|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
By Simon Hankinson (Daily Signal)
Tuesday afternoon, President Joe Biden announced his latest unauthorized attempt to grant a back-door amnesty to half a million or more people living illegally in the United States.
When it stands between him and a policy objective, Biden treats the law of the land as a minor obstacle to work around.
Whether it’s passing along billions of dollars in loan balances from college students to you and me, giving chosen favorites massive breaks on mortgages, or handing millions in grant money from the so-called Inflation Reduction Act to activists who support illegal immigration, Biden acts as if limits set by Congress are just for us little people.
The Daily Signal depends on the support of readers like you. Donate now
From a man who likes to say that democracy hangs by a thread and who claims to uphold the rule of law, this approach is ironic.
Congress intended immigration parole to be used by the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security to allow a few hundred migrants a year into the country, in exceptional circumstances.
But the president has used it to create a string of “McVisa” programs benefiting Afghans, then Ukrainians, and then Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans. He used it for aliens to book an appointment on the CBP One app so they could just show up at a port of entry, then to allow family members from favored countries to cut the line and wait here instead of at home.
This latest idea jammed through the parole loophole by Biden is called “parole in place.” It’s based on some bogus premises, starting with pretending that someone living in the U.S. illegally for more than a decade is “applying for entry” today. (That would be like describing someone who showed up on your porch tomorrow but didn’t ring the doorbell until 10 years later as a “visitor.”)
Critics describe parole in place as an “amnesty” because under U.S. immigration law, aliens who’ve entered illegally can’t get green cards through their spouses because they’ve never been “admitted.” This isn’t just “bureaucratic hurdles,” as The Washington Post would have you believe. It was a deliberate attempt by Congress to make it harder for migrants to enter the U.S. illegally and stay with impunity.
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 illegally present for more than a year. But illegal alien spouses may apply for a waiver to these bars from a DHS subagency, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, for which many are approved every year.
Biden’s new amnesty once again subverts the will of Congress by treating an alien who is paroled the same as someone who was legally admitted, thus eliminating the three- and 10-year bars to return. Once paroled, the half-million alien spouses he paroles in place can apply for green cards and, in due course, become citizens.
This is not only unlawful and unfair, but will encourage yet more illegal immigration, fraud, and massive access to already stretched federal and state benefits. It also will throw another half-million cases onto Citizenship and Immigration Services’ already impossible workload.
The Obama administration tried out the parole-in-place concept, but limited it to illegal alien spouses of U.S. military service members. Biden’s program widens the availability to all aliens living illegally in the U.S.—who either entered illegally or came on a visa and overstayed—if they have been married to an American citizen for at least 10 years.
Since January 2021, Biden has released millions of aliens at the border with no idea who they are—including the Venezuelan gang member accused of murdering Laken Riley and the suspected multiple killer from El Salvador now accused of murdering a Maryland mother of five, Rachel Morin.
Biden has released so many illegal aliens so fast that there are now 7.4 million who should be detained under our laws by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (another DHS subagency), but roam free, mostly untracked, on a “Non-Detained Docket” of deportation cases.
“Parole in place” will allow 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.
Having let in up to 10 million inadmissible aliens by negligence, incompetence, and scoffing at U.S. laws, Biden now is going for broke. But rather than using jerry-rigged workarounds to achieve mass migration and amnesty, the president should stick to persuading Congress to approve his policies.
That’s the real rule of law.
