Biden Takes a Page From Obama’s I “Changed the Law” Immigration Playbook in Unconstitutional Amnesty Attempt To Hoodwink Voters

This week, President Biden announced a new Executive order on immigration that will provide 500,000 illegal immigrants with amnesty and a path to citizenship, encourage additional illegal immigration, and trample on our Constitution.  This Administration has set new lows in sidestepping Congress, ignoring state’s rights, and assuming powers never meant for the Executive branch.  I hope conservatives find a way to push back on this latest unconstitutional action and that the Supreme Court will once again step in.

In a press conference orchestrated to help raise his sinking poll numbers, President Biden announced that he would be providing amnesty and a path to citizenship for an estimated 500,000 illegal immigrants, all by executive fiat.  The President camouflaged this naked abuse of power as an effort to “keep families together.” This action, however, will send yet another signal that the United States will bend over backwards to grant citizenship to illegal immigrants.  So if you cross the border illegally – don’t worry, eventually the Left will find a way, legal or otherwise, to get you onto a path to citizenship.

President Biden’s sweeping Executive order has no grounding in our Constitution.  It completely ignores Congress, which alone has the power to create the kind of legislation that would achieve the mission of Biden’s order.  Instead of working with the Legislative branch, Team Biden is unilaterally granting amnesty to half a million illegal immigrants by employing a measure called “parole in place,” which in the past has only been used sparingly and in most cases, only for case-by-case issues related to the spouses and children of active-duty U.S. service members.  Because he sidestepped Congress and elevated the importance of an obscure rule meant for limited use, Biden has ensured this Executive order will likely be overturned in court, or at the very least thrown out by the next conservative President.

Of course, the ultimate fate of this rule, and the 500,000 or more families it affects, matter little to the President.  This order was not issued to fix our broken immigration system, which is already incapable of processing the massive number of asylum claims made in just the last almost four years under Biden.  It wasn’t issued to help immigrant families either – indeed, the fact that our overburdened, bloated immigration system will now have to process half a million more “parole in place” claims only heightens the risk of fraud and will likely make the wait longer for families trying to go through the process the right way.

This order was issued for a different purpose: to raise Biden’s plummeting approval ratings.  A recent poll found that immigration was the second-most important issue for Americans in the upcoming elections, behind only inflation, and that 67% of independent voters disapproved of Biden’s border policies.  Thus, Biden’s Executive order – like President Obama’s DACA decree, where he boasted he “change[d] the law” – is a calculated political move taken in an election year to reframe the immigration issue around compassion for families – performative though it may be – while shifting focus away from the disastrous consequences of his Administration’s ongoing failure to secure our border: higher costs for the American people, the influx of poisonous fentanyl into our communities, and the greater risk of terror attacks on our homeland due to our inability to monitor who is crossing into our country.  President Biden is using illegal immigrants and their families as pawns in his bid to get reelected.  It’s gross and indecent.

In his announcement, Biden stated he was taking this step because “Trump and the Republicans” were stalling progress on border legislation, even though he and every reasonable American can see that it is radical progressives in Congress and members of his own Administration who are opposed to fixing the border crisis – because they don’t believe in borders in the first place.  The next conservative Administration should not simply overturn this unconstitutional policy.  It should work with Congress to impose real limits on the Executive branch’s power to hijack legislative powers for its own political purposes, so that these kinds of abuses cannot happen again.