CV NEWS FEED // Senate Republicans are calling for the immediate restriction of a Biden administration parole policy which has reportedly allowed over a million migrants to flood into the country.
Camilo Montoya-Galvez of CBS reported Monday that over one million migrants “have been allowed to enter the U.S. under Biden administration [parole] programs:”
Since President Biden took office in 2021, his administration has used immigration parole at a historic scale, invoking the decades-old law to welcome hundreds of thousands of foreigners fleeing armed conflicts in Afghanistan and Ukraine, or political and economic crises in countries like Haiti and Venezuela.
“Republicans have tied changes in immigration policy to their support for” a “multi-billion-dollar supplemental package,” the left-leaning States Newsroom reported.
“If we don’t fix parole, there will be no deal,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-SC, told reporters last week.
The States Newsroom continued:
Graham said parole is a “red line” for Senate Republicans, and his comments came as President Joe Biden met with congressional leaders to advocate for more than $100 billion in aid for Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan and U.S. border security.
According to NBC’s Sahil Kapur, Graham requested that Congress implement a “hard cap” on parole among other reforms to how the law works.
He also demanded that the Biden administration “report to Congress every month,” providing information on “who was paroled [and] why.”
“That to me is a minimum in these negotiations,” Graham said.
In addition, Senate Minority Whip John Thune, R-SD, noted that throughout negotiations “there have been some significant gains made in terms of policies that are real.”
Thune is the second-highest-ranking Republican in the Senate. He specifically referred to immigration policies “dealing with asylum, [and] dealing with border security measures, whether that be a physical wall or technical barriers.”
The program that has resulted in the most migrant parole arrivals is the CBP One app.
According to the Department of Homeland Security website, it is “a free online tool available to migrants in Central and Northern Mexico for individuals to schedule appointments to present themselves at a [U.S. Port of Entry (POE)] along the Southwest Border.”
“CBP One enables migrants to secure an appointment while waiting away from the border and only travel to present at a POE for their scheduled date,” the website adds.
Per Montoya-Galvez, the app has been responsible for 422,000 arrivals.
Meanwhile, a program for migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela has resulted in 340,000 parole arrivals, Biden’s Uniting for Ukraine policy resulted in 176,000, and his Afghan resettlement effort resulted in 77,000.
While often cited by Democrats as a priority of liberal open border policy, “family reunification” initiatives have only resulted in less than four thousand arrivals.
“Immigration parole was passed by Congress as a means to provide targeted, limited and temporary relief to foreigners in emergency situations,” noted former Congressman Tim Huelskamp, Ph.D. Huelskamp serves as a senior advisor to CatholicVote.
“But under President Biden, immigration parole has been radically misused to admit illegally more than a million foreigners into this country – most unlikely ever to leave,” Huelskamp continued:
This open-borders Biden policy has overwhelmed the social safety net all across the country and diverted public resources away from needy, low-income Americans, has abetted the drug and sex-trafficking cartels, and is radically undermining any semblance of a lawful, humane immigration system.
>> TRUMP’S CBP CHIEF: ‘WHAT IS CHRISTIAN’ ABOUT BIDEN’S BORDER POLICIES? <<
CatholicVote Director of Governmental Affairs Tom McClusky expressed concern that congressional Republicans’ attempts to fix the parole system will not be enough.
“The rumored details of the yet-to-be-released bill does nothing to alleviate the problems that are actually happening, and in fact would increase the numbers of people crossing illegally,” McClusky said.
“The Biden administration and their contractors at the border are facilitating the trafficking of human beings under the guise of ‘welcoming the stranger,’” he continued. “For decades the US Senate have been proven to be incapable of passing legitimate reform.”
According to a January 1 FOX News report, “more than 302,000 migrants were documented attempting to cross the U.S. southern border” last month. “It is the highest total for a single month ever recorded.” It is also the first time migrant encounters have exceeded 300,000.
>> SPEAKER JOHNSON: NO MORE UKRAINE AID UNTIL BORDER IS SECURE <<
Last month, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-LA, insisted that he will not support allocating more wartime aid to Ukraine until both houses of Congress take “transformative” action to quell the border crisis.
“From the very beginning when I was handed the gavel, we need clarity on what we’re doing in Ukraine and how we’ll have proper oversight of the spending of precious taxpayer dollars of the American citizens,” Johnson said at the time.
“And we need transformative change at the [southern] border,” he emphasized. “Thus far, we’ve got neither.”
