Republicans Accuse Biden Admin of Using ‘Mass-Parole Programs’ to Hide ‘Catastrophic’ Border Crisis; Biden’s ‘Parole in Place’ Plan Is a Solution in Search of a Problem: The Lack of a ‘limiting principle’ Would Allow Parole to Swallow All the Other Immigration Rules

Republicans Accuse Biden Admin of Using ‘Mass-Parole Programs’ to Hide ‘Catastrophic’ Border Crisis:

The Biden administration is crediting strengthened border enforcement and a crackdown by the Mexican government on migrants traveling to the U.S. for a drastic drop in illegal southern border crossings in recent months.

But Republicans argue that the border crisis has not abated. They argue instead that the administration is playing a shell game, using “unlawful mass-parole programs” to send migrants to ports of entry and then letting them into the country “often with little or no vetting.”

According to a report from CBS News, over the first three weeks of May, U.S. Border Patrol agents apprehended about 3,700 migrants per day between official ports of entry, which, if the trend holds, would lead to about 115,000 apprehensions for the month. That would be down from the 129,000 apprehensions in April and 137,000 in May, and a more than 50 percent drop from December when agents made about 250,000 apprehensions.

The Border Patrol apprehensions don’t include the number of migrants processed at official ports of entry.

“We have driven down the number of encounters at our southern border rather dramatically,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told CBS, citing a “number of actions that we have taken, not only strengthening our enforcement, not only attacking the smugglers, but also building lawful pathways that enable people who qualify for relief to reach the United States in a safe, orderly, and legal way.”

But House Republicans contend that despite Mayorkas’s claims, “the border crisis remains at catastrophic levels.” On Wednesday, the House Committee on Homeland Security noted that in April, total Southwest border encounters topped 179,000 and total nationwide encounters exceeded 247,000. Border encounters include both immigrants apprehended crossing the border illegally and those who are processed at official ports of entry. —>READ MORE HERE

Biden’s ‘Parole in Place’ Plan Is a Solution in Search of a Problem

The lack of a ‘limiting principle’ would allow parole to swallow all the other immigration rules

As I recently explained, the Biden administration appears to be planning to expand on its other “parole” programs to grant de facto amnesty to approximately 1.1 million illegal aliens who are married to U.S. citizens. If that happens, those sympathetic couples in “mixed status” families will be just the beginning, but it should be noted that nearly all of those alien spouses already have a remedy to their plight. In other words, this plan is a solution in search of a problem, albeit one that will make future enforcement efforts next to impossible, but more importantly, it would expand DHS’s limited parole authority so wide that it will quickly swallow all the other rules governing aliens in the INA.

Parole, and Ice Cream. Under section 235 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), aliens seeking admission to the United States (including illegal entrants) must prove they have a visa or other document that permit their admission, and that they are otherwise admissible.

In section 212(d)(5)(A) of the INA, however, Congress gave the executive branch (originally the attorney general, now the DHS secretary) the authority to allow inadmissible aliens to enter the United States for given reasons (like emergency medical treatment) or for specific periods of time.

Parole doesn’t make those aliens any less removable, and in fact the parole statute requires DHS to take parolees back into custody and treat them like all other aliens seeking admission at ports of entry once their periods of parole have expired.

Due to abuses of that parole power by prior administrations, Congress placed restrictions on that authority in 1996. Under amendments that year, the DHS secretary may parole aliens “only on a case-by-case basis” and then only “for urgent humanitarian reasons” or for a “significant public benefit”.

The problem is that the Clinton administration never properly amended the parole regulation to reflect those changes. Instead, a sloppy regulation, first implemented during a two-week period in 1982 under a district-court order, largely remains in place.

As noted, the statute permits the DHS secretary to parole inadmissible aliens only if parole is necessary for an urgent humanitarian reason or provides the country with a significant public benefit. That 1982 regulation, however, turns that latter requirement on its head — it permits parole whenever the secretary determines that “continued detention is not in the public interest”.

Substitute “ice cream” for “significant public benefit” and this complicated error is easier to appreciate. That statute would allow parole if it would give Americans ice cream, but the statute permits release only if it meant detention would not provide extra ice cream. Those are similar concepts, but under the regulation, you’re not guaranteed any ice cream at all — and that’s how it has played out under Biden. —>READ MORE HERE

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