Texas and other 15 GOP states sue the Biden's Immigrant Parole in Place program

Texas Attorney General, Ken Paxton. Credits: Ramón Elizondo.

Sixteen GOP states filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and other Biden administration officials, challenging the immigration Parole In Place program.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is leading the lawsuit along with Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Wyoming, said that he would not let the Biden administration tear the country apart by incentivizing unauthorized individuals who crossed the border without being inspected.

“Under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the federal government is actively working to turn the United States into a nation without borders and a country without laws”, said Paxton. “I will not let this happen. Biden’s new parole workaround unilaterally grants the opportunity for citizenship to unvetted aliens whose first act on American soil was to break our laws”.

According to the 56-page document lawsuit filed in a federal court in Tyler, Texas, giving parole to undocumented immigrants will cost the states suing the program, millions of dollars, with the possibility of no recovery.

“The number of parolees in the Plaintiff States will cause quantifiable financial harm to the States, and the exact magnitude of those harms will become clear in discovery when the federal government produces statistics about the number of PIP-qualifying aliens in the Plaintiff States,” the suit reads. “The Plaintiff States cannot recover their increased costs from the federal government, which they would otherwise not incur if the federal government enforced the law.”

Despite the allegations of financial harm caused by non-authorized immigrants, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) showed that in 2020, undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in the United States.

In addition to those contributions, the ITEP reports that immigrants without legal status paid $25.7 billion to the Social Security Administration in their paycheck deductions, $6.4 billion in Medicare taxes, and $1.8 billion in unemployment insurance taxes in the same year.

Moreover, the American Immigration Council (AIC) organization, reported that in 2022, more than 1,651,000 undocumented immigrants were living in the state of Texas, of whom they paid $1.9 billion in local and state taxes, adding $2.7 billion to the federal level.

Nonetheless, the contributions from the undocumented communities seem not to weigh a considerable economic growth for conservative states such as Arkansas, which joined the legal challenge due to the southern border crisis of unaccompanied children.

“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris don’t support a wall on our southern border,” Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton said on X. “If they did, we wouldn’t have seen record border crossings for the past four years.”

Meanwhile, Salvadoran Committee of Arkansas founder, Nelson Escobar, disagreed with the state joining the lawsuit, which he sees as too radical towards the 58,100 undocumented individuals who the AIC estimates are living in the Natural State.

“We know that this is a Red State, and as time has passed, we have always expected more democracy from our representatives,” said Escobar. “Being part of a lawsuit of this magnitude is like telling communities residing in the state that the government doesn’t agree to give any benefits that favor the immigrant movement because this is not about border security, this is about recognizing a moral right.”

Escobar also mentioned the importance of recognizing the workforce and the economic contributions that unauthorized immigrants bring to the state, regardless of people’s political views or preferences.

“Giving parole does not affect their partisan policies, in contrast, it continues to help to open paths for families that, thanks to those efforts with their work, the state and the entire country continue to maintain a competitive and strong workforce,” said Escobar. “The state continues to grow in infrastructure and population, which means greater income and economic growth.”

In a 2022 report from the AIC, undocumented immigrants living in Arkansas paid $64.2 million in state and local taxes, as well as $83.3 million to the federal government. In addition to these contributions, the AIC data shows that the spending power of unauthorized immigrants living in the state exceeded $1.1 billion in the same year.

Last updated on August 25, 2024 by Ramón Warini