Lawsuit Has No Legal Ground to Stop Parole-In-Place Program for Families

Despite the program’s firm legal footing, several attorneys general want to stop immigration initiative.

Authored by Zaira Garcia and originally published on dallasnews.com

On Friday, several attorneys general, led by Texas’ Ken Paxton, filed a lawsuit to temporarily freeze the Biden administration’s “parole in place” program, which would have provided protection and relief for undocumented individuals who are married to U.S. citizens and have lived in the U.S. for at least a decade. That includes as many as 110,000 Texans, according to a FWD.us analysis based on census data.

The lawsuit is a devastating setback for a program that would have a tremendously positive impact on Texas’ families, communities, economy and workforce. The estimated 500,000 undocumented people in the U.S. who meet the program’s basic eligibility requirements are married to U.S. citizens and have lived in the U.S. for more than 20 years, on average. One-fifth of them live in Texas.

Parole would ensure that these families can remain together, with their children, loved ones and neighbors, as well as help these individuals further contribute to our workforce and economy. Currently, many U.S. citizens who want to sponsor their spouses for legal status cannot do so due to bureaucratic hurdles as a result of our broken immigration system coupled with a lack of congressional action to address this. For example, many individuals who are married to U.S. citizens but were not formally admitted or paroled into the U.S. must leave the country and reenter lawfully to apply for legal status, which can present issues with immigration bars and backlogs and result in families being separated for several years.

Parole in place would give the undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens long-overdue protections from deportation, as well as the ability to apply for legal work permits and adjust to a legal permanent status through their marriage. More than 315,000 U.S. citizens in Texas are living with someone eligible for this program and would also benefit from this protection.

Our broader economy and workforce would benefit, too. If these immigrants seek a path to citizenship, they would contribute an additional $1.5 billion to the Texas economy and an additional $512 million annually in state and local taxes according to FWD.us analysis — and that’s just in Texas.

Blocking this program will squander those economic benefits and expose tens of thousands of Texas families to the risk of inhumane separation, especially if former President Donald Trump is elected and has the opportunity to carry out their promised mass deportations. Using local law enforcement, the National Guard, and the military to forcibly remove millions of people, as they have threatened, would cost trillions of dollars and would devastate our workforce and our communities.

Trump and his allies have been successful at temporarily blocking pro-immigrant policies from going into effect. However, many of these challenges ultimately fail, because President Joe Biden is using existing legal authority to make these meaningful changes. A lawsuit against the administration’s use of parole at the border was rejected earlier this year by a Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas who determined there was no proof the law had done any harm to the state.

The president’s authority to provide parole to certain immigrants, including through parole in place, is legal and long-standing. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 established the parole authority, and Congress has reaffirmed it repeatedly in the decades since. Parole has been used widely by presidents of both parties: For example, President George W. Bush’s administration used parole to reunite long-separated U.S. citizens with their immediate family members from Cuba. Parole has also been used to provide relief to military service members with spouses who are undocumented immigrants from the Bush administration through the Biden administration.

In 2019, Congress included language in the National Defense Authorization Act affirming “the importance of the parole in place authority of the Secretary of Homeland Security.” That bill passed both chambers of Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support, and Trump signed it into law.

Even some anti-immigrant advocates, usually the first to decry any pro-immigrant policy as “illegal,” agree that the use of parole in place is clearly authorized by Congress, which puts it on “a much firmer legal footing.”

The court should move swiftly to dismiss these baseless challenges and restore this program to keep Texas and American families together, strengthen our communities and grow our economy.

Zaira Garcia is regional government relations director at FWD.us, a bipartisan political organization seeking immigration and criminal justice system reforms.

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