House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green (R-TN) says President Joe Biden is rolling out “a welcome mat” at the United States-Mexico border with an executive amnesty for more than half a million illegal aliens in the U.S.

“By allowing otherwise inadmissible aliens to remain in the country indefinitely through a ‘parole-in-place’ sleight of hand, and to receive generous, taxpayer-funded benefits, this president is sending a loud and clear message to any would-be border crosser that the door is not only wide open — there’s a welcome mat,” Green said in a statement.

Biden’s executive amnesty will ensure that at least 550,000 illegal alien spouses of American citizens and children can secure green cards and, eventually, naturalized American citizenship. In addition, the amnesty will open work visas to those illegal aliens who have graduated from an American university.

Green said the amnesty “further legitimizes unlawful entry into our country — an affront to the rule of law and an insult to every American.”

To carry out the amnesty, Biden and his Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas are once again using a little-known parole program that Republicans and critics have said has been abused by the administration to create an expansive catch and release network.

“Despite being intended for use in extraordinary circumstances only, Biden and Mayorkas have warped the parole statute beyond recognition,” the Heritage Foundation’s Lora Ries said:

This latest decree from the White House will encourage more illegal immigration and marriage fraud while adding to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’s more than nine million-case backlog and workload, making the wait for legal green card applicants even longer. [Emphasis added]

Similarly, executives with the Immigration Accountability Project (IAP) said the amnesty will ultimately increase the likelihood of marriage fraud and called on Congress to stop the administration.

“Congress controls immigration policy and cannot allow this administration to continue to abuse parole or other means to invent its own immigration system,” IAP executives wrote in a memo. “It is incumbent on Congress to use its constitutional authority to defund these amnesties and to challenge them in court.”

Thanks in part to Biden’s liberal use of parole authority, the number of known migrants living across American communities while awaiting deportation hearings has climbed to 7.4 million. These are only those migrants known to the federal government who have been released into the U.S. interior while awaiting such hearings and does not include illegal aliens not known to the government.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.