Mark Krikorian | National Review
And Republicans handed it to her.
Late last year, the Republican Senate approved, and President Trump signed into law, the means for a future Democratic president to grant unilateral amnesty to virtually the entire illegal population — and get away with it.
It’s called “parole in place.” As my colleague Andrew Arthur explained last year, parole in place is a tool concocted by the Obama administration, based on legal contortions by the general counsel of the Immigration and Naturalization Service during the Clinton administration. As such, it had no basis in law.
But clever Democratic congressional staffers inserted it into National Defense Authorization Act, signed into law December 20, 2019. It’s a huge bill, including pay raises for soldiers, the creation of the Space Force, and much else.
But if you dig down to Division A, Title XVII, Subtitle B, section 1758 on p. 667 of the bill, you find a provision calling for parole in place for illegal aliens who are close relatives of soldiers, embedding this administrative confection into statute for the first time. The provision only calls for extending this status to a very sympathetic, and very small, category of people; more important, though, it also states that “it is the sense of Congress that . . . the importance of the parole in place authority of the Secretary of Homeland Security is reaffirmed.” This puts any future executive amnesty on a much firmer legal footing than the flimsy pretext of “prosecutorial discretion” that served as the rationale for DACA and DAPA.
