Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy said Tuesday a parole program established by then-President Joe Biden was not legal while discussing the Supreme Court’s decision to allow Trump to begin deporting hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans.
The Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to begin the process of revoking Temporary Protected Status (TPS) from over 300,000 Venezuelans in the United States. McCarthy said that lower courts trying to block the revocation of TPS for 350,000 Venezuelans following a lawsuit led by Democratic Attorney General Letitia James of New York never should have been involved.
“The most important part of the law may be that it deprives the courts of jurisdiction to control what here is really a quintessentially political determination, what nationals from other countries are allowed to be in the United States and under what conditions,” McCarthy told “America’s Newsroom” guest co-host Aishah Hasnie. “In this circumstance, not only is the law clear that the court should have stayed out of this and good the Supreme Court seems emphatic about that, but the policy of the Biden Administration didn’t make any sense.”
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“If you are talking about a hostile regime like the one in Venezuela that has operational partnerships with other anti-American regimes like Iran and China, we can’t vet people even just a few people who come in, we don’t have a means of checking on them,” McCarthy continued. So if you take 350,000, you are buying a huge problem and just in terms of sheer numbers, we have cities and municipalities across the United States whose budgets or social welfare, education, law enforcement are all under strain because of the millions of illegal aliens that Biden let into the country.”
Upon taking office on Jan. 20, President Donald Trump issued several executive orders to address illegal immigration, including designating Mexican drug cartels, the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua and MS-13, an El Salvadoran prison gang, as foreign terrorist organizations. Trump also ordered a review of American refugee admissions Jan. 20.
McCarthy said one Biden administration immigration policy, the so-called “CHNV program,” would also be struck down as illegal. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani of the District of Massachusetts imposed a nationwide injunction in April barring the Trump administration from deporting migrants who entered the country during the Biden administration under that program.
“The parole program I think was illegal. Now, the administration, just as is Trump Administration had broad discretion to remove temporary protected status, the Biden Administration probably had at least legal authority to extend temporary protective status,” McCarthy told Hasnie. “It doesn’t mean it was a wise move or good policy move. But I think legally speaking this was not one of the more objectionable of the Biden programs. There are many of those.”
The Trump administration announced it was ending the program, which allowed Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans to receive parole and enter the country, in March. These migrants may not have been able to secure visas through a normal process, according to the America First Policy Center.
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