Sixteen Republican-led states filed a lawsuit this week against President Joe Biden’s administration over an immigrant parole program.
On Friday, Texas, Florida, Idaho, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and Wyoming filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and other Biden administration officials, challenging a program that will grant hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens parole in place (PIP).
“This action incentivizes illegal immigration and will irreparably harm the Plaintiff states,” the lawsuit says.
The policy, which is set to begin on Monday, allows spouses that do not currently have a legal citizenship in the U.S. to apply for “parole in place” which allows these individuals to stay in the U.S. and follow a path to citizenship.
The program has sparked significant controversy in an election year dominated by immigration as a key issue. Many Republicans have criticized the policy, arguing that it amounts to amnesty for individuals who violated the law.
“Under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the federal government is actively working to turn the United States into a nation without borders and a country without laws. I will not let this happen,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement on Friday.
Paxton continued: “Biden’s new parole workaround unilaterally grants the opportunity for citizenship to unvetted aliens whose first act on American soil was to break our laws. This violates the Constitution and actively worsens the illegal immigration disaster that is hurting Texas and our country.”
Similarly, in a post to X, formerly Twitter, Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody wrote: “As I have said over and over again, the @JoeBiden-@KamalaHarris administration is illegally using ‘parole’ in a systematic way to advance their open-borders agenda.”
“Today, we challenged yet another illegal parole policy,” Moody added.Newsweek reached out to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security via email on Friday for comment.FWD.us, a bipartisan organization focused on immigration and criminal justice reform, defended the program as being legally compliant. The group also pointed out the timing of the lawsuit, which coincided with Vice President Kamala Harris accepting the Democratic nomination for president.
“The only motivation behind this lawsuit is the cruelty of tearing families apart and the crass politics of hoping a judge might do the bidding of the anti-immigrant movement,” FWD.us said in the statement.
In order to qualify for the program, immigrants must have lived in the U.S. for at least 10 years continuously, have no disqualifying criminal record, pose no security threat and have been married to a U.S. citizen by June 17—the day before the program’s announcement.
—–Reprinted from “Newsweek.”—–
