To address a political embarrassment, Biden has concocted a form of what we might call ‘migrant laundering.’
Biden is willfully failing to execute the laws faithfully when it comes to illegal immigration.
W e must have a “safe, orderly, and humane processing” of “migrants” seeking to enter the United States. Prepare to hear that a lot, particularly on Sunday at President Biden’s drive-by in El Paso. It’s the new Biden administration mantra. If you hear it often enough, Biden hopes you’ll pass into just the right detached, transcendental state — the state that seems to befall him now and again (and again . . . and again . . .). That way, you might not notice that Congress has already enacted into federal law the “safe, orderly, and humane process” for aliens who enter our country in violation of our laws.
It’s called detention.
Last weekend, I urged that the House impeach Biden over the security catastrophe he has willfully created at the southern border. In just the last two months, for example, over 600,000 illegal aliens — oh, sorry, migrants — have been apprehended. And mind you, that doesn’t count another 200,000-plus “got aways,” who’ve snuck in without being captured because Biden won’t provide adequate enforcement resources. As anger over his non-enforcement policy mounts, Biden is now trying to hoodwink the country into believing that he is getting tough on illegal-alien entries, despite two years of aiding and abetting millions of them. That is what tomorrow’s theater in El Paso is about. It’s why on Thursday, Biden announced a new policy, dramatically warning Latin America that aliens who show up at the border without legal authorization to enter will be denied the opportunity to apply for asylum.
On cue, the media-Democrat complex shrieked and blubbered about how very distressing it all is to “human-rights organizations.” But it’s a scam, and they’re in on it. The monitory tone of the coverage is misdirection. Buried deeper in the reporting is an alternative illegal-entry route the administration is pedaling — softly and disingenuously when addressing the American people, but loud and clear south of the border.
Biden and his factotum, Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, are telling aliens the world over who want to come to the United States that they just need to let us know they’re coming ahead of time. For this, they just need to use an app or avail themselves of various hubs in Mexico (and elsewhere, to be sure). The idea is that Biden will then purport to grant them parole before they get to the border. The fiction is that this way, when the alien hordes later show up at the border, they won’t be “without legal authorization” anymore. The parole decreed by the chief executive will be treated as if it were a visa granted under legitimate American law.
“Wait a second,” you’re thinking, “hasn’t Biden already been paroling hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens?” Yes, he has. But see, the parole has been happening after the aliens get “encountered” at the border. (Encounter is a euphemism that the government employs because it doesn’t want to say arrest — that, after all, would imply detention, which the government is not doing, though the law requires it.)
The Biden administration doesn’t want to do the parole post-encounter anymore. Is that because of our national-security problem? Don’t be silly: It’s because of Biden’s embarrassing political problem.
If the parole happens after the encounter, then the alien gets counted as a “migrant” who has been captured trying to enter illegally. With these illegal-alien arrest numbers now racing past 300,000 a month, Biden is on pace to exceed, by leaps and bounds, the 2.3 million “encountered” in fiscal year 2022 (which ended last September and thus doesn’t count the nearly 1 million more since then). As if this were not a bad enough look, Biden then presumes to parole a goodly chunk of these “migrants” into the country. Government reports must thus reflect the dreaded “capture and release” of illegal aliens by the million.
To address this political embarrassment, Biden has concocted a form of what we might call “migrant laundering.” The illegal aliens will now apply for parole before they get here, so that when they arrive at the border — voila! — they are no longer illegal; they’ll have their Biden parole codes. Border agents (the Welcoming Committee) will find the code right there on the app, perhaps loaded onto one of those cellphones illegal aliens are given gratis, courtesy of Uncle Sam (a.k.a the American taxpayer). That means there will no longer be reason to count these aliens in government stats as illegals caught at the border and then released onto our streets. You’re to conclude that the aliens are no longer illegal because they have Biden administration parole authorization, as if that were the same thing as authorization under the laws of the United States.
