Freedom

Opinion by Conn Carroll 

President Joe Biden created the current border crisis by ending the previous administration’s Remain in Mexico program and creating loopholes in Title 42 enforcement. From that moment, the flood of immigrants arrested for illegally crossing the southern border has become so large that Border Patrol agents literally could not process them fast enough into the U.S.

At first, Border Patrol would spend two hours with each immigrant family, interviewing them, fingerprinting them, and issuing them a “notice to appear” in court that begins their deportation process. It is during these proceedings that most immigrants assert asylum as a defense against deportation. Almost all of them lose their asylum case, or abandon their asylum claim, but unless they commit a violent crime, Biden won’t deport them anyway.

Two hours was simply far too long to spend with all the immigrants who answered Biden’s call of “you should come,” so the Biden administration shortened the review process to just 30 minutes and instead of a “notice to appear” in court, immigrants were given a “notice to report” to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office near their final destination. These ICE field offices would then interview immigrants and start the deportation process. Problem is, ICE field offices were not, and are not, equipped to process all the immigrants sent their way.

One way Biden managed to deal with the overflow of immigrants arrested for illegally crossing the southern border was to just grant them “parole.” Immigration law has included a parole power for decades, but in 1996, Congress specifically acted to limit this parole power.

“In recent years … parole has been used increasingly to admit entire categories of aliens who do not qualify for admission under any other category in immigration law, with the intent that they will remain permanently in the United States,” the House committee wrote at the time. “This contravenes the intent of [current law].”

The new law narrowed the parole power to “only on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons.”

Biden has driven a Mack truck through this loophole, releasing almost a million immigrants into the U.S. through the parole power alone. This is clearly illegal, and 20 states have sued Biden to end the program.

Biden’s abuse of the parole power is so egregious that even some usually friendly reporters have begun to question just what is supposed to happen to all those immigrants who have been released through Biden’s parole program.

“Biden has made unprecedented use of a discretionary immigration tool called parole to respond to migration crises,” Axios’s Stef Kight writes. “The protection comes for many with an ominous two-year expiration date. The looming uncertainty faced by these people isn’t all that different from DACA recipients — undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children whose protection under former President Obama’s program is now in question.”

The DACA analogy is a good one because that was also an illegal abuse of presidential power.

So, what will happen to immigrants granted parole by Biden after their two years are up? Well, if Biden is still president, he’ll simply grant them parole again. And again. And if another Democrat is elected president, again.

If a Republican is elected, however, their parole terms will expire, and they will be subject to deportation.

Biden has caught and released over 2 million immigrants arrested for illegally crossing the southern border into the country since he became president. It would be next to impossible to find and deport them all. Instead, it is far more likely that many of them would be slowly deported as they are arrested for drunken driving, speeding, and other minor violations of the law.

There is no good solution to the massive immigration crisis Biden has created. The nation will be suffering from his weak border enforcement policies for decades to come.