Federal Court Rejects Biden’s ‘Parole In Place’ For Illegal Aliens

By Simon Hankinson, The Daily Signal | November 12, 2024

Two days after the election, a federal court in Texas ruled against President Joe Biden’s latest unauthorized scheme to subvert immigration law: “parole in place” for illegal aliens who are the spouses of U.S. citizens.

In a 73-page decision, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas upheld a challenge by 16 states to the Department of Homeland Security’s attempt to create the parole program by administrative rule. 

Introduced by Biden back in June, “parole in place” for spouses was built on a legal house of cards, as my BorderLine column explained at the time.  In promulgating the order, Biden’s government created another administrative runaround to dodge the lawful visa process.

Congress mandated a three-year bar from returning to the U.S. for those who have been here illegally between six to 12 months, and a 10-year bar for those present for more than a year.

But illegal aliens who are spouses of American citizens may apply for a waiver to these bars from a DHS subagency, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services; many of them are approved every year.

Parole in place was a backdoor amnesty for half a million or more aliens living illegally in the United States. It would have treated an alien who is paroled the same as someone who was admitted legally, thus eliminating the three- and 10-year bars to return.

Once paroled, roughly a half-million alien spouses could have applied for green cards and later become U.S. citizens. This would have encouraged yet more illegal immigration, fraud, and access to already overextended federal and state benefits.

The program was another example of Biden’s taking a legal loophole created by the Obama administration and ramming a figurative truck through it. “Parole in place” would have allowed foreign nationals living here illegally to jump ahead of millions who are patiently waiting legally in line in their home countries to join family or get jobs in America.

Parole in place, which also would have allowed spouses of U.S. citizens to escape any accountability for entering or staying in the U.S. illegally, was only the latest in Biden’s four-year “parole-a-palooza.” He has invented entirely new programs to allow millions of foreign nationals to arrive in the U.S. despite having no visa and with no credible background checks.

Biden has used parole to create “McVisa” programs benefiting Afghans, then Ukrainians, and then Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans.

Then the Biden-Harris administration perverted a phone application, CBP One, that was meant to facilitate lawful travel and transportation of goods at our busy borders. The administration coopted CBP One as an informal workaround of the official U.S. Refugee Admissions Policy, allowing 1,400 individuals a day to schedule appointments at land ports of entry.

Congress didn’t pass legislation allowing Biden to do this, other than a limited power first granted in 1952 and later amended to prevent exactly this kind of abuse. Unfortunately, Congress never set numerical limits on parole, which is a mistake lawmakers should rectify.

Currently, Biden’s program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans allows a total of 30,000 a month from these four countries to preschedule their illegal entry to the U.S. at ports of entry and interior airports, where nearly all are paroled into the country. Added to that are the 1,400 more using CBP One.

Remember that President Barack Obama’s homeland security secretary, Jeh Johnson, called 1,000 illegal arrivals in a single 24 hours “a bad day” and 4,000 a day a “crisis.”

Biden’s parole programs baked in a daily “crisis” automatically. On top of those already obscene numbers were those who got away entirely and entered the U.S. without any official inspection, as well as millions more who simply were caught and released at the border, theoretically into the legal limbo of immigration court proceedings that will take many years.

There are no indications the Biden-Harris administration will stop any of the parole programs before the new Trump-Vance administration begins Jan. 20.

But the federal appeals court’s ruling to block parole in place may signal the high-water mark of parole abuse, and a return to the rule of law in immigration matters.

Simon Hankinson is a senior research fellow in the Border Security and Immigration Center at The Heritage Foundation.

Original article link