Fact-Checking the PolitiFact ‘Parole Amnesty’ Fact-Check
The power of Facebook, and what happens when you get your information from the under-informed
By Andrew R. Arthur on December 1, 2021
On November 23, PolitiFact (which modestly describes itself as “a nonpartisan fact-checking website to sort out the truth in American politics”) issued its opinion on a Facebook post claiming that H.R. 5376, the Build Back Better Act (BBB), would provide “’’Parole’ Amnesty for Millions of Criminal Illegal Aliens”. Not surprisingly, it rated the post “Mostly False”. I say “not surprisingly” because the author of that article doesn’t appear to fully understand what he is opining on and limited the experts on which he relied.
Immigration in the Build Back Better Act
By way of background, the BBB is a bill Democrats are attempting to ramrod through the congressional process without Republican support via a legislative maneuver known as “reconciliation”, which I explained in-depth in a September post.
The current iteration of H.R. 5376 passed the House on a mostly party-line vote on November 19. The lone Democrat voting “Nay” was Jared Golden (D-Maine), and he was joined by 212 House Republicans. It has since been sent to the Senate, where the immigration provisions are under consideration by that chamber’s parliamentarian.
The citation in the Facebook post in question is to section 60001 of the bill, found at pages 862 to 865 of the current text. As I explained on November 5, that section would extend what is known as “parole” to aliens who entered the United States — legally or illegally — prior to January 1, 2011.
https://cis.org/Arthur/FactChecking-PolitiFact-Parole-Amnesty-FactCheck
