California’s Congressional Democrats Take Another Shot at Expanding Path to Green Card

As the Trump administration ramps up immigration arrests and deportations, California Democrats are renewing an effort to expand a path to permanent residency for millions of immigrants — a push that’s likely to face an uphill battle in the Republican-controlled Congress.

Democrats simultaneously announced bills in both houses of Congress on Friday that would allow people who have lived in the U.S. continuously for the past seven years to apply for a green card under the registry provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

California Sen. Alex Padilla, who announced the Senate version of the legislation, said the move was meant to push back against increasing immigration enforcement under President Trump.

“When a father of three U.S. Marines is violently beaten and detained, when U.S. citizens are arrested for no other offense than the color of their skin, when a farmworker falls to their death during an ICE raid, we know it’s gone too far,” Padilla said from Los Angeles, where thousands of National Guard members and U.S. Marines were deployed in recent months amid mass protests over immigration raids.

The Immigration and Nationality Act’s registry provision was most recently updated in 1986 under the Reagan administration and applied to immigrants who entered the U.S. by the end of 1971.

Under the Democrats’ proposed changes, that fixed cutoff date would be replaced with the seven-year residency requirement. It could apply to an estimated 8 million immigrants who have no criminal record and are not eligible for citizenship under the current law.

Padilla and other members of Congress emphasized that the law has been updated several times with bipartisan support since it was first passed in 1929.

With Republicans in control of both houses of Congress, their support will be necessary to update the law again.

“Our new bill is simple and common sense, and it can help fix our broken immigration system in the same kind of way that Republican President Ronald Reagan did many years ago,” Padilla said. “No new bureaucracy, no new agency, just a simple date change to existing law.”

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, whose district includes part of Santa Clara County, announced the House version of the bill.

Lofgren and Padilla unsuccessfully tried to pass similar legislation in 2022 and 2023, but both legislators expressed optimism that shifting public opinion on the scale of recent deportation efforts could bring some Republicans to their side.

“Many of my Republican colleagues are hearing the same thing from their constituents that I’m hearing from mine,” Lofgren said. “They didn’t expect a bunch of masked, armed men to go in and arrest people who are contributing to the economy, who have been pillars of their communities. They’re not liking that, and this is one way to provide a remedy.”

When pressed on the likelihood of getting the bill passed, Padilla insisted that he believes now is the moment to try again.

“The whole country has seen the extreme cruelty brought upon by this administration and the polls have shown us what we’ve believed all along,” Padilla said. “The American people disagree with what’s happening. The American people believe in better treatment, respect and opportunities for legalization for immigrants.”

Maximiliano Garde, the supervising attorney for the San Francisco-based La Raza Community Resource Center, said the bill would be a huge boon to millions of immigrants who have been shut out of the process to legalization, but he doesn’t think it will pass.

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Garde said. “This administration has a lot of enmity toward not just Latinos but specifically Mexicans. … And with changing the registry, the main beneficiaries are going to be Latinos and especially Mexicans.”

Garde added that he thinks it’s unlikely that Republican members of Congress will break away from Trump if he chooses to oppose the bill.

“I don’t see them really having the backbone to resist the pushback that they’re going to get from the White House,” Garde said.

But he still believes there is a benefit of introducing the legislation, even if it is doomed to fail.

“It shows that the administration is lying,” he said. “They’re not interested in helping the honest, hardworking people that have been in this country for decades. … It’s not just that that’s motivating them, it’s also just some enmity toward immigrants in general.”

Trump has suggested that he supports temporary visas for immigrants in industries like agriculture, but Padilla also expressed doubt that the president is interested in long-term paths to legalization.

“Let’s be clear about what the goals of this administration have been,” Padilla said. “They don’t want to fix a broken immigration system. Have they offered any plans or solutions? They want to exploit immigrants to justify their power grabs.”