Former President Joe Biden admitted over 1.4 million illegal immigrants into the United States through both his CBP One app and Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, or CHNV, parole programs. An estimated 4 million more illegal immigrants were arrested while illegally crossing the southern border and then released on parole into the U.S. None of these migrants received a thorough background check, nor were they screened for valid asylum claims. Yet now, Democratic activist judges demand that each of them be given full due process protections before their parole may be revoked.
Neither the Constitution nor federal law supports these expansive due process claims. Biased Democratic judges are trying to disable the federal government so it cannot enforce immigration law by flooding an overwhelmed system with specious asylum claims. The Trump administration has every right, in fact a duty, to fight these rulings all the way to the Supreme Court, where it should win — and we are confident that it will.
On Oct. 19, 2022, after a record 231,000 arrests of illegal immigrants crossing the border, the Biden administration announced a new program under which Venezuelans who obtained a U.S. sponsor were allowed to fly into the U.S. and be granted parole despite the fact that they were still inadmissible aliens. The initial cap for the program was set at 24,000 inadmissible Venezuelans admitted every month.
In January 2023, the program was expanded to include citizens from Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua, and the cap was raised to 30,000 a month. Parolees in this program were immediately given work permits, food stamps, Medicaid, and welfare. The parole term was allegedly set by Biden at two years, but he claimed that future presidents had the authority to extend it indefinitely.
The Biden administration also claimed these parolees received “a national security and public safety vetting,” but these checks were only cursory. The migrants’ names were put through Department of Homeland Security databases for past trouble with the law but without any check being made on data from their home countries. No interviews were conducted. No claim of persecution was required. All a migrant needed to do to enter the U.S. was find a willing sponsor here in America, many of whom later turned out to be fraudulent. DHS, of course, did little to vet the domestic hosts, for the Democratic administration wanted as many migrants as it could get.
On his first day in office, President Donald Trump ended admitting more migrants through the CHNV program, and then on March 25, DHS began the administrative process of revoking the parole status of those who were already here. A group of Nicaraguan and Venezuelan migrants sued in federal court to keep their parole, and their case was assigned to a judge who, before she was appointed to the bench, volunteered for Democratic Party political campaigns, including those of Barack Obama for president and Elizabeth Warren for Senate.
This leftist judge then held that Trump could not issue a blanket revocation of parole and instead must review each and every migrant on a case-by-case basis. This is absurd on its face and will eventually be overturned by higher courts.
The Democrats’ strategy on immigration has been, and still is, to flood migrants into the country with little to no vetting and then turn around and demand maximum due process for every migrant a Republican administration tries to deport. It’s heads Democrats win and tails Republicans (and U.S. citizens) lose
While illegal immigrants are due some process, they have no right to demand the same process that citizens get when tried for a crime in the U.S. As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority in Department of Homeland Security v. Thuraissigiam, “While aliens who have established connections in this country have due process rights in deportation proceedings, the Court long ago held that Congress is entitled to set the conditions for an alien’s lawful entry into this country and that, as a result, an alien at the threshold of initial entry cannot claim any greater rights under the Due Process Clause.”
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Scalia went on, “It was Congress’s judgment that detaining all asylum seekers until the full-blown removal process is completed would place an unacceptable burden on our immigration system and that releasing them would present an undue risk that they would fail to appear for removal proceedings.”
The due process clause of the Constitution is not a “get out of deportation free” card for illegal immigrants. Trump does not have the power to detain people at random and deport them to randomly chosen countries, and there is no evidence that is what he is doing. Biden’s CHNV program was illegal from the start. Trump had the right, and was right, to end it and begin deporting every migrant who entered the country under its bogus aegis.
