Biden’s Border Crisis Will Return If We Don’t Close The Loopholes

Haitian citizens tried to get the Supreme Court to uphold their Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation Tuesday, asking the high court to toss the Trump administration’s appeal of lower court rulings blocking its efforts to end TPS for the Caribbean country. The legal battle highlights an ongoing struggle over TPS and the backdoor mass immigration machine more broadly.

People imagine that legal and illegal immigration are separate, distinct things. But there’s a grey area between them that presidents for years have exploited to create a shadow immigration system to circumvent the limits imposed by Congress. This abuse has been going on for years, but the Biden administration dialed it up to 11.

The Trump administration is working to undo the damage caused by its predecessors, but unless Congress changes the law, the next Democrat president will just restart the shadow system.

The two pillars of this parallel, extra-legal immigration system are immigration parole and Temporary Protected Status, or TPS.

Past presidents have used parole to let in foreigners in any number, for any reason, for any length of time they felt like. And TPS has been abused to let illegal aliens already here stay indefinitely. The key to both is that presidential administrations have for decades claimed they can give work permits and Social Security numbers to any illegal aliens they want. And once you’re here with a work permit, it’s a lot harder to send you home, which is the point.

Congress enacted both these programs, but presidents have ignored the tight requirements Congress intended. Parole, for instance, was supposed to be for a handful of individual emergency cases, like someone whose mother would die before a visa could be processed or a gang member who’s barred from entering but is needed to testify in court.

Instead, parole has been used for the mass arrival of whole categories of foreigners outside the normal immigration system. At first, it was mainly used for refugee admissions, and so Congress passed the Refugee Act of 1980 to limit such presidential freelancing. But all that did was convince subsequent administrations to invent whole new parole programs to circumvent Congress: family reunification parole, Central American Minors (CAM) parole, international entrepreneur parole, and even “parole in place,” a legal fiction to retroactively parole border-jumping illegal aliens.

Congress in 1996 again tried to fence in presidents’ use of parole by adding more adjectives and adverbs to the law, which now says it may be used “only on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.”

Fat lot of good that did.

The previous abuses of parole were child’s play compared to the Biden administration’s shenanigans. Biden’s Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, paroled nearly 3 million illegal aliens into the United States, more than all prior grants of parole combined. In fact, Mayorkas’ abuse of the parole power was one of the main reasons the House of Representatives impeached him in 2024.

The other pillar of the shadow immigration system is TPS, which, despite its name, is anything but temporary. TPS is intended to offer temporary relief to illegal aliens who find themselves in the U.S. when some natural or man-made disaster strikes their country.

Congress enacted TPS in 1990 to try to fence in presidential freelancing in this area as well, where administrations would grant “Extended Voluntary Departure,” EVD, to illegals they chose not to deport. EVD was just a made-up thing with no basis in law, and TPS was supposed to impose some structure and oversight on this process.

It failed.

Most grants of TPS have just renewed on autopilot, year after year, decade after decade. In the rare instances when TPS was not automatically renewed, administrations often replaced it with a different made-up three-letter initial to let illegals stay and keep working — Deferred Enforced Departure, or DED.

But whether it’s EVD or TPS or DED, it’s all the same thing — a way for presidents to ignore their duty to enforce immigration law and grant illegals work permits and Social Security numbers in the bargain. More than 1.3 million illegals now have TPS.

Put together, parole and TPS account for something like 25 percent of the total illegal population — who were either let in and given work permits by Biden and his predecessors, or de facto amnestied if they were already here.

President Trump is trying to undo this mess by ending Biden’s grants of parole and TPS. The anti-borders crowd is fighting this in court but will eventually lose.

But what happens if Gavin Newsom or AOC or some other anti-borders politician wins the White House in 2028 or 2032 or 2036? The only way to prevent them from restarting the shadow immigration system is to change the law. And only Congress can do that.

Presidents have shown that they simply cannot be trusted to be responsible in using the discretion Congress has given them in immigration policy. Congress has given them an inch, and they’ve taken a mile — or a million miles, in the case of Biden.

So that discretion must be taken away.

Three changes are needed.

First: TPS must be repealed. There’s no need for it since, if there’s a natural disaster that makes it unsafe to deport people to a country, ICE can just suspend flights for, say, 60 days and then have another look. The only real reason for TPS is to give work permits to illegals.

Second: Parole must be numerically capped. A little wiggle room is needed in any large system, but since parole has been abused so flagrantly, Congress needs to yank the executive branch’s leash. A limit of 3,000 or 5,000 a year should be more than enough to meet the narrow, emergency needs parole was intended to meet.

Third and most important: Congress must pass legislation prohibiting the Department of Homeland Security from giving work permits to foreigners whose status doesn’t expressly allow it. If you get rid of TPS and don’t do this, then a future administration will just give illegals work permits under some new phony three-letter status. Even beyond parole and TPS, there are millions of illegals to whom presidents have given work permits, making a mockery of the annual caps on legal immigration, passed by Congress in large part to limit competition with American workers.

These three changes wouldn’t fix all the problems we have with immigration. Asylum is an outdated mess, and even regular legal immigration is excessively high. But they would go a long way toward preventing any future administration from reviving the shadow immigration system and would help preserve Congress’s — and voters’ — authority over this key area of policy that affects so many aspects of our national life.