A federal judge in Florida ruled against the federal government in a lawsuit by the state, agreeing that the Biden administration’s new parole system, which authorizes the release of tens of thousands of migrants, violates immigration law.
On Wednesday, US District Judge T. Kent Wetherell in Tallahassee, Florida, said that the program “effectively turned the Southwest Border into a meaningless line in the sand and little more than a speedbump for aliens flooding into the country.”
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Republican Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody made a statement after the ruling, detailing her support for the judge’s decision.
“Today’s ruling affirms what we have known all along, President Biden is responsible for the border crisis and his unlawful immigration policies make this country less safe. A federal judge is NOW ordering Biden to follow the law, and his administration should immediately begin securing the border to protect the American people.”
The parole program is part of the Biden administration’s larger “non-detention policy,” which Wethrell wrote is not under his or any judge’s purview.
“The evidence establishes that the current status quo at the Southwest Border is unsustainable, but it is not the Court’s job to solve the immigration crisis — that is the job of the political branches,”
Biden’s policy attitude comes from the harsh political optics of detaining migrants while waiting for asylum claims to be processed. Biden’s program released them into the US instead and relied on their return after a decision was made. Critics attacked President Trump for a detention policy, but Wethrell insisted, “There is nothing inherently inhumane or cruel about detaining aliens pending completion of their immigration proceedings.”
The administration faced over 1.7 million migrant encounters in the fiscal year 2021 and over 2.3 million in 2022 after ending multiple Trump-era immigration policies like the Migrant Protection Protocols, which kept migrants in Mexico for their immigration hearings. The Biden policies looked to process the migrants more quickly.
Florida argued that the Biden executive policy violated provisions of law that required immigrants to be detained while their cases were resolved and cited the expenses that came to them and other border states with their release as standing.
The Biden administration has denied any new actual policies on migrant processing, instead arguing that change came from a shift in priorities that is permissible under federal immigration law. They argued that while a policy change would be a legal issue, this priority change is political.
While Judge Wethrell acknowledged the distinction, he disagreed that this categorization made the changes immune to judicial review.
“Although it would certainly be much easier for the Court to simply say that elections have consequences and that the parties’ disagreement over proper immigration policy should be resolved in Congress or at the ballot box rather than in court, the Court sees no jurisdictional or prudential reason why it should not exercise its duty to ‘say what the law is’ in this case and then let the political chips fall where they may.”
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