A Compelling Defense of Immigration Parole Programs

In recent testimony before the House Subcommittees on Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability and Border Security and Enforcement, of the Committee on Homeland Security, my Cato Institute colleague David Bier presented a strong defense of the legality, justice, and effectiveness of immigration “parole programs,” which allow broad categories of migrants fleeing war and oppression to enter the US legally. As he describes, there is a long history of such programs, most recently those created by President Biden for migrants from Ukraine fleeing Russian invasion (the Uniting for Ukraine program), and four Latin American nations beset by violence and socialist tyranny (the CHNV program).

David is one of the nation’s leading immigration policy experts, and his testimony is must-reading for anyone interested in this issue. Here is a summary:

One legal way for immigrants to enter and participate in US society is parole, an immigration category first created by Congress in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. Over the decades since then, millions of individuals have entered this country as parolees. Although parole is a temporary status, it allows immigrants to adjust to lawful permanent residence if they are eligible through another pathway, which many thousands of parolees have done. Many former parolees are now Americans and continue to contribute to their new home. It is an essential and important feature of America’s legal immigration system.

Congress should:

• protect current parolees from the president’s mass deportation efforts;
• reinstitute the parole processes suspended by the president; and
• expand those processes to give more people a viable legal option to immigrate legally to the United States.

David explains the advantages of these programs, and ably addresses a variety of legal and policy objections.

I have defended the legality of CHNV in a Supreme Court amicus brief, and in an earlier amicus brief in Texas v. Department of Homeland Security, a lawsuit filed by twenty GOP-controlled states (that case was eventually dismissed by a conservative Trump-appointed federal judge for lack of standing). I also defended it in a 2023 article in The Hill, and criticized Trump’s attempts to revoke it in a March 2025 post.

See also my various writings on the success of Uniting for Ukraine and what we can learn from it.

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