Republicans Challenge Mayorkas: New DHS Migrant Parole Program Is Backdoor Amnesty

(CNSNews.com) – The Biden administration is usurping congressional authority with its new immigration parole program for Nicaraguans, Cubans, and Haitians (and Venezuelans), a group of Republican lawmakers wrote in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas this week.

Earlier this month — following the policy put in place for Venezuelans — Mayorkas announced that people from Nicaragua, Cuba and Haiti may also apply online to come to the United States, without having to make the dangerous journey. Migrants — up to 30,000 a month — will be considered on a case-by-case basis for permission to live legally in the United States for up to two years and to receive permission to work here during that period. 

What legal justification is there for such an abuse of the parole program? the Republicans asked Mayorkas in a January 18 letter written by Sens. Andy Biggs and J.D. Vance.

Vance on Thursday told Fox News’s Laura Ingraham that the Biden administration is going to make the border crisis even worse than it is now, if people think they’ll be paroled.

“The basic idea here, Laura, is that they have taken a very narrow program that’s allowed them to process certain case-by-case exceptions and blown it up to 30,000 exceptions per month,” Sen. Vance said.

“And as you know, Laura, the big problem here is not just the people who will directly be granted parole under this program. It’s the fact that it’s an open invitation to tens of thousands of more on top of them.

“So you already have a wide open border. You already have the message spread across Central America that America is effectively open for business, we have no border. And on top of that, you’re telling a large number of people that a lot of them are going to get parole from violating our immigration laws. There is no legal authority for it, but it will make this border crisis even worse.”

Vance agreed that the new policy is a backdoor amnesty:

“They know that they could not get 30,000 additional parolees through the immigration laws under Congress, so they’re effectively doing this by themselves without any actual congressional authority. They’re using executive action to completely backdoor our immigration laws and get around Congress,” Vance said.

“They say that the system was already broken. The system is broken, because they broke it. They caused the wide-open border, and now they’re causing — the very same policies that caused this problem in the first place, they’re accelerating them and increasing them. They don’t care about border security.

“It’s so clear at this point two years in that they don’t care about border security. It’s up to us to hold their feet to the fire and make sure the American people know exactly what’s going on.”

The letter spearheaded by Vance and Biggs asks DHS to answer the following questions:

1. From what source does DHS derive its legal authority to parole more than 30,000 monthly migrants into the United States?

2. From what source does DHS derive its legal authority to parole migrants before they reach the United States border.

3. Will the migrants paroled pursuant to this policy be transported into the United States using federal funds?

4. How does this policy “enhance border security”?

5. Under what criteria were the countries Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua selected for this program?

‘Safe, orderly, humane immigration process’

 “We’re executing a comprehensive strategy to secure our borders and build a safe, orderly, and humane immigration process,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told the nation’s mayors at their annual meeting in Washington on Thursday.

“Working within a broken system in desperate need of legislative reform, two weeks ago we announced new lawful pathways for noncitizens seeking relief in the United States, accompanied by a consequence regime for those who do not avail themselves of those processes. Since then, encounters from the targeted countries have dropped significantly. 

“FEMA is providing Emergency Food and Shelter Program funds to help cities around the country recover or defray the costs of noncitizen arrivals; CBP and ICE are working closely with cities to share information and coordinate the disposition of noncitizens in immigration enforcement proceedings.”

Some mayors, including Eric Adams of New York, have complained loudly about the busing of thousands of asylum-seekers to their sanctuary cities from overwhelmed border states.

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