Feds granted thousands parole after court’s hold; border numbers drop with Title 42 expiration

Homeland Security paroled roughly 2,500 migrants into the U.S. from the southern border on Friday, according to a department source.

A day earlier, a judge issued a temporary restraining order against the Border Patrol’s use of parole to catch and release the wave of migrants cresting along the U.S.-Mexico boundary.

Judge T. Kent Wetherell’s order, which the Biden administration is appealing, was in effect Friday. It’s unclear what authority the government used for the new paroles.

Neither Homeland Security nor the Justice Department responded to requests for comment over the weekend. Customs and Border Protection, which oversees the Border Patrol, said it would respond “as soon as possible” but hadn’t done so by Sunday afternoon.

The source who revealed the new paroles said Homeland Security released 6,000 people on parole on Thursday before the Title 42 pandemic border expulsion power expired just before midnight.

That was also the point when Judge Wetherell’s order took effect, yet the 2,500 more releases happened Friday.

Homeland Security is struggling to handle the unprecedented jailbreak along the U.S.-Mexico boundary, where nearly 10,000 migrants a day poured into the country in the run-up to the end of Title 42.

In an unexpected twist, the numbers dropped once Title 42 was lifted, from 10,000 a day just before to 6,300 on Friday and 4,200 on Saturday, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told CNN.

On ABC, Mr. Mayorkas said the drops in numbers mean officials have been able to handle the flow of people using their regular immigration authority.

“With the 50% drop in the number of encounters at our southern border, we are executing our consequence regime exactly as planned,” he told ABC.

Had the numbers remained high, the choices facing Mr. Mayorkas and his team were all bad, Border Patrol Deputy Chief Matthew Hudak told the judge in a court filing Friday. Agents could either release migrants on parole with a 60-day check-in condition; release migrants with a notice to report, which he said has a less-stringent check-in requirement; or not catch the migrants in the first place.

Without parole, he said, that latter option would become a real – and worrying – reality.

“Included within any such group that USBP is unable to apprehend could be those linked with terrorist organizations, those with criminal records, human smugglers, those actively trafficking other members of the same group (which could include children), and vulnerable children not accompanied by their parents, as well as those entering seeking protections like asylum,” Chief Hudak said.

He made that argument earlier last week. Judge Wetherell rejected it, saying he didn’t see much difference between releasing on parole and releasing without parole “because in both instances, aliens are being released into the country on an expedited basis without being placed in removal proceedings and with little to no vetting and no monitoring.”

He also rejected “doomsday rhetoric.” He said the chaos at the border is the administration’s “own making” through its policies that have spurred the two-year unprecedented surge of illegal immigrants.

Parole is a special power Homeland Security has to allow a migrant to enter the U.S. without a visa or permit.

It is supposed to be exercised on a case-by-case basis and only in cases of urgent humanitarian need or significant public benefit. Traditionally, parole was used for cases such as emergency medical treatment or the need for a witness to testify in a criminal case.

Under President Biden, parole has become a secondary immigration system. Since Oct. 1, 2021, 1.5 million migrants have been admitted under parole.

Judge Wetherell ruled in March that the administration was abusing the parole power. In particular, he said, there was no case-by-case consideration and the administration was getting the law backward. Where the department justified the public benefit by pointing to the need to reduce overcrowding in Border Patrol facilities, the judge said the law required that it be viewed from the standpoint of benefit that the migrants could bring.

The Biden administration could have appealed that ruling but did not.

Now, it is scrambling to derail his latest ruling.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre attacked the judge’s ruling.

“It’s sabotage,” she said. “That’s how that reads to us.

“It is a harmful ruling,” she added.

She said the administration was “going to continue to use every tool that we have to make sure that we are dealing with this issue in a humane and orderly way.”