HR6565-119

What This Bill Does

The Reuniting Families Act is a broad immigration-family-unity package. It recaptures unused family-sponsored and employment-based immigrant visas from prior fiscal years, adds unused annual numbers to future worldwide levels, and treats certain long-waiting approved petition beneficiaries as outside the numerical limits. It reclassifies spouses, permanent partners, and minor children of lawful permanent residents as immediate relatives, raises family-preference allocations, changes age-out and survivor rules, and creates relief for orphans, widows, and widowers. It revises inadmissibility rules for previously removed applicants, exempts certain Filipino veterans family members from immigrant-visa limits, protects fiancée children from aging out, gives work authorization to spouses and children over age 16 in E, H, L, and O status, extends section 245(i) adjustment eligibility, expands cancellation of removal by lowering the continuous-presence period to 7 years and adding hardship to the applicant, and bars removal while certain petitions or applications are pending. It defines permanent partners and permanent partnerships across immigration law, extends derivative and nonimmigrant treatment to permanent partners, applies fraud penalties to sham permanent partnerships, provides diversity visas for people blocked by Muslim and African bans, and prioritizes refugee family reunification through expanded Priority 3 and derivative-refugee processing.

Who Benefits and How

Immigrant families benefit because spouses, permanent partners, children, widows, widowers, orphans, refugees, diversity-visa selectees, and long-waiting petition beneficiaries gain faster or more stable routes to admission, adjustment, work authorization, or protection from removal. Lawful permanent residents benefit because their immediate family members are treated more like families of United States citizens. Employers benefit when E, H, L, and O dependent family members over age 16 can work. Refugees benefit from family-reunification priorities regardless of nationality. Filipino veterans families benefit from a dedicated immigrant-visa exemption.

Who Bears the Burden and How

USCIS officers, State Department consular staff, immigration judges, and DHS removal officials must implement more visa numbers, new immediate-relative categories, survivor rules, permanent-partner definitions, work authorization, adjustment eligibility, cancellation standards, pending-application removal bars, diversity-visa restoration, and refugee family procedures. Federal immigration agencies must update forms, guidance, systems, and adjudicator training. Opponents of expanded immigration and employers relying on slower labor-market entry may object to larger family and employment pathways. Federal taxpayers bear administrative costs from higher adjudication and resettlement workload.

Key Provisions

• Adds unused family-sponsored and employment-based immigrant visas from prior fiscal years back into future visa levels.
• Expands immediate-relative treatment for lawful-permanent-resident spouses, permanent partners, and minor children.
• Provides survivor, orphan, widow, widower, Filipino veteran, fiancée child, work-authorization, adjustment, cancellation, and pending-application removal protections.
• Amends immigration law to define permanent partners and apply benefits plus fraud penalties to permanent partnerships.
• Restores diversity-visa access for people affected by Muslim and African bans.
• Requires refugee processing rules that prioritize family reunification and expand Priority 3 plus derivative-refugee access.