Don’t break the law! That’s my job!
Gallup estimates that more than 750 million adults worldwide would emigrate to another country if they had the opportunity — including 27% of Latin Americans and an eye-popping 63% of Haitians, 52% of Salvadorans, and 47% of Hondurans.
President Biden and DHS Secretary Mayorkas seem hell-bent on letting them all in.
The law be damned.
Mayorkas said on Thursday “[w]e are building lawful pathways for people to come . . . without resorting to the smugglers.” Yes, build it and they will come!
Translation: foreigners who don’t qualify under our generous to-a-fault immigration laws (more than a million green cards served most every year) no longer need to break our laws.
Why not? Because the Biden administration will do the law-breaking for them (through Orwellian “lawful pathways”). Like the “dark” web — sites designed for often nefarious purposes accessible with special software — there is a “dark” immigration law passed not by Congress but created by the Executive Branch, usually for the express purpose of circumventing Congress.
Under Biden, this constitutional perversion has sunk to new lows.
On Thursday, DHS pompously proclaimed that “[i]n a historic move, [we] . . . will establish Regional Processing Centers . . . throughout the Western Hemisphere to reduce irregular migration and facilitate safe, orderly, humane, and lawful pathways.”
Secretary Mayorkas explained that these will be “place[s] for qualifying individuals to obtain authorization to enter . . . before arriving at our borders,” screening aliens as refugees and also “refer[ring them] to pursue additional pathways”.
What sort of numbers are we talking about? What are these “pathways”?
Mayorkas says “[w]e are going to begin [with] 5-6,000 plus each month . . . and we will scale up.” As to the pathways, he is primarily talking parole.
Congress created the parole power for use “in emergenc[ies], such as . . . an alien who requires immediate medical attention . . . [or] strictly in the public interest . . . such as . . . a witness or for purposes of prosecution” — not to let the Biden evade Congress by allowing entry to classes of inadmissible aliens.
The Biden administration has notoriously used parole to release hundreds of thousands apprehended at the border. He already has granted parole to over one million aliens. Parole is supposed to be temporary, but we all know few will ever go home.
As the Fifth Circuit ruled last year, DHS cannot “parole aliens en masse” — its “pretended power to parole aliens while ignoring the limitations Congress imposed [is] not nonenforcement; it’s misenforcement, suspension of the [law], or both.”
Biden and Mayorkas derive a huge political side benefit. Invited parolees enter “legally” — they won’t be apprehended or counted in apprehension statistics, and won’t camp out in unsightly Bidenvilles under bridges.
DHS can even crow about dramatically reducing the number of apprehensions, bringing the border under “control,” simply by obviating the need for anyone to enter illegally in the first place.
And there is a huge additional side benefit for parolees. Within a few years, they will become eligible for billions of dollars in federal welfare.
We can only hope that aggrieved states will once again come to the rescue and seek to enjoin these abuses. And we can only hope that the Supreme Court will stop it.
George Fishman serves as Senior Legal Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies.
