A group of undocumented immigrants and their families are moving to a federal court to defend a new Biden administration program against a Republican-led lawsuit from 16 states.
The program, which the White House calls Keeping Families Together, offers a form of legal assistance known as “parole in place” to an estimated half million undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens, making it easier for them to apply for permanent residency and citizenship. Republican states, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, filed a lawsuit Friday seeking to end the program.
In response, six undocumented immigrants eligible for parole, along with their U.S. citizen spouses, filed a motion Monday to join the government in defending the program in federal court. They are being joined in their motion by the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, or CHIRLA, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit.
“I just think it’s absurd that Texas would file a lawsuit that would literally tear my family apart,” said Foday Turay, one of the immigrants seeking to intervene in the case. Turay was brought to the U.S. from Sierra Leone as a child, where his family escaped a civil war. He is now a lawyer and works as a prosecutor for the Philadelphia district attorney’s office. He is married to a U.S. citizen from New Jersey, with whom he has a 1-year-old son.
“I’ve been waiting for a program like this for over a decade,” Turay said. “When you live in a country where you’ve been paying taxes for years, and yet you’re constantly afraid of being separated from your family and your community, when does that fear end?”
Undocumented immigrants who are married to U.S. citizens can apply to legalize their status, but they must usually leave the country first, risking years of or even permanent separation from their families. For that reason, many choose to remain undocumented. The parole in place program allows them to apply for a green card and eventually citizenship without leaving the country.
Applicants must prove they lived in the U.S. continuously for 10 years and were married to a U.S. citizen before the program was announced June 17. They must also pass a background check: misdemeanors are disqualifying, as are a number of other crimes, including domestic violence and most drug offenses.
In announcing the lawsuit, the Texas Attorney General’s Office said the parole program “directly violates the laws enacted by Congress.”
“Under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the federal government is actively working to transform the United States into a country without borders and a country without laws,” Paxton said in a statement. “This [program] violates the Constitution and actively exacerbates the illegal immigration disaster plaguing Texas and our country.”
The states that join Texas in suing the federal government are Idaho, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and Wyoming.
They are being joined in the lawsuit by America First Legal, the group founded by Stephen Miller, who served as a senior adviser to then-President Donald Trump and was the architect of many of his administration’s immigration policies.
“It is blatantly illegal, a deadly accelerant of the devastating border invasion, and we will use every lawful tool to stop it,” said Miller, who called the program “executive amnesty.”
The lawsuit was filed in Tyler, a small city in eastern Texas, in a division of the federal district courts whose two judges were both appointed by Trump. The case was assigned to Judge J. Campbell Barker.
If Barker grants the motion to intervene, the immigrants and their attorney will be directly included as defendants in the lawsuit. While the federal government will defend the program on behalf of its own agencies, the immigrants and their attorney will defend it on the basis of their own personal interests.
“If we had not intervened, the judge would not have considered the voices and experiences of the people who actually benefit from the release of Keeping Families Together,” said Esther Sung, legal director of the Justice Action Center, which represents the immigrants along with Make the Road New York.
In addition to its potentially transformative effect on the lives of immigrants and their families, the parole in place program could have an impact on some voters in the November election. The pro-immigration group FWD.us estimates that about 60,000 people eligible for the program live in swing states — though they can’t vote, their citizen spouses can.
But the lawsuit puts the program in immediate jeopardy. Texas and the other states are asking Barker to immediately halt the program while the courts consider the case.
Discussing its impact on states
In support of the lawsuit, the 16 Republican attorneys general argue that the parole program causes irreparable harm to their states. In particular, they argue that undocumented immigrants cost states money in education, health care and other expenses, and that a program like this will encourage future illegal immigration.
Sung, the Justice Action Center attorney, said the group plans to challenge the states’ claims that they will suffer harm as a result of the program. The group successfully pursued a similar legal strategy when it intervened to defend another Biden administration program that offers conditional release to certain immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. In March, a Trump-appointed judge rejected a challenge to the program brought by Texas on similar grounds.
The question of whether undocumented immigrants pose net fiscal costs or benefits is controversial, with different analysts reaching different conclusions, often along ideological lines.
But Turay says he and other immigrants eligible for parole are typically taxpayers who are well-established in their communities, given the program’s requirement that applicants live in the country for 10 years. The White House estimates that applicants have lived in the U.S. for more than 20 years on average.
Turay himself relies largely on tax receipts to prove his residency. “Most of the people who apply have been paying taxes for years — on mortgages, on wages,” he said. “That’s what we show as proof: 10 years of paid taxes.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
