Who Decides Immigration Policy?
Presidential abuse of 'immigration parole'
usurps congressional authority

Washington, D.C. (February 22, 2022) – Can presidents simply let into the United States anyone they want?
 
A new report from the Center for Immigration Studies answers this question by examining the 70-year battle between Congress and the president over "immigration parole", which is used to allow the entry of aliens who do not qualify for admission. Congress authorized it to be used only in narrow circumstances, but successive presidents have ignored clear congressional intent.
 
The report, The Pernicious Perversion of Parole, demonstrates that the legislative history of the parole statute reflects clear congressional intent that parole not be used to allow the mass entry of broad categories of beneficiaries. Yet both Republican and Democratic presidents have used their parole authority to ignore immigration policies passed by Congress, undermining the Constitution’s separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches.
 
George Fishman, the Center’s senior legal fellow and author of the report, said, “Parole continues to be used to evade, but on an even grander scale, congressionally established immigration policy and to provide an amnesty for illegal aliens without allowing Congress to vote. A number of states, led by Texas, are presently challenging the legality of categorical parole in the 5^th Circuit, but Congress can also rein in the executive by passing parole reform and finally ending the battle with the executive.”
 
Once inadmissible aliens enter the United States via parole, they can be issued work permits, Social Security numbers, and driver’s licenses.
 
Key Points
 

• The Department of Homeland Security may temporarily parole aliens into the U.S. only on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.

 

• In 1952, Congress granted the Executive Branch this power, which, in the words of the Judiciary Committee report, “should be surrounded with strict limitations ... in emergency cases, such as the case of an alien who requires immediate medical attention ... and a witness or for purposes of prosecution.”

 

• Beginning in 1956, both Democrat and Republican presidents have used the parole power “to circumvent Congressionally-established immigration policy”, in the words of a 1996 Judiciary Committee report, bringing in hundreds of thousands of aliens over the years. Each succeeding administration (other than the Trump administration) has used the parole power to achieve an illegitimate power grab.

 

• Congress has repeatedly tried to rein in the abuse of parole, even setting up our current refugee admission program in 1980 to prevent the executive branch from setting refugee policy through abuse of the parole power.

 

• The Trump administration tried on a number of occasions to rein in parole abuse, shutting down the Obama administration’s international entrepreneur and Central American Minors (CAM) programs. While a federal court blocked Trump’s termination of the entrepreneur program, another permitted the termination of CAM. The Biden administration has pulled DHS’s proposed regulation terminating the entrepreneur program and has restarted — and greatly expanded — CAM. CAM now allows certain groups of mostly illegal aliens from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, including those who have merely applied for asylum or U visa status, to procure parole for their children and certain other household members living back home.

 

• Late last year, the 5^th Circuit Court of Appeals found that “DHS cannot ... parole aliens en masse; that [is] the whole point of the ‘case-by-case’ requirement” and that “DHS’s pretended power to parole aliens while ignoring the limitations Congress imposed on the parole power [is] ... misenforcement, suspension of the INA, or both.”

 

• Texas and other states have sued the Biden administration, asking a federal court in Texas to declare the CAM parole program unlawful. Texas’s challenge could shake the very foundations of the executive branch’s edifice of abuse of the parole power.

 

• The executive's abuse of power could be fixed by enactment of Lamar Smith’s original parole reform provision from 1996, permitting parole only for 1) a medical emergency; 2) organ donation to a family member; 3) a visit to a family member whose death is imminent; 4) an alien who has assisted U.S. law enforcement and whose presence is needed by the government or whose life is threatened; or 5) criminal prosecution.