WASHINGTON—On Friday, the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) filed a friend-of-the-court brief in a Texas federal district court urging it to grant the motion of twenty states for a preliminary injunction against the Biden administration’s new app for mass migration. The administration now allows would-be illegal aliens from four countries—Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua—to sign up to enter this country on an app, and then be processed through ports of entry and paroled into the U.S. at the rate of 30,000 per month.
The point of this program, the administration claims, is to make what it calls “irregular migration”—the mass influx of illegal entries over the border—into “regular migration.” But, as IRLI shows in its brief, 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, IRLI explains, 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.
Similarly, IRLI points out, the statute requires that any alien must be returned to custody when the purpose of paroling that alien has been served. Thus, even if the app ended up channeling illegal immigration through ports of entry, its purpose would then be served, and every paroled alien would have to be returned to custody. But that return would remove the incentive to use the app, thus fatally undermining the program. For this reason, the administration is guaranteed to violate the “return to custody” requirement of the statute.
“It is preposterous to think that channeling mass illegal immigration with an app makes it legal,” said Dale L. Wilcox, executive director and general counsel of IRLI. “We hope the court sees this program as the abuse of the parole process it is, and does not allow the administration to paper over its disastrous border numbers by not even attempting to enforce the law on 30,000 illegal aliens per month.”
The case is Texas, et al. v. Department of Homeland Security, No. 6:23-cv-00007 (S.D. Tex.).
