Reagan-Bush Family Fairness: A Chronological History
Today, the American Immigration Council releases
Reagan-Bush Family Fairness: A Chronological History
. From 1987 to 1990, Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, Sr. used
their executive authority to protect from deportation a group that Congress
left out of its 1986 immigration reform legislation—the spouses
and children of individuals who were in the process of legalizing. These
“Family Fairness” actions were taken to avoid separating families
in which one spouse or parent was eligible for legalization, but the other
spouse or children living in the United States were not—and thus
could be deported, even though they would one day be eligible for legal
status when the spouse or parent legalized. Publicly available estimates
at the time were that “Family Fairness” could cover as many
as 1.5 million family members, which was approximately 40 percent of the
then-unauthorized population. After Reagan and Bush acted, Congress later
protected the family members.
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