Biden Prepping New Immigration Policy That Would Provide Amnesty to More Than a Million Migrants: Report
The ‘Parole in Place’ program could be rolled out as soon as this week.
President Biden is preparing to announce a new plan aimed at protecting illegal immigrants from deportation and easing the process for obtaining work permits, so long as they have been in America for at least a decade and are married to an American citizen, according to a new report.
The planned action follows a recent executive order intended to try and stem the flow of illegal migration across the southern border that left many members of the president’s own party enraged.
CBS News reports that Mr. Biden plans to institute a so-called “Parole in Place” plan that would allow illegal immigrants to more easily obtain work permits and provide stronger protections against deportation. The plan could be announced as soon as Tuesday — the 12th anniversary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program that was instituted by President Obama.
The Parole in Place program would provide these deportation protections and work permit authorizations for more than one million immigrants in the country without authorization who currently meet marriage and residency requirements. The program would also create an easier pathway to citizenship for those immigrants who meet the requirements.
The Senate recently spent months negotiating a bipartisan border security and immigration deal that would have raised the burden of proof on asylum seekers — requiring them to show that they had a credible fear of being harmed in their home countries — and would not have permitted any large-scale pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants.
The lead Republican on that border negotiation, Senator Lankford, says that Mr. Biden’s Parole in Place program, or any similar measure, does nothing to solve the problem of illegal immigration.
“Biden’s border is still in crisis and his latest idea is amnesty. This will invite more chaos. The border proposal I negotiated had NO amnesty and NO path to citizenship,” Mr. Lankford wrote on X in response to reports about the Parole in Place program.
Mr. Biden may be trying to correct a political problem stemming from another recent executive action liberal Democrats in Congress — especially members of the Progressive and Hispanic Caucuses — were enraged about just weeks ago. The order was aimed at cracking down on illegal border crossings and limiting the scope of asylum protections for migrants.
Senator Padilla, the son of Mexican immigrants, said the president was doing nothing more than “reviving” Trump-era asylum restrictions, and in turn betraying his own supporters.
“By reviving Trump’s asylum ban, President Biden has undermined American values and abandoned our nation’s obligations to provide people fleeing persecution, violence, and authoritarianism with an opportunity to seek refuge in the U.S.,” Mr. Padilla said in a statement. “This asylum ban will fail to address the challenges at our border, just as it did under the Trump Administration. It will lead to people with legitimate asylum claims being prevented from seeking safety and returned to harm.”
The executive order did little to assuage the president’s critics, as well. Governor Abbott said Mr. Biden was “gaslighting” the American people into believing that he cared about illegal crossings at the border.
“As long as the Biden administration refuses to provide any type of enforcement, any type of blockage of people crossing illegally, all that this new Biden policy is going to do is to actually attract and invite even more people to cross the border illegally,” Mr. Abbott told Fox News.