Sixteen Republican-led states filed a lawsuit in partnership with America First Legal against the Biden-Harris administration over a plan to give as many as 1.3 million illegal immigrants what critics call “immediate executive amnesty.”
The lawsuit, filed on Friday, challenges a new parole-in-place programfrom the Biden-Harris administration’s Department of Homeland Security “that effectively provides a new pathway to citizenship for more than a million illegal aliens.”
“Longstanding federal law prohibits aliens who entered the United States unlawfully from obtaining most immigration benefits,” the lawsuit states, addressing the Biden-Harris administration program that would allow some illegal aliens to stay in the United States while requesting parole status.
“This includes obtaining lawful permanent resident status—without first leaving the United States and waiting outside the United States for the requisite time—based on an approved family-based or employment-based visa petition,” the suit goes on to say.
While the administration has claimed that roughly 550,000 illegal immigrants would be eligible for the parole-in-place amnesty, the lawsuit argues that the figure is “likely a significant underestimate,” also stating that the real number could be as high as 1.3 million.
“Biden’s new parole workaround unilaterally grants the opportunity for citizenship to unvetted aliens whose first act on American soil was to break our laws,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton contended. “This violates the Constitution and actively worsens the illegal immigration disaster that is hurting Texas and our country.”
The sixteen states that joined the lawsuit as plaintiffs against the Biden-Harris Department of Homeland Security are Texas, Idaho, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Wyoming.
The lawsuit comes amid an unprecedented crisis on the southern border that has turned immigration into one of the most important issuesheading into the November elections.
Over 10 million people have crossed the border under the Biden-Harris administration, with an estimated 1.7 million illegal immigrant gotaways recorded since he was inaugurated in 2021. There were 415,000 total reported gotaways for 2018, 2019, and 2020 under the Trump administration.
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