Biden’s Perversion of Immigration Parole Has Reached a New Low
By George Fishman on November 21, 2022
I have previously bemoaned the abuse of the statutory parole power by multiple administrations, both Republican and Democrat. They all succumbed to the nearly irresistible temptation to create a “shadow” Immigration and Nationality Act, totally divorced from the will of Congress, through the perversion of the quite circumscribed parole power that Congress itself had bestowed upon them. You can read about the whole sordid affair here.
But the Biden administration has now taken this practice to a new low, which my colleague Todd Bensman has just revealed in his blockbuster report, "Border Crossing for All: The Next Stage of Biden's Migration Crisis".
As Mark Krikorian, the Center for Immigration Studies’ Executive Director, has observed, the Biden administration had already settled upon a strategy of stigma removal, attempting to convert as much of the population of illegally-entering economic migrants as it could into people supposedly fleeing persecution or violence or harm of one sort or another. This could justify (at least in the administration’s own mind) the abandonment of any semblance of immigration law enforcement as a goal, replaced with, in DHS Secretary Mayorkas’ words, “safe, orderly, humane, and lawful pathways for migration.” Ancillary benefits abounded. First, the illegal aliens – sorry, prospective “asylees” – could get work authorization after they were released from detention, usually after a wait of six months. Second, if granted asylum, they would become eligible for Federal welfare – sorry, “means-tested” benefits – on a more generous basis than is available to even most legal permanent residents (LPRS), and they could themselves become LPRs after a year’s wait.
However, destigmatization was not a silver bullet for the Biden administration. First, the aliens had to get themselves across the border and into the U.S., thus committing a federal crime even if they later applied for asylum (unless entering through a port of entry). It is harder to sanitize a criminal act, though by no means impossible in this day and age. Second, few of these aliens could meet the eligibility standard for asylum (persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion), and thus few would ever apply. Third, even once the aliens were promptly released on parole following apprehension by the Border Patrol, their apprehensions would still be tabulated in U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) statistics. Thus, they would contribute to the Democratic Party’s political headache caused by the Biden administration serving as master-of-ceremonies for the highest number of border apprehensions in history.
https://cis.org/Fishman/Bidens-Perversion-Immigration-Parole-Has-Reached-New-Low
