Vice President Kamala Harris has proved capable of implicitly but unconvincingly reversing herself on many issues, including immigration, since she became the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, which is why her decision not to repudiate her 2019 mass amnesty plan is so alarming.
In 2019, Harris distinguished herself from the 2020 Democratic primary field by promising to use unilateral executive power to grant permanent amnesty to so-called Dreamers and 6 million other illegal immigrants.
Specifically, she said she would create a “first of its kind” parole-in-place program for participants in President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — the Dreamers. Through the intricacies of immigration law, this designation could set Dreamers and all other immigrants on a path to citizenship without legislation.
Parole in place began as an extralegal program created by Obama in 2013 to benefit the spouses, children, and parents of current and former members of the armed forces. Spouses of any citizen can apply for citizenship, but they are ineligible if they entered the country illegally. Obama solved this problem by granting them “parole in place,” which essentially changed their past illegal entry into a lawful parole entry.
For seven years, this was essentially an illegal program, but it was codified into law by the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act. Crucially, the NDAA limited parole in place to members of the armed forces and their spouses, children, or parents.
Under the 2019 Harris Dreamer amnesty, parole in place would be extended to all DACA recipients and the DACA program itself would be expanded. To be clear, however, there is no statutory basis for this program. Fast-forward to June 2024, and President Joe Biden announced his own parole in place program, not for DACA recipients but for the spouses of all U.S. citizens, whether they served in the U.S. military or not.
This executive order was immediately challenged by Republican governors, and a federal court issued an injunction to stop the program. That litigation is still ongoing and has not been resolved. It could be thrown out on standing grounds without ever reaching the merits of whether or not a president has the power to grant unilateral amnesty as Biden did.
Asked this week if Harris plans to grant unilateral executive amnesty to Dreamers, her campaign declined to answer. It also declined to say if there were any other illegal immigrants to whom she planned to grant parole in place status. That is an important admission.
Both the Biden parole in place amnesty and Harris’s proposed parole in place amnesty lack any statutory basis. If federal courts decline to strike them down on standing, it would mean Harris could give amnesty to all illegal immigrants.
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The Biden-Harris administration has already abused the parole power to let in millions of illegal immigrants, creating an extralegal immigration system alongside the legal system. Considering how willing Biden and Harris are to grant parole status to millions of illegal immigrants who want to enter the country, why wouldn’t Harris also grant retroactive parole status to millions of illegal immigrants already here?
Harris should be hounded by the press until she either repudiates her 2019 parole in place plan, as well as the Biden 2024 parole in place plan, or she should admit her administration is planning to grant the largest illegal mass amnesty in U.S. history.