The result: The administration will tell us that there has been a dramatic decline in the number of “migrants” “encountered” each month while trying to cross the border “without authorization.” Sure, the exact same thing that was happening before will still be happening: Wave after wave of illegal aliens will arrive at the border and be ushered into the country. But we’ll be told that because “encounters” are down, the president has “solved” the border crisis — even as it further metastasizes when Title 42 is rescinded.
Needless to say, this is illegal. It is both a gross violation of the narrow, statutory parole authority Congress has granted the executive branch for decades, and an unconstitutional usurpation by the president of Congress’s power to set the conditions for lawful entry into the United States. In impeachment parlance, Biden is willfully failing to execute the laws faithfully, and rather than preserving the Constitution as his oath requires, he is shredding it.
As we’ve repeatedly observed, Congress has been crystal clear that aliens who enter the country illegally, or are arrested trying to, “shall be detained” until any legal proceedings are concluded. And, since the vast majority of illegal aliens have no viable claims of a right to enter and remain in our country if they have not gone through our generous legal-immigration process, Congress has provided for deportation forthwith. As Biden officials bang on about the need for “safe, orderly, and humane processing” of “migrants,” understand: It’s not like Congress never considered due process for illegal aliens. To the contrary, lawmakers considered it very carefully. Quite rationally, they decided that the processes of detention and rapid deportation were not merely safe, orderly, and humane but also the best way to discourage aliens from making the often-perilous journey to the United States. There is nothing humane about a policy, such as Biden’s, that encourages the unspeakable horrors of human trafficking.
Naturally, emergency situations do arise. An alien at the border may have a heart attack or other health exigency that requires emergency medical treatment. The Justice Department may need the testimony of an alien in a terrorism or organized-crime prosecution. Or there could be an earthquake or a war as a result of which, for humanitarian and diplomatic reasons, it is in the national interest to temporarily admit some aliens until the crisis eases. For such reasons, Congress gave the executive narrow parole authority, only to be invoked in cases of true emergency, and only on a case-by-case basis — i.e., not as a pretext to grant admission and de facto amnesty to broad categories of aliens whose entry and presence in the country has not been authorized by Congress.
The Obama-Biden administration blew out the parole limitations in 2009. The consequences have been disastrous. Before then, it was the rare alien who asserted a fear of persecution because such claims were so routinely denied. But now, aliens and smuggling networks know that “migrants” who say those magic words will be paroled into the United States and, in all probability, never kicked out. That’s why they’re coming in droves now. And of course, transnational progressives believe, regardless of what our law says, that our obligation is to roll out the red carpet and ensure that “migrants” have a “safe, orderly, humane process” for positing whatever bogus claim they can conjure up — even as aliens who try to play by the rules of our legal immigration system wait in line.
For a change, I will end this weekend rant with a silver lining. For all the hullaballoo about Biden’s finally deigning to eyeball the catastrophe he has wrought this weekend, the most significant development in the next few days will be the start, on Monday, of a federal trial in Pensacola.
Florida, in a lawsuit brought by state attorney general Ashley Moody, a key ally of Governor Ron DeSantis, has challenged Biden’s mass-paroling of illegal aliens as a violation of the Constitution and federal statutory law. The presiding judge is Thomas Kent Wetherell II, formerly a state appellate judge and deputy solicitor general, who was appointed to the federal bench in 2019 by then-president Donald Trump — whose border-security measures Biden has recklessly dismantled. In May, Judge Wetherell denied the motion of the defendants — the Biden administration — to dismiss Florida’s lawsuit, writing:
Suffice it to say the court is wholly unpersuaded by defendants’ position that they have unfettered discretion to determine how (or if) to comply with the immigration statutes and that there is nothing that Florida or this court can do about their policies even if they contravene the immigration statutes.
Sounds like this trial could be more consistent with what most Americans think of as a safe, orderly, and humane process.