America First Legal (AFL), Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, and a coalition of twenty state Attorneys General took new legal action to stop President Biden from continuing to fly hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens from crime-plagued nations directly into cities across the United States.
The underlying lawsuit aims to stop the Biden Administration’s “parole” scheme that allows 30,000 aliens from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela (CHNV) to enter the country each month and remain – indefinitely. The program allows these aliens – after more or less flying to the destination of their choice – to obtain work permits and ultimately claim public benefits, such as food stamps and welfare. The program floods the United States with legions of illegal aliens who should not be in the U.S., only further worsening the worst immigration crisis in United States’ history.
In February, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas erroneously dismissed the lawsuit, finding that the states did not have standing to sue because the court did not believe the states had sufficiently established they were hurt by the program. The court’s decision focused on border encounter numbers for the five months after the program started which showed the total number of CHNV aliens crossing the border had decreased.
However, the court ignored evidence showing that, after those first five months, border crossings by CHNV aliens increased significantly and are now higher than they were before the program started. In the five months before the program started, DHS encountered 417,113 CHNV aliens, or a daily average of 2,356 CHNV aliens. In the last five months of available data (October 2023 through February 2024), the total number of CHNV alien encounters is 449,771, or a daily average 2,959 a day. The daily average rate has increased by 25%.
The Biden Administration justified the CHNV program by claiming that it would decrease the number of illegal crossings. By their own standard, then, the program is a complete failure.
The court ruling also ignored the significant financial costs that Texas, and all states around the nation, have incurred at the hands of Biden’s parole program. These costs include issuing driver’s licenses, healthcare costs, education, and, of course, increased law enforcement and correctional facility services.
