Twenty-one GOP attorneys general will be in a Texas court on Thursday seeking a judicial shutdown of the administration’s giant parole loophole in the nation’s border laws.
President Joe Biden has already used the parole loophole to import at least 180,000 people from their distant homes in Haiti, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Venezuela, even though the loophole was designed for rare exceptions — such as a sick foreign sailor who was unable to apply for a routine visa.
His pro-migration border deputy, Alejandro Mayorkas, announced a target of importing 360,000 people each year via the four-country parole program, in addition to the annual inflow of one million legal immigrants. Most of the beneficiaries are job-seeking adults whose arrival will push down Americans’ wages and nudge up their housing costs.
“The odds, at least at the district and Circuit Court level, for success in this case are high,” said Andrew Author, a former immigration judge who now works with the Center for Immigration Studies. “The Biden administration plainly runs afoul of the restrictions that Congress imposed back in 1996,” he said, adding:
In 1996, Congress became alarmed at the abuses by multiple administrations of the parole authority since 1952. And consequently, the current language that appears on the parole statute — “urgent humanitarian reasons” and “significant public benefits” — was added to the parole provision to restrict the ability of administrations to bypass congressional limitations on immigration to the United States.
The Supreme Court has curbed states’ ability to sue the White House on immigration issues. However, said Arthur, it “left the door open for any [White House] program that grants benefits to those aliens — and the sole purpose of this program is to grant benefits to those aliens [especially] the ability to live and work in the United States.”
The program is also illegal because it releases migrants into the United States with no plans to return them once the two-year permit is over, he added.
The case is being heard by federal Judge Drew Tipton in Victoria, Texas. The plaintiffs include the GOP Attorneys General in Texas, Ohio, Florida, and many other states.
The lawsuit was filed in January and claimed:
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS or Department), under the false pretense of preventing aliens from unlawfully crossing the border between the ports of entry, has effectively created a new visa program— without the formalities of legislation from Congress—by announcing that it will permit up to 360,000 aliens annually from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to be “paroled” into the United States for two years or longer and with eligibility for employment authorization.
The Department’s parole power is exceptionally limited, having been curtailed by Congress multiple times, and can be used “only on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.”
Biden’s deputies are ideologically committed to the parole program. “Cubans, like my own family, who nearly 63 years ago fled the communist takeover, deserve the same opportunity to follow legal pathways to build a new life in the United States,” said an August 17 statement from border chief Mayorkas that announced an expansion of the parole program.
The migration loophole is also defended by multiple pro-migration groups. They are supported by FWD.us, an advocacy group for wealthy West Coast investors who profit from the arrival of more consumers, renters, and workers. They worry that the case against the four-country parole program will also knock down Mayorkas’s’other parole programs for Afghans, Ukrainians, and chain migrants.
The breadth of investors who founded and funded FWD.us was hidden from casual visitors to the group’s website in early 2021. But copies exist at the other sites.
The defenders say the program is good for the migrants, who otherwise would break the nation’s border laws.
RollCall.com reported on August 23:
“The parole program has served as a lifeline for the people who’ve been able to access it,” Michelle Lapointe, deputy legal director at the National Immigration Law Center, said. “It is, of course, not a substitute for a functional asylum system. But for individuals fleeing islands and instability in Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, it’s been critically important.”
Dylan Corbett, the founding executive director of the Hope Border Institute in El Paso, said while the parole program isn’t perfect, a ruling against it could increase pressure at the U.S.-Mexico border.
“It’s a good thing when there are legal channels for people to migrate,” Corbett said. “If these were struck down, all it’s going to do is intensify arrivals at the border for people who need to migrate. That will be the downstream effect of an injunction against these programs.”
So far, the greatest beneficiaries of the program are better-off, educated Haitians who can use the Mayorkas program to exit their chaotic, and increasingly leaderless, island home.
“Since the humanitarian parole effort was announced in January, at least 39,000 Haitians have been approved for the program, which they simply call ‘Biden,'” WoyMagazine.com reported in June. The article noted:
Haitians are flocking to leave their country during what one U.N. official has called a time of “unprecedented insecurity.” For several years, armed gangs in the Caribbean nation have fought for control of neighborhoods around Port-au-Prince, using methods like kidnapping and rape to cement their dominance. The violence has emerged during a time of political gridlock between U.S.-backed Prime Minister Ariel Henry and opponents who contest his legitimacy, a conflict extreme enough to prompt the U.N. to call for an international “specialized support force” to help quell it.
The Associated Press reported on August 21,
“I said, ‘Whoa! This seems like it would work well for bringing my nephew and my brother into the country,’” said [Valerie Laveus, a Hatian-born] teacher, who received a WhatsApp message in January and verified with an immigration lawyer that the program was real.
After years of trying to get a green card, her brother arrived with her nephew in early August, ready to start a new life. They are two of the roughly 181,000 people who have entered the U.S. under the humanitarian parole program since President Joe Biden launched the initiative.
So far, more than 39,000 Haitians have used the Biden visa to quit their home country while it slides into lawlessness. Many others have been allowed to cross into the United States via the southern border.
If Tipton and the Supreme Court shut down the four-country parole program, Mayorkas will look for other ways to bring migrants into the United States, Arthur said.
Pro-Americans faced a whac-a-mole process at the border,” he said, adding:
As various things get shut down, the Biden administration just creates new ones. The only way that that’s going to stop is for Congress to start withholding funds from DHS that allow them to do these things. Congress can easily through the appropriations process just defund all of these parole programs.
Extraction Migration
The federal government has long operated an unpopular economic policy of Extraction Migration. This colonialism-like policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries, reduces beneficial trade, and uses the imported workers, renters, and consumers to grow Wall Street and the economy.
The migrant inflow has successfully forced down Americans’ wages and also boosted rents and housing prices. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors and contributed to the rising death rate of poor Americans.
The lethal policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers.
The population inflow also reduces the political clout of native-born Americans, because the population replacement allows elites and the establishment to divorce themselves from the needs and interests of ordinary Americans.
In many speeches, Mayorkas says he is building a mass migration system to deliver workers to wealthy employers and investors and “equity” to poor foreigners. The nation’s border laws are subordinate to elite opinion about “the values of our country” Mayorkas claims.
Migration — and especially, labor migration — is unpopular among swing voters. A 54 percent majority of Americans say Biden is allowing a southern border invasion, according to an August 2022 poll commissioned by the left-of-center National Public Radio (NPR). The 54 percent “Invasion” majority included 76 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of independents, and even 40 percent of Democrats.
The case is 6:23-cv-00007 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas.
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