President Joe Biden’s border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas, is using the little-known “parole” side door in border law to bring legally deported migrants back for televised reunions with their left-behind, asylum-seeking children.
“Our highest priority is to reunite these families … It’s not about righting the wrong of the past, it’s about restoring the conscience of our government,” Mayorkas said he touted his return of four deported migrants in a May 4 appearance on MSNBC.
The parole side-door “is a very limited authority that Congress has given for exceptional situations,” responded Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge who now works with the Center for Immigration Studies. The parole door “is very narrowly written [for small numbers of people], but the administration has blown right past the limitations,” he said.
Mayorkas is using parole power to create at least 1,000 reunifications that will serve as “a political prop to advance a [pro-migraton] narrative” about family separations, Andrew said.
That narrative, he said, will help them drop a regulatory bomb on the nation’s borders, so opening up Americans’ homeland to millions of foreigners who will demand asylum and the right to live in the United States because of commonplace crime and spousal abuse.
The massive migration crisis created by President Joe Biden — and the resulting economic losses to working Americans — is damaging Biden’s poll ratings. But multiple polls show that the damage is being reduced by the administration’s media-magnified, female-targeted narrative about Biden’s empathy for separated children and deported parents.
The first set of four parole returns got very sympathetic treatment from reporters on established media channels:
“All this is intentional,” said Rosemary Jenks, policy director at NumbersUSA.The deported migrants, she said they “have already gone through the legal process [and] been denied, and yet we’re bringing them back at our expense.” DHS officials are “going to publicize it as much as possible because they’re proud of it,” she said.
Arthur said:
When people hear family separation, they think of the narrative that children are being snatched from their parents’ arms. But this [first example] isn’t that — this is a woman who apparently handed her [15-year-old] child over to [to the federal government] so the kid could stay when she was legally deported.
The details of that unification event were provided by Kevin Sieff, a reporter with the Washington Post:
SAN DIEGO — Three years, seven months and four days after U.S. immigration agents separated her from her child, Sandra Ortíz was walking through the San Ysidro border crossing Tuesday when she spotted Bryan Chávez.
“My son!” she cried. “I missed you so much!”
They held each other quietly in the center of the pedestrian plaza, the frenzy of the border a blur around them.
The article was headlined “Massive family reunification effort starts with a mother and son at the border,” and it featured several well-lit photos of the deported mother and son, crying, complete with flowers and colorful balloons.
To get good video, Mayorkas’s allies decided that Ortiz would go through the same border station from where she was formally deported and played up the possibility of an emotional breakdown:
… it was with some reservation that the lawyers working on their case told Ortíz that the process would involve her returning to the same border crossing where she had been separated from her son.
“Hopefully it’s not a triggering event,” said Carol Anne Donohoe, Ortíz’s attorney, of the law firm Al Otro Lado.
The article included additional awkward details: The mother brought her 15-year-old son to the border seeking asylum, even though she had no legal grounds for asylum. She was properly deported after being allowed to use the U.S. legal system, and her son was allowed to stay to make his own plea for asylum.
Once the child stayed in the United States, he kept in contact with his mother via cellphone video. The article noted that the boy lived with her other son and daughter were had already migrated into the United States, but did not provide any evidence that they were living legally in the United States.
The boy was aided by a network of lawyers at the El Otra Lado law firm.
The firm gets millions in donations from unidentified donors, has received pro-migration funding from Mark Zuckerberg, and works with a pro-migration legal advocacy network funded by Brad Smith, the chairman of Microsoft. It meets migrants in Mexico to help guide them through the border’s legal complexities, and it helps migrants who are in the United States get welfare, healthcare, aid, and legal recognition.
Migration is strongly supported by investors because it acts as an economic stimulus for their companies. Over time, legal and illegal migration spikes Wall Street values, shrinks wages, sidelines U.S. graduates, and boosts housing prices. It also and further skews job-creating investments towards the coastal states, reduces companies’ use of American-run labor-saving technologies, and cements billionaires’ control over the technology sector.
