Op-ed: Trump’s Immigration Test

Shortly after his swearing-in, President Donald Trump told supporters that he felt immigration was the “No. 1 issue” that led to his victory, more important than inflation. This is no doubt why he got off to a strong start on immigration Monday with a series of executive orders and other actions. Trump will be an enormous improvement over Biden on immigration. But much of what he is doing is returning to the status quo ante—as a colleague of mine has noted, even “mass deportation” can be seen as a return to immigration normalcy. After all, in 2014 under President Barack Obama, ICE’s Enforcement and Removals Operations directorate deported nearly 316,000 people.

As important as it is to unwind bad Biden policies and reverse their consequences, returning to the border and immigration situation of January 2021 isn’t enough—much remained to be done even then. What should we look for over the next days and weeks to see if Trump 2.0 will represent a real advance beyond Trump 1.0?

One issue to watch is parole. The new administration immediately suspended the entrance of inadmissible aliens via Biden’s unlawful mass-parole programs using the CBP One app. Immigration parole is a narrow power given by Congress to the president to let in people who are inadmissible; it was intended to be used in a handful of cases, such as in a medical emergency or the need for an inadmissible alien to testify in court. Biden’s two mass-parole programs—one at the Mexican land border for people from any country and the other for nationals of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to fly directly into the interior—have resulted in the settlement of about 1 million people who have no right to be here.

Parole was one of the tools the Biden administration used to freelance a parallel immigration system to evade the numerical limits on immigration established by Congress. Under Biden’s watch, more foreigners were released into the country via this system than through legal immigration.

Ending these programs is essential. But what’s stopping the next Democratic administration from just starting them up again, or using parole as a pretext for something even worse?

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[Read the whole thing at Compact.]