The decision is a victory for Florida governor Ron DeSantis and the state’s attorney general, who brought the case.
A few weeks back, in discussing President Biden’s immigration “parole” scam — the scheme by which the administration wants us to pretend that illegal aliens are not entering the country unlawfully because he is purporting to usher them in under a lawful process — we noted that the hammer might soon be coming down thanks to a challenge brought by Florida’s state government.
And so it has.
In a scathing opinion issued on Wednesday, federal district judge T. Kent Wetherell (a Trump appointee) ruled that Biden’s scam is illegal. More than that, as Fox News reports, Judge Wetherell observed that the administration had “effectively turned the southwest border into a meaningless line in the sand and little more than a speedbump for aliens flooding into the country.”
As I’ve previously explained, federal law explicitly requires that aliens who attempt to enter the country unlawfully “shall be detained.” There are only two relevant exceptions to this directive.
One of them was the basis for former president Donald Trump’s “remain in Mexico” policy: If the alien arrives from a foreign territory contiguous to the United States, the alien may be returned to that territory to await a removal proceeding — i.e., the alien is not required to be in custody in the United States because the alien is not present in the United States. The other exception is parole as defined by Congress — which you may remember (though Biden may not) as the branch of government that gets to prescribe the terms of lawful entry. An otherwise ineligible alien may be admitted “on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit” — as, for example, when a foreign national who has no legal basis to be present in the United States becomes gravely ill at the border and needs emergency medical attention, or is needed by our government to testify in a trial or to provide some technical expertise that benefits our society.
Biden’s program is lawless because it does not fit either of these exceptions. In particular, his catch-and-release policy — euphemistically labeled “humanitarian parole plus alternatives to detention” — is the antithesis of both case-by-case review (illegal aliens are being admitted en masse by the thousands per month and millions per year) and public benefit (it is a public catastrophe, particularly for the impossible burden placed on state medical, educational, welfare, and law-enforcement resources). Moreover, as Judge Wetherell observed, “there is nothing inherently inhumane or cruel about detaining aliens pending completion of their immigration proceedings.”
As related in the above-linked column, the handwriting was on the wall last May, when Wetherell denied the administration’s motion to dismiss Florida’s lawsuit. The judge then wrote:
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.
The decision is a victory for Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis and his ally, the state’s Republican attorney general Ashley Moody, who brought the case. Wetherell has stayed his ruling for a week to give the administration time to appeal to the Eleventh Circuit. Meantime, the Biden parole scam is being challenged in a separate case by several other Republican-controlled states.