Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Feb. 14 led a coalition of 20 states in a lawsuit against Biden’s Department of Homeland Security in partnership with America First Legal (AFL). The states seek an injunction against the new program, which will allow hundreds of thousands more immigrants to be “paroled” into the United States each year.
The program allows aliens to obtain advance approval to enter the United States while still in their home country, despite there not being a previous legal basis for them to do so.
The move for preliminary injunction requests that the U.S. District Court Southern District of Texas immediately halt this “parole” plan until the lawsuit is resolved.
ALF announced the lawsuit on Jan. 24 of this year, saying Biden administration officials created “a new blatantly unlawful program that will permit up to 360,000 aliens to be ‘paroled’ into the United States every year–despite no authorization from Congress to do so.”
America First Legal President Stephen Miller said in a statement about the injunction, “Biden’s plan to mass import unauthorized aliens from their home countries directly to the United States without any legal basis for doing so is nothing more than a brazen attempt to accelerate stratospheric migration levels while, at the same time, concealing the sheer volume of cross border flows by transporting these illicit aliens directly from their home countries to the American interior.”
Miller commented on how the program could lead to confusion on the part of Americans monitoring the number of migrants, saying that immigrants entering through the program would “presumably not be counted among the record numbers of illegals crossing the border.”
The program permits migrants from Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to fly into the United States if they meet certain requirements, including not entering the country illegally, passing background checks, and having a sponsor in the United States.
The program, which was introduced in October for Venezuelans and expanded in January, also allows migrants to get work permits and a two-year license to live in the United States, and it is combined with an extension of Title 42 expulsions to cover those nationalities.
The states filed a lawsuit, claiming that the program is illegal due to congressional parole rules, which limit its use to a “case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.”
Joining the suit along with Texas, were Attorneys General from Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
The White House did not immediately respond to The Epoch Times’s request for comment.