On Friday, the Supreme Court allowed President Trump to suspend a program that provided “parole” to 500,000 aliens from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
Democrats are crying foul, saying Trump isn’t following the law. But it was President Biden who broke the law when he allowed these migrants here in the first place.
While the Supreme Court’s reprieve doesn’t assure that the Court will ultimately rule in the administration’s favor, it is good news for now. For these parole programs were some of the most egregious misdeeds of Alejandro Mayorkas, President Biden’s Secretary of Homeland Security.
This program ushered into the United States on a red carpet over half a million aliens who, under our
nation’s immigration laws, were flatly inadmissible.
In fact, the House of Representatives impeached Secretary Mayorkas for high crimes and misdemeanors in part because of these very programs: proclaiming that “Mayorkas willfully exceeded his parole authority” by “creat[ing], re-open[ing], or expand[ing] a series of categorical parole programs … which enabled hundreds of thousands of inadmissible aliens to enter the United States in violation of the laws enacted by Congress.”
When Congress granted the President the parole power in 1952, it was strictly for, as the House Judiciary Committee made clear, ONLY “emergency cases,” such as “an alien who requires immediate medical attention” or an inadmissible alien who needs to be here as “a witness or for purposes of prosecution.” //
In 1996, Congress reacted to decades of abuses by administrations of both parties by tightening the language of the parole power in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. Among other changes, IIRIRA required that parole only be granted “on a case-by-case basis.” //
While Biden ignored the “case by case basis” requirement, and provided a mass parole, the lower-court judge who ruled against Trump, said that since parole can only be granted on a case-by-case basis, it likewise can only be terminated on a case-by-case basis.
So one law for Biden, another for Trump.
