On Friday, several state attorneys general, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, filed a lawsuit to temporarily suspend the Biden administration’s Parole in Place program, which would have provided protection and relief for undocumented individuals who are married to U.S. citizens and have lived in the U.S. for at least a decade. This affects up to 110,000 Texans, according to an FWD.us analysis of census data.
The lawsuit is a devastating setback for a program that would have a tremendous positive impact on Texas families, communities, economy and workforce. The estimated 500,000 undocumented people in the U.S. who meet the program’s basic eligibility requirements are married to U.S. citizens and have lived in the U.S. for an average of more than 20 years. One-fifth of them live in Texas.
Parole would ensure that these families can remain together with their children, loved ones, and neighbors, and help these individuals continue to contribute to our workforce and economy. Currently, many U.S. citizens who want to provide legal status for their spouses are unable to do so due to bureaucratic hurdles resulting from our broken immigration system and a lack of congressional action to address this problem. For example, many individuals married to U.S. citizens but unable to officially enter the U.S. or who are paroled must leave the country and legally re-enter to apply for legal status, which can create problems with immigration bars and backlogs and can result in families being separated for several years.
Parole would provide spouses of undocumented U.S. citizens long-overdue protection from deportation, as well as the opportunity to apply for legal work authorization and obtain legal permanent residency through their marriage. More than 315,000 U.S. citizens in Texas live with someone who qualifies for this program and would also benefit from these protections.
Our economy and job market would also benefit. If these immigrants seek citizenship, they would bring an additional $1.5 billion to the Texas economy and an additional $512 million in state and local taxes per year, according to an analysis by FWD.us—and that’s just for Texas.
Blocking this program would squander those economic benefits and put tens of thousands of Texas families at risk of inhumane separation, especially if former President Donald Trump is elected and has the ability to carry out the mass deportations he has promised. Using local police forces, the National Guard, and the military to forcibly deport millions of people, as they have threatened, would cost trillions of dollars and devastate our workforce and our communities.
Trump and his allies have succeeded in temporarily blocking the implementation of pro-immigrant policies. But many of these challenges ultimately fail because President Joe Biden is using existing legal powers to push through these meaningful changes. A lawsuit challenging the administration’s use of parole at the border was dismissed earlier this year by a Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas, who found there was no evidence the law had harmed the state.
The president’s authority to grant parole to certain immigrants, including through parole in effect, is legal and long-standing. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 established the parole authority, and Congress has reaffirmed it repeatedly in the decades since. Presidents of both parties have used parole extensively: For example, President George W. Bush’s administration used parole to reunite long-separated U.S. citizens with their immediate family members from Cuba. Parole has also been used to provide assistance to military members whose spouses are illegal immigrants, from the Bush administration to the Biden administration.
In 2019, Congress added language to the National Defense Authorization Act reaffirming “the importance of the Secretary of Homeland Security’s parole authority.” That bill passed both houses of Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support and was signed by Trump.
Even some anti-immigration activists, who are usually the first to condemn any pro-immigration policy as “illegal,” agree that the use of parole was clearly authorized by Congress, putting it on “much more solid legal footing.”
The court should quickly dismiss these baseless challenges and restore the program to keep Texas and American families together, strengthen our communities, and promote our economic growth.
Zaira Garcia is Director of Regional Government Relations at FWD.usa nonpartisan political organization that advocates for reforms in the immigration and criminal justice systems.
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