https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/nov/27/how-biden-converts-illegal-immigrants-legal-parole/
Maria Esperanza Diaz Ruiz had expected to pay a smuggler to get across the U.S.-Mexico border. Then she learned that the Biden administration’s new program would let her walk into the country at no cost as long as she had a tale of woe from back home.
She is one of the migrants taking advantage of a Biden policy that is converting illegal immigrants into legal “parolees,” a status that offers a work permit and a foothold in the U.S., according to the Center for Immigration Studies, which observed Ms. Diaz Ruiz and others.
“This is real,” she told the center’s Todd Bensman. “This is not a magic trick.”
Her justification for gaining parole, she said, is that she worked for a Nicaraguan government official who was homosexual. Her ex-husband threatened her and her boss, she told Mr. Bensman.
“I had to leave because I would be killed,” she said.
Armed with documents and a criminal background check, she joined a group of roughly two dozen migrants who were entered into the U.S. border authorities’ system, driven to the border crossing between Mexicali and Calexico, California, and turned over to federal authorities.
Mr. Bensman got unfettered access to Mexico’s side of the processing and published his findings last week.
He said crossings are not just at ports of entry along the border. Some immigrants are flown from Cancun or Monterrey directly into U.S. airports.
“This looks to be part of a purposeful strategy to create workarounds to court-ordered expulsion policies but also to reduce politically painful illegal crossing statistics by channeling ever more people through these legalized crossings,” he said. “While neither DHS nor the White House has publicized this legalized entrance program, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has repeatedly telegraphed it in his oft-stated intentions to create ‘legal pathways’ as part of the administration’s overarching ‘safe, orderly, and humane’ vision for southern border immigration.”
The program relies on Mr. Mayorkas’ power of “humanitarian parole.” The secretary can admit people into the U.S. outside of the usual systems for temporary or immigrant visas.
