by Jonathan van Harmelen
In 2002, Doctor Paul Harmatz, a researcher at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital, invited Maria Isabel Bueso, a 7-year-old girl from Guatemala, to come to the United States to partake in clinical trials for a new medication. Bueso, who lives with Maroteaux-Lamy Syndrome, a rare genetic disease, was not expected to live beyond her teens. Bueso’s participation in several treatment programs supported by Dr. Harmatz’s research not only helped her live but resulted in Food and Drug Administration approval of several drugs used to treat her condition. Since arriving in the U.S., Bueso has become a noted advocate for people with rare diseases and a proponent for medical research.
Yet in August 2019, she faced deportation when the Trump administration eliminated a deferred action program that allowed immigrants to avoid deportation while undergoing lifesaving medical treatment. Although U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services, or USCIS, reversed the decision in the wake of strong backlash, Bueso and her parents’ future in the U.S. remained uncertain for several years.
However, in February 2021, Representative Mark DeSaulnier offered Bueso a chance to save her and her family from deportation by authoring a private bill. After spending a year going through committee hearings, Bueso and her parents received permanent residence when President Biden signed H.R. 785.
It has been almost 40 years since Congress provided any legislative reform for the current immigration system. Yet instead of crafting legislation to reform the existing system, Republicans have found it easier to single out immigrants as the target of policing schemes.
Yet one tool of the American legal system—one where Congress can take action—regarding specific immigrant cases is private bills, which grant exemptions from existing immigration laws.
A private bill is defined by Congress as a bill that provides benefits to specified individuals (including corporate bodies). Private bills, which are handled by the House and Senate Judiciary Committee, are specifically used when individuals request relief for certain policies when administrative or legal remedies are exhausted. Historically, they have been used in a range of cases, such as granting medals to soldiers whose heroic deeds went previously unnoticed. According to the website of the U.S. Congress, half of all legislation enacted by Congress since 1789 has been private bills.
Historically, the majority of private bills passed are those pertaining to immigration cases where immigrants facing unusual circumstances, such as fleeing civil wars or, in Bueso’s case, requesting medical treatment in the U.S., receive consideration from lawmakers to bypass existing restrictions. Often, cases are transmitted to members of the House or Senate Judiciary Committee for consideration.
In the years before the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which eliminated immigration bans, members of Congress submitted private bills on behalf of immigrants who were denied the ability to naturalize by discriminatory immigration laws. For example, Representative Sidney Yates of Illinois authored several private bills for Japanese nationals whose spouses worked with the U.S. Army of Occupation after World War II but who were barred from immigrating under the provisions of the Immigration Act of 1924. During the Cold War, Congress passed dozens of private bills, along with public legislation, for refugees escaping Communist countries who faced deportation. Famous refugee cases include Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng, who received residency thanks to a private bill introduced by then–Michigan Senator Spencer Abraham and signed by President Bill Clinton in 2000.
Although many private bills are enacted for individuals seeking asylum from violence, they have also been used as a loophole for elites hoping to bypass immigration laws. One example was Jack Kent Cooke, a Canadian American businessman who at one point owned the Washington Commanders, the Los Angeles Lakers, and the Toronto Maple Leafs. Cooke, who failed to secure a business deal for a private television station in Canada, lobbied Representative Francis Walter in 1960 to submit a private bill to bypass the five-year wait period for naturalization.
The Los Angeles Times asserted that private bills more often served as a pipeline for elites seeking citizenship, such as Michael Wilding, the son of actor Elizabeth Taylor, who secured citizenship from one despite having a conviction for growing marijuana. Perhaps the most famous depiction of private bills is at the beginning of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. During his daughter’s wedding, Don Vito Corleone, meeting with his baker, arranges to have a congressman on his payroll submit a private bill for an Italian refugee, Enzo, who is dating his daughter. In more recent years, private bills have been used explicitly for refugees rather than the wealthy.
That doesn’t mean the use of private bills is getting more common. A 2024 study on private bills by the National Immigration Project revealed that the number of private bills has declined drastically. In 1970s, Congress enacted over 700 private bills. Since 1997, Congress has only enacted 51 private bills out of thousands of proposals, of which only 37 pertained to immigration. In the past five years, Congress reports only three private bills authored for immigrants like Bueso. Another case was that of Arpita Kurdekar, who successfully petitioned Representative Ann Kuster to submit a private bill on behalf of her and her family. Kurdekar, an Indian immigrant, was working for the New Hampshire Department of Transportation when a tree fell on her, leaving her paralyzed with a spinal cord injury.
Why are so few private bills successful? Part of this is inactivity in Congress. Although members of both parties submit private bills for immigration relief, the limited action taken by Congress in the Trump era means fewer bills are passed.
