AP Photo/Jim Rassol |
Valerie Laveus remembers when she first heard about an immigration program designed to allow people to come to the U.S. from four countries, including her native Haiti.
“I said, ‘Whoa! This seems like it would work well for bringing my nephew and my brother into the country,’” said the Florida teacher, who received a WhatsApp message in January and verified with an immigration lawyer that the program was real.
After years of trying to get a green card, her brother arrived with her nephew in early August, ready to start a new life. They are two of the roughly 181,000 people who have entered the U.S. under the humanitarian parole program since President Joe Biden launched the initiative.
But 21 Republican-leaning states threaten to end the program through a lawsuit to determine its legality, which is set to be heard in a Texas court beginning Thursday, with a decision coming later.
If the Biden administration loses, it would undercut a broader policy seeking to encourage migrants to use the administration‘s preferred pathways into the U.S. or face stiff consequences. The administration has said it had to act in the absence of congressional action to overhaul the nation’s immigration system.
But much of the administration‘s strategy is just one lawsuit away from collapse.
In the Texas trial, Republican states are expected to argue the Biden administration is basically usurping the power of Congress by allowing up to 360,000 people annually into the U.S. from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela under the humanitarian parole program. They say the program is an overreach of a parole power meant to be used on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.
The administration argues it has the power to use humanitarian parole in this way and credits the initiative with drastically reducing illegal border crossings by immigrants from those four countries. Program applicants must pass background checks and have a financial sponsor in the U.S. who vouches for them. If approved, they must fly into a U.S. airport instead of crossing at the southern border. They can then stay in the U.S. for two years and get a work permit.
Immigrant rights groups successfully petitioned to join the legal proceedings on behalf of Laveus and six other people who are sponsoring migrants. Esther Sung, an attorney for Justice Action Center, said the groups want to show the real people who have volunteered to be sponsors and how ending the program would affect them.
Blas Nuñez-Neto, assistant secretary for border and immigration policy with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said in a recent conference call that the government is worried about the upcoming trial and will appeal if the administration loses. --->READ MORE HEREBiden’s Illegal Immigration Schemes Hurt the Legal Immigration System: Summary
A new government report confirms that the Biden administration’s policies accommodating illegal immigration are harming the legal immigration system.
On this week’s episode of Parsing Immigration Policy, Elizabeth Jacobs, the Center for Immigration Studies director of regulatory affairs and policy, joins host Mark Krikorian to discuss the findings and implications of a congressionally mandated annual report from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman, an independent office within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
USCIS administers the nation’s lawful immigration system, and Jacobs (a former USCIS official) explains how its mission has been threatened by the administration’s determined efforts to bring inadmissible aliens to the United States as quickly as possible and expand work authorization opportunities for aliens who lack a lawful immigration status.
The discussion delves into the effects of key policies, including misuse of parole and expansion of Temporary Protected Status (TPS).
Jacobs underscores the need for adherence to congressional mandates: “If USCIS leadership is serious about bolstering the legal immigration system and maintaining reasonable processing times for immigration services, it has to focus its resources on programs that have been authorized by Congress – it cannot keep creating programs that are not authorized.”
In his closing commentary, Mark Krikorian, host of the podcast and executive director of the Center, discusses a new Biden administration tactic in its fight to force Texas to remove the marine barriers it has placed in the Rio Grande – specifically, cynical administration claims that the barriers are endangering a mussel species in the Rio Grande. --->WATCH AND READ MORE HERE
If you like what you see, please "Like" and/or Follow us on FACEBOOK here, GETTR here, and TWITTER here.
No comments:
Post a Comment