President Joe Biden decried a ruling that temporarily blocked a new administration program that would have offered legal status to hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants, endangering a key policy goal the administration announced in June to balance restrictions earlier this year to speed the deportation of recent arrivals entering the country illegally.
The ruling by a federal judge in Texas suspended “parole in place,” a program intended to provide legal status to family members of US citizens in the country illegally. Under the proposal, immigrants who have been in the US for at least 10 years could seek deportation protection and work permits without having to leave the country, which the White House argued would help preserve family units.
But the Texas judge paused the program just a week after the Department of Homeland Security began accepting applications, saying the administration had exceeded its authority in rewriting immigration laws.
“Last night, a single district court in Texas ruled that our work to keep families together has to stop,” Biden said in a statement. “That ruling is wrong. These families should not be needlessly separated. They should be able to stay together, and my Administration will not stop fighting for them.”
Biden announced the program in June, and it was intended as a counterweight to the crackdown announced weeks earlier that curbed asylum claims by those entering the country without visas or other documentation. Immigration levels have dropped significantly since Biden’s executive action restricting migrants’ ability to seek asylum between ports of entry during periods of heightened migration, but the policies were criticized by advocacy groups and the head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus as draconian.
Biden said he was driven to act after congressional Republicans twice blocked a bipartisan immigration bill at the urging of former President Donald Trump, now the party’s presidential nominee. But his executive action – and the corresponding decrease in immigration court cases – has blunted the issue ahead of November’s election.
Republican states sued to block the program on Aug. 23, arguing it violated the Administrative Procedure Act and exceeded the authority of the Department of Homeland Security.
If the program is ultimately allowed to proceed, an estimated 550,000 people would be eligible to apply. Applicants seeking protection as the spouse of a US citizen must have resided in the US for the past decade and been married before June 17, 2024. Some step-children of US citizens would also qualify.
The advocacy group Fwd.us estimates that 120,000 people in California are eligible to apply, the most of any state. If they were to gain citizenship, they’d contribute an additional $1.6 billion to the US economy. An additional 111,000 people in Texas and 27,000 in Florida would also be eligible. On average, the eligible residents of these states have been in the US for over two decades.