Mayorkas is using the staged reunifications to shame Americans into giving up control of their borders to the progressives who insist the United States is “a nation of immigrants,” not a nation of and for Americans and their children.
In his MSNBC appearance this week, Mayorkas again argued that Trump’s enforcement of the nation’s popular immigration laws was “cruel and inhumane” The sin, he argued, must be atoned for by offering aid and the big prize of U.S. residency to the lawfully deported migrants:
Some of these children are in their most formative years, their most formative stages of development, others are acutely vulnerable by reason of their incredible youth. Three years of age, at the time of separation, it’s extraordinarily cruel and inhumane, what occurred before us.
The TV-magnified offer of parole to deported migrants should encourage other migrants to ask for parole, Mayokas said:
[It] will hopefully reduce or eliminate the fear that other families have in coming forward and we will build confidence in the integrity of our effort and the sincerity of our commitment to reunite these families.
Mayorkas, who is responsible for protecting Americans from illegal migrants, praised the elite-backed pro-migration groups -such as El Otro Lado and KIND — that help migrants break into the United States:
These are heroic efforts by community-based organizations. These are heroic efforts by counsel who represent these separated families and try to vindicate their rights and bring healing to them. We’re privileged to work alongside them.
Mayorkas did not mention that Trump and his pro-American deputies followed the nation’s laws, excluded economic migrants, reduced the volume and trauma of migration, and also helped to raise the wages and the political power of working Americans.
But Mayorkas repeatedly claims that the United States is a “nation of immigrants” and recently tweeted that immigrants — not Americans– are the “backbone” of the U.S. economy.
In an interview posted May 6 with one of the most pro-migration reporters, Jacob Soboroff at NBC, Mayorkas said that officials “are very much focused on providing stability [to the paroled families, but] it is not something that we can guarantee at this point in time.”
But Mayorkas is using his border theater to set the stage for a much bigger action, says Arthur.
“From everything that we’re being told, we can have sympathy for [Ortiz’s] situation, but there’s really nothing [in law] that allows her into the United States … other than the fact that they can parole anybody that they want,” he said.
The woman lost her plea for asylum because the law provides protection to people fleeing government or religious persecution, and it excludes economic migrants or victims of non-political crime. The rules protect Americans from waves of low-wage migrants that would take jobs, cut wages, and boost housing prices.
But the asylum law also includes a limited, catch-all protection for members of a damaged “particular social group.”
Mayorkas is quietly rewriting the asylum regulations so that people who suffered from non-political crime or who get abused by their spouses can get defined as a “particular social group.”
“This is the bomb,” said Arthur:
What they’re going to say is that if you’ve been threatened by gangs, you’re a member of a “Particular Social Group” that is eligible for asylum and they’re gonna say if you’ve been subject to domestic violence, you’re a member of a particular social group too.
Officials have been writing the draft regulation for some time and have triggered a backroom lobbying campaign by many groups to include their favored clients under the expanded definitions of “particular social group.”
For example, some activists are arguing that Central Americans with African ancestry face racial discrimination in Central America, and so should be allowed to apply for asylum.”
Mayorkas is also allowing many migrants to enter the United States by separating families. For example, he is allowing adults to repeatedly try to sneak across the border, he is letting all children and teens enter through the “Unaccompanied Alien Children,” door, and he is letting “vulnerable” migrants and fractured families through the asylum door, despite the coronavirus crisis. This migration-by-separation policy is extracting many Central American migrants from their countries for use in the U.S. economy as extra consumers, workers, and renters.
For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.
This opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, intra-Democratic, rational, and recognizes the solidarity Americans owe to each other.
The voter opposition to elite-backed economic migration coexists with support for legal immigrants and some sympathy for illegal migrants. But only a minority of Americans — mostly leftists — embrace the many skewed polls and articles pushing the 1950’s corporate “Nation of Immigrants” claim.
The deep public opposition to labor migration is built on the widespread recognition that legal and illegal migration moves money away from most Americans’ pocketbooks and families.
Migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to investors, from technology to stoop labor, from red states to blue states, and from the central states to the coastal states such as New York.