Biden Immigration Parole Circumvents The Law
By Joe Guzzardi
Twenty years ago, journalist Michelle Malkin wrote a column titled, “The Deportation Abyss: It Ain’t over ‘til the Alien Wins.” Written post-9/11, the nation yearned as it still does for a strict deportation strategy and for vigorous immigration law enforcement.
At the beginning of her commentary, Malkin quoted the late Barbara Jordan, a Texas Democrat who served in the U.S. House of Representatives and chaired the U.S. Commission on Immigration reform from 1993 to 1996. Jordan said, “The credibility of immigration policy can be measured by a simple yardstick: people who should get in, get in; people who should not enter are kept out; and people who are judged deportable should be required to leave.”
Jordan’s sensible immigration guidelines were ignored. Too many loopholes in the immigration system, too many squishy congressional representatives, too many lax immigration judges and too many spineless Board of Immigration Appeals’judges undermined legitimate deportations of criminals, including convicted murderers, sex predators, drunken drivers and aggravated felons, subverting Jordan’s sound solutions. Information on how to dodge immigration enforcement was readily available. The soup-to-nuts legal directory that advises aliens who “got trouble” is still operating 20 years later, doubtlessly thriving, and dispensing advice on how to avoid deportation.
In her worst nightmare, Jordan could not have imagined that a U.S. president would not only be inviting millions of illegal aliens from all around the world to come to American, but then rewarding them with air transportation, housing, food, mobile phones and, eventually, one of the most coveted documents that migrants seek from the instant they depart their homeland, employment authorization cards.
Biden is determined to undermine American workers with his reckless abandonment of border security, and his messaging to foreign nationals from around the globe that, despite DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ protestations to the contrary, the border is open. The odds are extremely high that foreign nationals who get to the border will gain entrance. Parole may await them. At least, it’s the administration’s coveted goal to illegally grant parole to foreign nationals that don’t qualify for what should be a rarely approved immigration status.
Since the mainstream media tosses the word parole around loosely, knowing exactly who merits the status is important to understanding the administration’s deport-no-one intentions. Writing for the Center for Immigration Studies where he’s a Senior Legal Fellow, former DHS Deputy General Counsel George Fishman, in an article “The Pernicious Perversion of Parole: the 70-year battle between Congress and the President,” explained parole’s proper place in immigration law. As Fishman’s title suggests, the decades-long battle has been mostly a lost cause for Congress and immigration restrictionists.
Parole’s history dates back to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 which contained a provision that allowed discretionary power to the Attorney General to parole into the U.S. temporarily under such conditions as the AG may prescribe for emergent reasons or for reasons deemed strictly in the public interest any alien applying for admission to the U. S. All parole grantees are issued on a case-by-case basis, and cannot be granted en masse. (Emphasis added.)
In 1956, Republican Dwight Eisenhower became the first president to violate parole regulations when he permitted Hungarian refugees to enter en masse. Prior to 1956, parole authority had been used only to benefit individual aliens. But as Professors Adam Cox of the University of Chicago Law School and Cristina Rodriguez of New York University correctly concluded, presidents have used powers expressly delegated to them by Congress to advance their own immigration agenda in a manner that accomplished personal objectives Congress almost certainly did not intend and expanding or repurposing Congress’s original design.(Emphasis added.)
Parole should be granted only under the five following conditions: 1) for a medical emergency, 2) for organ donation to a family member, 3) to visit a family member whose death is imminent, 4) for an alien who has assisted U.S. law enforcement and whose presence is needed by the government or whose life is threatened or 5) for criminal prosecution.
Biden’s flagrant use of parole to admit thousands of aliens into the U.S. proves that Malkin’s thesis – the alien always wins – is truer today than ever. Many thousands more aliens remain gathered at or on the way to the border, confident that parole will be their easy ticket into the U.S.
PFIR analyst Joe Guzzardi writes about immigration issues and impacts. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org