Credit: Slate.com
On Wednesday, a judge issued a small win for the crisis at the border.
A federal judge in Florida struck down the Biden administration’s use of parole to mass release migrants into the United States. He found the practice unlawful and accused the administration of turning the border into a “meaningless line in the sand.”
Judge T. Kent Wetherell made the ruling in response to a lawsuit from the state of Florida. This suit alleged the administration’s mass release of tens of thousands of migrants via humanitarian parole into Alternatives to Detention (known and Parole + ATD) is unlawful.
In the condemning opinion, Wetherell said the Biden White House had “effectively turned the Southwest Border into a meaningless line in the sand and little more than a speedbump for aliens flooding into the country.”
Wetherell also ruled that the policies implemented by the Biden Administration, which includes catch and release, were contributing to the collapse of the border as a means to keep illegal migrants out.
“Today’s ruling affirms what we have known all along, President Biden is responsible for the border crisis and his unlawful immigration policies make this country less safe. A federal judge is NOW ordering Biden to follow the law, and his administration should immediately begin securing the border to protect the American people,” Republican Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody said.
Fox News reported:
The administration had been increasingly using parole — which the statute says is supposed to be used on a “case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit” — to release migrants quickly into the interior to reduce overcrowding at the border as it deals with historic migrant numbers at the border. Florida contended that the government is violating statutory mandates that migrants be detained. The administration had argued that there is no “non-detention policy” and that it is using its prosecutorial discretion.
“The evidence establishes that Defendants have effectively turned the Southwest Border into a meaningless line in the sand and little more than a speedbump for aliens flooding into the country by prioritizing “alternatives to detention” over actual detention and by releasing more than a million aliens into the country — on “parole” or pursuant to the exercise of “prosecutorial discretion” under a wholly inapplicable statute — without even initiating removal proceedings,” the judge said, siding with Florida.
“There is nothing inherently inhumane or cruel about detaining aliens pending completion of their immigration proceedings,” he said.
Governor Ron DeSantis’ deputy press secretary, Jeremy Redfern, said the governor is “acting to protect Floridians from Biden’s border crisis.”
“Today, Judge Wetherell vindicated the governor’s actions and ruled that the Biden administration is breaking federal immigration law by failing to fulfill the duties of his office and secure the nation’s border,” he said in a statement, before noting the judge’s conclusion that the administration had turned the border into a “meaningless line in the sand.”
“Thankfully, Governor DeSantis steps up to lead when national leaders fail,” Redfern said.
Wetherell also sided with Florida in its argument that it had standing to challenge the policy. More than 100,000 migrants have been released into Florida, and it has caused a significant increase in costs to provide services to them.
The Biden administration has seen more than 1.7 million migrant encounters in FY 2021. They have seen over 2.3 million in FY 2022. They ended the Trump-era policy Migrant Protection Protocols, which kept migrants in Mexico for their immigration hearings.
