The Citizenship for Essential Workers Act is expected to be in President Biden’s infrastructure improvement plan.
Although it is likely to go through changes prior to passage, the Citizenship for Essential Workers Act would provide an immediate path to legal permanent residence for more than 5 million undocumented essential workers who work in the following fields.
- Health care
- Agriculture
- Construction
- Emergency response
- Sanitation
- Food
- Restaurants
- Hotels and hospitality
- Meat, fish, and poultry processing
- Domestic work
- Childcare
- Disaster recovery
- Home health and residential care
- Manufacturing
- Warehousing
- Transportation and logistics
- Janitorial
- Laundry services
- Any other worker deemed essential by the Department of Homeland Security or state or local government.
The Citizenship for Essential Workers Act will also include undocumented workers who worked in essential industries but lost employment due to COVID-19, including leaving the job due to unsafe working conditions, as well as undocumented relatives of an essential worker who died from COVID-19.
The Citizenship for Essential Workers Act also aims to preserve family unity by repealing the threeand ten-year bars for re-entry into the United States.
What you can do now to prepare.
In all adjustment of status to permanent residence applications there are basic documents and there is information that need to be gathered and prepared, such as:
- A copy of your birth certificate. If it is unavailable or does not exist, provide other acceptable evidence of birth such as church, school, or medical records, and proof of unavailability or nonexistence, if applicable;
- A copy of a government-issued identity document with photograph;
- Certified police and court records of all criminal charges, arrests, or convictions regardless of final disposition (if applicable)
- A copy of your marriage certificate to the principal applicant or proof of relationship as a child to the principal applicant. If you are a spouse of the principal applicant and your marriage certificate is unavailable or does not exist, evidence demonstrating its unavailability/nonexistence and other acceptable evidence of marriage (such as church records);
- Evidence you terminated your previous marriage (if applicable).
For more information on how to prepare these documents and to be alerted of updates, please consider subscribing to our Citizenship for Essential Workers Act email list.