The Reuniting Families Act significantly expands family-based immigration pathways by increasing annual visa allocations for family-sponsored immigrants to 480,000 plus recaptured visas from previous years, reclassifying spouses and minor children of permanent residents as "immediate relatives" exempt from numerical caps, and raising country-specific visa limits from 7 percent to 20 percent to allow broader geographic distribution. The bill creates new eligibility for widows, widowers, and orphans whose relatives died; introduces "permanent partnership" as a new immigration category extending spousal benefits to committed same-sex and opposite-sex couples who cannot legally marry; and eliminates lengthy re-entry bars for previously removed immigrants, replacing them with shorter timeframes ranging from 5 to 20 years. Additionally, the bill increases diversity visas from 55,000 to 80,000 annually, restores visas lost due to the 2017-2022 travel bans and COVID-19 delays, streamlines refugee family reunification by allowing simultaneous pursuit of both refugee and immigrant visa applications, and requires background check completion and case decisions within one year, directly benefiting millions of families seeking to reunify with relatives in the United States.
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