It’s hard to keep track of all the immigration cases that blew up once President Trump started securing our borders and enforcing U.S. immigration law only three months ago.
The latest decision by Massachusetts District Court judge Indira Talwani was an unjustified and baseless nationwide injunction blocking Trump’s decision last month to end the parole status for half a million Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan nationals.
Nationwide injunctions by federal judges are based on dubious authority and threaten the separation of powers doctrine in the Constitution – the checks and balances that hold this nation together. The sooner Congress and the Supreme Court implement and enforce clear limits on this, the better.
But it’s not just the sweeping executive power that Judge Talwani, an Obama appointee, asserts is the problem. It’s also the bewildering double-standard applied to the Biden and Trump administrations on immigration.
Americans want to believe that once appointed, judges do their best to follow the Constitution and the law. But it gets harder each time we see a ruling that stretches logic and law to reach a conclusion that aligns with politics. We’ve seen so many in the past few years, including the many “lawfare” cases brought against President Trump since his first term.
Let’s get our heads around immigration parole. Aliens who want to come to the U.S. need a visa. In exceptional cases, Congress provided a limited power for the executive (exercised by the President through his Secretary of Homeland Security) to parole aliens for limited periods. When that period ends, they go back to whatever status they had before.
In 1996, Congress tightened the rules, clarifying that parole could only be granted on a “case-by-case basis,” and strictly “for urgent humanitarian reasons” or a “significant public benefit.” Parole isn’t a path to permanent status.
Blatantly violating the clear limits set by Congress, Biden perverted parole to invent a slew of “McVisa” programs to benefit groups he liked and to bypass numerical caps.
Biden’s DHS started paroling illegal aliens caught at the border, arguing that they didn’t have room to detain them. This “Parole+ATD” was shut down by a federal judge who found the president didn’t have the authority to give illegal aliens a free pass into the country.
In August 2021, Biden invented Operation Allies Welcome to let in thousands of Afghans. In theory, these were supposed to be the ones who’d helped the U.S. and whose lives might be in danger under the Taliban, but in practice, many got in through fraud or had nothing to do with our efforts in their country. Some were even criminals and suspected terrorists.
Then in April 2022, Biden began a Uniting for Ukraine program to bring people in from that country, even though (a) you might wonder why the men weren’t home fighting Russia, and (b) why they could not have claimed asylum in neighboring European countries instead of the U.S.
In January 2023, Biden rolled out a Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan Parole program allowing up to 30,000 nationals from those four countries per month to enter the U.S.
Then he added up to 1,400 appointments a day for nationals of any country to schedule their illegal entry into the U.S. using the CBP One phone app, as long as they claimed to be in Mexico. Nearly all of them ended up getting paroled once they showed up at a U.S. port of entry.
Finally, in June 2024, Biden tried but failed to give a de facto amnesty via parole to over a million illegal aliens who were married to American citizens. Who knows how far a “President Harris” could have continued with parole-a-palooza, had she won.
All told, Biden used bogus parole programs to bring in over 1.5 million inadmissible illegal aliens.
Even though the law specifically says a president can’t use parole to bypass the U.S. official refugee program, that was clearly the intent. The Biden administration expected them all to claim asylum and live here while their cases dragged on for years or decades. But not all of them bothered to make that claim, figuring parole would just be extended. Bad bet.
Trump revoked the CHNV parole – as was his rightful power as president – in March. What Biden did, even if it wasn’t right, Trump had the power to undo.
For Judge Talwani to now tell Trump he can’t revoke parole for 530,000 paroled CHNV nationals without a “case-by-case” review is rich indeed. Does she seriously think that every one of the 30,000 CHNV applicants Biden let in per month was examined and approved on a “case-by-case” basis? Sure, if we say every fan let into Yankee Stadium for a game has been admitted “case-by-case.” If it simply means ‘one-by-one’, then Secretary of Homeland Security Noem can certify that, and it will be just as true as it was when former Secretary Mayorkas did.
Federal immigration law is very clear that the president has wide discretion to deny or revoke visas and remove aliens on national security or discretionary grounds. He can do or undo parole as well.
Joe Biden violated the law when he provided mass parole to hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens. No judge should be able to stop a successor president from undoing the harm a prior president has done, particularly harm that was done by ignoring, twisting, and breaking the law.
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Simon Hankinson is a Senior Research Fellow in the Border Security and Immigration Center at The Heritage Foundation.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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