspective of immigration reformers, Tuesday’s election is unlikely to change the gridlock that has stymied immigration reform for more than 15 years. Since at least 1998, there has been bipartisan agreement that our current immigration system is broken and that Congress must act to fix it. Since then, regardless of who has controlled Congress or the White House, the country has been waiting for the political stars to align in such a way as to make immigration reform a reality. In the meantime, families have been torn apart and our economy has been denied a powerful tool for innovation and entrepreneurship. The reason is clear. Too few of America’s lawmakers have the courage to lead on immigration and too many are content to play politics with this critical issue.

Despite the threat (and likelihood) of political tantrums from those who have consistently blocked reform, the most likely catalyst for change on immigration at this point is bold, decisive leadership by the President of the United States, who re-affirmed yesterday that he would “take whatever lawful actions I can take” by the end of the year.

President Obama can and must show the way forward by using the tools at his disposal to fix as much of our broken immigration system as he can, and to protect millions of unauthorized immigrants who have built their lives here and contribute to our society and economy, but have no means of attaining legal status under our outdated immigration system.

In taking executive action on immigration, President Obama would be following in the footsteps of every U.S. president since 1956. Since Dwight D. Eisenhower, every president has granted temporary immigration relief to one or more groups in need of assistance. There are at least 39 such examples, including the family fairness policy of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, which protected the spouses and children of unauthorized immigrants who qualified for legal status under the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). Soon after the implementation of family fairness, Congress updated the law to keep families together.

If the elected House and Senate leaders who have been handed the gavel in 2015 are serious about breaking the 15-year log jam on immigration, then they won’t let the excuse of executive action stand in their way. There is no action that the President can take that will trump the need and opportunity for lasting, permanent reforms to our broken immigration system. After more than 15 years, the nation has waited long enough. It is time for courage and leadership. It is time to act.

For additional resources, visit our resource page on Executive Action and Prosecutorial Discretion.

Obama has big post-election plans on immigration. Here's what you need to know



Updated by Dara Lind on October 30, 2014, 1:30 p.m. ET @DLind  dara@vox.com

With the 2014 midterm elections over, the Obama administration is turning to its big post-election agenda item: immigration relief.

President Obama has promised that he's going to take executive action on immigrationbefore the end of 2014; on November 4th, when press secretary Josh Earnest got asked about the president's agenda, immigration action was the first (and only) priority that got mentioned. Rumor has it that the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice are submitting their recommendations for what exactly the president should do by early November.

With Republicans having won the Senate, some people are skeptical that Obama's really going to follow through on major unilateral action. But the administration has promised, explicitly, to do just that.

Obama's anticipated plan is expected to include relief from deportation for millions of immigrants. The new program might build on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program from 2012, which allowed young immigrants who would have benefited from the DREAM Act to apply for two years of protection from deportation, and for work permits. Or it might take a slightly different form, but one that would still allow some unauthorized immigrants to be protected from deportation, and be allowed to work, without officially giving them legal status.

Nothing's known for sure about what the new immigration program would do — after all, the White House hasn't made a final decision yet. And it's always possible that they'll back away entirely, though it would probably upset Latino voters if they did. But here's what we know they're considering, and what looks likely to make it into the final package.

 

How many people could be covered?

Estimates tend to be in the mid to low millions.
Legally speaking,the president could extend deferred action to all 11 million unauthorized immigrants. That would be unprecedented. If he wanted to follow precedent slightly more closely, he could protect all of the 8 million or so unauthorized immigrants who would qualify for legal status under the immigration reform bill the Senate passed last year — just like he used DACA to protect would-be DREAM Act beneficiaries after the DREAM Act failed.
But most policymakers are expecting the plan to help a smaller subset of immigrants. Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL), the biggest Congressional advocate for executive action on immigration, has said that "three, four, maybe even five million" immigrants could be protected if and when President Obama acts.
Immigration activists say that the Department of Homeland Security's recommendations to the White House might protect fewer people than that — one advocate told Buzzfeed that the number included would be in the "low seven figures," while another said "three million."
It all depends on who exactly is included in the new program, which no one knows for sure at this point.

 
Which types of immigrants could be covered?

The president's ability to protect unauthorized immigrants from deportation is supposed to be limited to particularly worthy cases. When the Obama administration instituted the DACA program in 2012, they justified it by saying that they were limiting the program to a particular group of immigrants — and then using the application process to evaluate individual cases.

Similarly, for this round of immigration relief, the administration will probably carve out one or more groups of unauthorized immigrants who will be eligible to apply, and then set an additional set of criteria that individuals in those groups will have to meet to get their applications approved. Here are some possible groups that could be eligible under a new program:

Unauthorized immigrants who are married to US citizens or green-card holders. There are 1.5 million unauthorized immigrants in the US whose spouses have US citizenship, or at least a green card. These immigrants should be eligible for legal status themselves, but are blocked by rules that make it extremely difficult to get legal status in the US if you've ever been unauthorized — especially if you're not willing to risk leaving the US in the hopes that you might get to come back.

Unauthorized immigrants whose children are US citizens. There are 3.8 million unauthorized immigrants with US-citizen children (in most cases because their kids were born in the US). These immigrants can't get legal status until their children turn 21 — and would then have to deal with the same rules that make it so tough for unauthorized immigrants in the US to get legal status.

Other unauthorized immigrants with children. The Obama administration has said that immigration enforcement shouldn't split up families, and advocates believe that the only way to guarantee that is to protect parents from deportation. There are 900,000 unauthorized immigrants whose children are not citizens, but are under 18. The administration could also protect the parents of DACA recipients, which could cover several hundred thousand more unauthorized immigrants. According to Buzzfeed, advocates aren't sure whether the Department of Homeland Security is including parents of DACA recipients in its recommendations for relief.

Farmworkers. Historically, legalizing unauthorized farmworkers has been more popular with Congress than legalizing other unauthorized workers — a bill called "AgJOBS," to grant legal status to farmworkers, has been floating around Congress as long as the DREAM Act. In an op-ed published in Univision, Democratic members of Congress, including Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, argued that Obama "could recognize that it is 'essential for agriculture' that farmworkers who toil in our fields do so without fear" as part of his executive action.

 
What other requirements would an immigrant have to meet?

Immigrants won't automatically qualify for legal status if they fit one of these categories. There are other criteria to consider as well. To qualify for DACA, for example, an immigrant has to meet a set of criteria regarding age, education, criminal record, and time in the United States. Not all of those will matter for other groups of immigrants (age requirements will likely be dropped) but others will.

In particular, the administration is expected to require applicants to have been in the US for a certain number of years before they're eligible for relief. The DACA program required immigrants to have been in the US since at least 2007 — five years before the program went into effect. The new policy similarly could say that immigrants have to have lived in the US for at least five years — or it could say they have to have lived in the US for at least ten years, or some other number.

Advocates are very worried that if the administration limits the program to immigrants who have lived in the US since 2004, will disqualify millions of people, enough to seriously blunt the impact of the program. While most unauthorized immigrants have lived in the US for over a decade, some are newer arrivals — or have left the US and returned at some point in the last ten years. Furthermore, it's going to be extremely hard for immigrants to prove when they entered the country without papers.
 
See the entire article here.