WASHINGTON—The Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) has filed a brief in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals supporting a lawsuit by Texas against a Biden Administration mass-migration app. The app allows would-be illegal aliens to schedule their crossing into America with Border Patrol, at which point they will be granted parole and released into our country.
The point of these programs, the administration claims, is to make what it calls “irregular migration”—the mass influx of illegal entries over the border—into “regular migration.” But there is nothing in this program that makes this app-fueled migration regular, in the sense of law-abiding.
In the parole statute as applied here, parole may only be granted on a case-by-case basis for “significant public benefit.” No significant benefit to the public is served by paroling any particular alien under this program; rather, as the administration concedes, the program’s supposed benefit—the reduction of “irregular migration” by providing the app alternative—is only significantly advanced by paroling tens of thousands of other illegal aliens en masse. And the benefit of en masse parole cannot be used to justify individual parole on a case-by-case basis.
The federal district court hearing the case, nonetheless, dismissed it, claiming that a Supreme Court decision barring jurisdiction over suits asking courts to order the federal government to arrest more people meant the court lacked jurisdiction to hear Texas’s challenge to the app. But, as IRLI shows in its brief, that same Supreme Court decision explains that courts do have jurisdiction to hear claims based on the government’s conferral of a benefit. The mass grants of parole challenged here, quite clearly, are the conferral of a benefit. An alien paroled into this country can even become eligible for citizenship.
“Obviously, the district court stretched the Supreme Court’s language beyond the breaking point in order to dismiss this case,” said Dale L. Wilcox, executive director and general counsel of IRLI. “We hope the court clearly sees that mass grants of parole are a benefit, and rejects the lower court’s unprincipled conclusion that it had no jurisdiction even to hear Texas’s challenge to this flagrant abuse of the parole process.”
The case is Texas v. Mayorkas, No. 24-50717 (Fifth Circuit).
