Sype, who welcomed his friend to the U.S. earlier this month, said the man is here to work hard on his cousin’s farm in order to provide for his family.
“It would just be such a shame for this program to be ended, as it just seems like a kind of bright light in a much larger broken immigration system,” he said.
The humanitarian parole measure is part of the Biden administration’s expansion of legal immigration pathways that temporarily allow people fleeing political and economic instability to come to the U.S., including after Russia invaded Ukraine.
More than 100,000 Ukrainians have been granted entry under the Biden administration’s “Uniting for Ukraine” parole program.
That program is not part of the challenge by Republican states in the Texas lawsuit.
“We have overseen the most significant expansion in lawful pathways for people to come to the United States in many decades as a result of our efforts to try to incentivize intending migrants to use safe, orderly, and lawful pathways to come to the United States,” Blas Nuñez-Neto, the DHS’ assistant secretary for border and immigration policy, said in May. The administration has credited these policies with helping to decrease the number of crossings at the southern border.
Esther Sung, legal director of the Justice Action Center, said the seven individuals the organization represents in the case highlight the many positive reasons people are choosing to take part in the parole program, as well as its benefits.
Among those she and her group represent is a doctor who hopes to sponsor the mother of a young woman who “has very serious medical problems and is in need of surgery,” Sung said.
The doctor wrote in a declaration to the court that she worries “that if the program is terminated before her mother arrives, the young woman may not be able to receive the life-saving surgery that she needs.”
“In the immigration landscape that we have, this is the one benefit and therefore very worthy of defending,” Sung said.
The 21 states that are challenging the parole program for people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela argued in their complaint that the policy was unlawful, in part because it exceeds the federal government’s “statutory parole authority” and does not meet the criteria for being used “only on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.”
The states also argue the policy will cause irreparable harm to the states by straining their resources.
The office of the attorney general in Texas, the first state to file the lawsuit against the policy, and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the lawsuit and the hearing.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