Part of this is also due to changing policies regarding private bills and deportations. In 2017, ICE director Thomas Homan advised then–Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley that ICE viewed private bills as a threat to the agency’s deportation policies and would only grant a stay of removal if Congress provided written consent—even if a private bill was in deliberation. The Congressional Research Service reported that ICE reverted to previous policies during the Biden administration.
Additionally, the existence of a private bill for an immigrant does not guarantee ICE would refrain from detaining the beneficiary. Hillel Smith of the Congressional Research Service advised that Congress should update its existing protocols regarding private bills to ensure that “aliens seeking to benefit from such legislation receive prompt consideration by the agency of their requests to remain in the United States during that process.”
So, do private bills still hold up at a time when the Trump administration continues to overhaul immigration policies through executive orders? In some cases, the answer is yes.
During the first Trump administration, Democratic members of Congress submitted private bills to counter the increase of ICE deportations and raise awareness of specific cases. In March 2018, Representative Bill Brady of Pennsylvania submitted several private bills for an undocumented family in the Philadelphia area. Carmela Apolonio Hernandez and her four children fled Guerrero, Mexico, after traffickers killed several of her family members, and applied for asylum at San Diego. When immigration officials denied her claim, she moved her family to Philadelphia, where they were welcomed by the Church of the Advocate in North Philadelphia.
Upon hearing Hernandez’s story, Brady submitted a private bill—and discovered that it was a vehicle that allowed his conscience to speak loudly in the face of injustice. As Brady told Philadelphia NPR affiliate WHYY: “If I found out that they got deported, and a month or two from now I found out some harm came to them, and I didn’t do anything, that’s not a good feeling.” Brady acknowledged in his remarks on the Hernandez case that while private bills have little chance of passing Congress, they nonetheless sent a message to immigration officials about specific cases.
Although immigration policies are constantly changing, the National Immigration Project still encourages immigrants and their legal counsel to petition their congressional representatives for private bills. While this option can often take years, it can allow immigrants to gain residency when other alternatives to citizenship have failed. (The current criteria for private bills can be found on the House Judiciary Committee’s website.)
Private bills offer immigrant advocates and members of Congress a tool to respond to Trump’s destructive immigration policies. The current deportation scheme harkens back to the infamous Mexican Repatriations of the 1930s—when local law enforcement and the Border Patrol unjustly deported thousands of Mexican Americans, including their American-born children, to Mexico amid the economic strife of the Great Depression. But Trump’s plan does a double injustice by ushering in a new era of xenophobic immigration policies. Already we are witnessing the creation of an overmilitarized Border Patrol to police immigrants and a network of prisons that would cost taxpayers billions of dollars.
Such a deportation scheme, if completed, would cause unprecedented economic consequences. In places like California’s Central Valley, where a quarter of the nation’s foodstuff originates, farmers forewarned of rising prices due to labor shortages caused by immigration raids. In Kern County, farm managers have noted that Border Patrol agents have targeted farms that employ undocumented workers, leading the ACLU and the United Farmworkers to file lawsuits against the Department of Homeland Security.
The American Immigration Council reported last October that mass deportations would reduce the U.S. gross domestic product by 4.2 to 6.8 percent. The same report stated that 14 percent of American construction industry workers are undocumented. Perhaps the greatest cost to Americans will come in the form of tax increases; proposed raids to deport one million undocumented immigrants would require $88 billion in government funds—the equivalent of four times NASA’s annual budget.
For undocumented immigrants and their families, there are several organizations that provide legal counsel and guidance for engaging with ICE officials. Websites such as Informed Immigrant provide a step-by-step guide on how to respond to ICE raids. The Immigration Defense Project provides legal counsel and advice to immigrants on how to respond to immigrant officials. The National Immigration Law Center also offers a fact sheet on what you and your family can do if approached by immigration officials. As the ACLU reminds us, everyone, regardless of citizenship status, is guaranteed protection against racial discrimination and entitled to the rights of a fair trial by the Constitution.
Immigrant advocates should lobby members of Congress to pursue the enactment of private bills with greater alacrity. While they do not resolve the mass detention of immigrants by the Trump administration, they offer recourse for immigrants facing extraordinary circumstances. They also might help the overall anti-immigrant status quo by providing the public with compelling stories that might capture the imagination and cast the opportunity of immigration in a more favorable light.
Private bills will not fix the immigration system, nor will they address the suffering created by mass deportations. But they do offer immigrants hoping to remain in the U.S. one of many legal alternatives. And they give those with the courage to speak on behalf of this vulnerable population an opportunity to be heard.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/a-secret-weapon-to-fight-mass-deportation/ar-AA1ArxUw
