The Biden administration is getting ready to claim that its new immigration “parole” process is a success—drastically cutting down the number of immigrants illegally crossing the southern border between ports of entry. What it won’t tell you is that it’s playing a crooked shell game—simply taking the same illegal aliens and shifting the processing burden to different locations while still releasing the same number or more into the U.S.
And contrary to the administration’s claims, there is no expanded deterrence mechanism to curtail illegal immigration under this parole program. In fact, the program doesn’t make the process more safe, orderly, or humane; it continually floods the system, keeping aliens vulnerable to abuse, trafficking, and exploitation.
Earlier this month, President Joe Biden announced his administration’s plan to expand the new parole process from just Venezuelans to Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Haitians.
Under this process, a total of 30,000 aliens every month from these four countries will be allowed to make an appointment at a port of entry on Customs and Border Protection’s CBP One online app, jump the line ahead of millions waiting their turn in our legal immigration system, be paroled into the U.S., and obtain work authorizations.
What the administration is not telling the American public—at the same time the Department of Homeland Security touts lower illegal crossing numbers in January (a week before January even ended)—is that it is cooking the books.
This parole program takes the same aliens—those looking for work and filing fraudulent asylum claims so they can be quickly released into the U.S.—and just shifts the processing burden to different locations and personnel.
In addition to being deceitful, this new parole program is unlawful and far from the case-by-case parole process outlined by our lawmakers in the Immigration and Nationality Act. Twenty states have already sued the administration over this unconstitutional program.
The consequence of mass parole and fraudulent asylum claims is that a large majority of those who lose their claims in immigration court will never actually be removed from the United States, thanks to the administration’s anti-detention policy.
Because the administration refuses to detain most illegal immigrants while they’re awaiting their court hearings, they are released into the U.S. on parole and become difficult to find when their claims are denied.
How difficult? From 2013 to the end of 2021, only 7.7% of illegal aliens who were never detained and who should have been removed from the country were actually removed. That compares to a removal rate of 97% for those who were continuously detained after being caught.
In addition to avoiding detention, this activist administration regularly refuses to execute final orders of removal and quietly closes tens of thousands of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement cases.
There is one small positive, however. The CBP One app should allow some relief for Border Patrol agents, at least temporarily. Any reduction in illegal crossings between ports of entry instead of at the ports themselves is helpful for them and long overdue—especially after years of being demeaned by this administration.
However, the CBP Office of Field Operations will be swamped at ports of entry, just as the Border Patrol has been for the past two years. And this type of unsustainable workload only leads to pressure to process many inadmissible aliens in faster. It’s likely that additional CBP officers may get pulled from patrolling the border to help and that “gotaway” numbers may increase.
We have already seen the gotaway number skyrocket after the administration started its “successful” parole program for Venezuelans. Now, it will use that as a model for the Cuban-Haitian-Nicaraguan parole program.
For the sake of transparency, the Department of Homeland Security must publish the CBP One app numbers for both “asylum seekers” and parolees each month. If DHS does not publish this information, Congress must demand it during oversight hearings and through legislation.
Put bluntly, the new parole program is an attempt at a crisis cover-up, and expanding it to other countries will only make the crisis worse.
Unsurprisingly, it fits in perfectly with the administration’s plan to get more aliens into the interior of the U.S. and gut interior immigration enforcement, granting mass de facto amnesty.
The administration’s goal is to facilitate the border crisis more quickly and efficiently with reckless disregard and disdain for our nation’s security, safety, and laws.
Shamefully, Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas deliberately caused this crisis and continue to shirk all responsibility, always quietly furthering their open-borders agenda.
This piece originally appeared in The Daily Signal
