A federal judge on Thursday afternoon temporarily halted the Biden administration’s plan to parole migrants who cross the southern border illegally.
For two years, the Biden administration has released some migrants without giving them a court date. Through the Alternatives to Detention program, migrants without a court date are tracked and forced to “check in” via a phone app. The program was designed to prevent migrants from disappearing into the shadows while they await their court dates.
But the administration prepared a new “parole” program this week to release migrants from custody without a court date or any way to track them, NBC News reported.
What was the sentence?
On Thursday evening, just hours before Title 42 was set to expire, US District Judge T. Kent Wetherell ordered the Biden administration to back down and issued a two-week restraining order against the policy. His decision came after Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration filed a lawsuit seeking a temporary restraining order.
In his ruling, Wetherell explained that there is no “material difference” between the new parole program and the “catch and release” program that he declared unconstitutional two months ago.
Wetherell also admonished the Biden administration for claiming that stopping the parole program would “cause chaos.” Any chaos, the judge said, is Biden’s doing. He wrote:
Leaving aside the fact that even President Biden recently acknowledged that the border has been in chaos for “several years,” the defendants’ doomsday rhetoric rings hollow because, as detailed in Florida, this problem is largely one of the defendants’ own creation. by adopting an implementation of policies that have encouraged so-called “irregular migration” that has become quite regular over the last 2 years.
How did the government respond?
Customs and Border Protection criticized the order as “harmful” but said immigration authorities would enforce it.
“This is a harmful decision that will result in unsafe overcrowding at CBP facilities and undermine our ability to efficiently process and remove migrants, and risks creating dangerous conditions for CBP agents and migrants. Border Patrol,” a CBP statement said. “The fact is that when overcrowding has occurred at Border Patrol facilities, both Republican and Democratic administrations have used this parole authority to protect the safety of migrants and the workforce.”
The Biden administration argues that this harm is overcrowding in migrant facilities, which are expected to be overwhelmed with tens of thousands of migrants as they continually cross the border.
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