A slate of Democratic senators are pressing President Joe Biden to give extra deportation protections to Palestinians before he leaves office, but border hawks say such a move comes with blatant national security risks.
Democrats penned a letter to the outgoing president earlier in December, calling on him to designate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) onto the Palestinian Territories. While the Biden administration had already bestowed Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) to some Palestinians in the United States since the Israel-Hamas war began, the lawmakers argued that action didn’t go far enough and want better assurances that Palestinians won’t be removed from the country.
“Joe Biden barely knows what day of the week it is, meanwhile his pro-Iran, pro-Hamas staff are trying to jam through a policy to bring thousands of unvetted Palestinians to the United States before his term ends,” Montana Rep. Ryan Zinke, speaking in reaction to Democratic lawmakers’ request, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “We already know Hamas has infiltrated refugee populations and put their terrorists in civilian groups to plan future attacks.”
Zinke, like other border hawks in Washington, D.C., expressed concern over the possibility of extremist elements within the Palestinian population, and previously drafted legislation that would outright prohibit Palestinians from entering the U.S. Nevertheless, Sens. Peter Welch of Vermont, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Tim Kaine of Virginia and others in their caucus are publicly calling on the Biden administration to roll out deportation protections for this specific group of foreign nationals.
“For over a year, Israeli bombing and extensive ground operations in Gaza have left over 43,000 Palestinians dead, and core civilian infrastructure largely incapacitated,” the Democrats wrote in their Dec. 12 letter, which appeared to be a critical framing of Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 terrorist attack against its civilian population. “The stability of the West Bank has also worsened since October 7, 2023, as violent settlers have increasingly destroyed homes, stolen livestock, demolished olive orchards, and wounded and killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians, including children.”
“The presence of this ‘ongoing armed conflict’ would clearly ‘pose a serious threat’ to the personal safety of Palestinians forced to return home,” the letter continued.
TPS and DED are similar in that both designations provide a level of deportation protections and work privileges for foreign nationals living in the U.S., according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. However, DED is an administrative stay of removal made by the president which has no statutory basis, whereas TPS can be made at the Department of Homeland Security’s discretion and carries statutory power.
Biden granted DED to some Palestinians in the U.S. in February 2024, but Democrats argue that action didn’t go far enough. Meanwhile, immigration hawks are raising major national security questions over such an action, pointing out that the Palestinian territories are rife with members from designated terrorist organizations and it’s difficult to properly screen migrants from the region.
“Every time our government offers TPS to the citizens of a terrorist-run pseudo-state like Palestine it endangers the public safety and national security of the United States,” Matt O’Brien, investigations director for the Immigration Reform Law Institute, stated to the DCNF. “It is not possible to vet Palestinians.”
“And Palestine itself is administered by a complex web of shadowy terror groups, many of which serve as proxies for nations that are overtly hostile to the U.S., such as Iran and Syria,” O’Brien continued. “Palestinian government officials are not folks who will share derogatory information on migrants with the U.S., in fact they usually have a vested interest in hiding it, so they can smuggle in terrorists and spies.”
Questions over Palestinian refugees in the U.S. have been raised since the Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023, which sparked the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. Internal federal government documents leaked to the media in April indicated that the Biden White House was even considering options on how to provide permanent safe haven to Palestinians living in war-torn Gaza.
Immediately after news of the possible Biden plan surfaced, Iowa GOP Sen. Joni Ernst led a delegation of 34 Republican senators in demanding the White House pump the brakes. In their letter to Biden, the GOP lawmakers noted the incredibly high number of Gazans currently supporting Hamas and how, because of the numerous logistical hurdles that come with importing migrants from a war-torn region halfway around the world, it would be nearly impossible to conduct proper vetting of all of them.
A poll released by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Research in March found that a staggering 71% of Palestinians supported Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre on Israeli civilians. Additionally, just 5% of the Palestinians surveyed said they believed the Oct. 7 attack to be a war crime.
TPS has become an incredibly popular tool to allow foreign nationals from countries experiencing upheaval to remain in the U.S. As of Sept. 30, there were roughly 1,095,115 individuals from 17 different countries enjoying TPS designation, according to a new report from the Congressional Research Service.
President-elect Donald Trump — who won election in an electoral landslide after campaigning on a hardline immigration platform — has pledged to bolster border security and lead a sweeping crackdown on illegal immigration in the interior of the country, and has already tapped a number of border hawks to lead this initiative. The president-elect has also suggested he’d target TPS.
“Once these individuals get a legal foothold in the United States it’s near impossible to track and remove them,” Zinke said to the DCNF. “This is a long-used tactic by radical Islamic terror organizations and the Biden Administration knows it.”
“They also know that on Day One President Donald J. Trump is going to remind the world what America First looks like and that terrifies the globalist deep staters,” the Montana lawmaker continued.
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