Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has proposed a plan through which undocumented immigrants who have been deported from the U.S. can be brought back if they have close relatives living in the country. Sanders proposed the plan through an immigration policy that he released earlier this week.
Sanders based his proposal on a Department of Homeland Security policy that allows the DHS to grant "parole-in-place" status to some illegal immigrants "for urgent humanitarian reasons," which allows them to remain in the United States while applications are being considered, reported Newsmax.
Sanders wants to keep families together at all costs, which prompted him to draft the proposal. "The United States must do the right thing and guarantee the swiftest possible reunification of these broken families," Sanders' immigration plan reads, according to Conservative Post.
"This would certainly push the envelope. It's a step we haven't seen taken," said Marc Rosenblum of the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank in Washington, according to USA Today.
Though the Sanders campaign has not estimated the number of people who could be returned to the country under the plan, a report from the Human Rights Watch found that, in 2011 and 2012, more than 100,000 parents of U.S. citizens were deported from the border region alone.
