Biden’s Illegal Immigration Phone App Could Allow Millions of Gazans Into

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Imagine seeing this on tomorrow’s front page:

Biden Announces New “Give It to Gaza” Parole Program: 1,000 Palestinians per Week to Fly in From Designated Middle East Airports to Chicago, Detroit, and New York.

That’s not a real headline—but it could be. “They can’t do that!” you say? Not so.

Previous presidents realized they were constrained by U.S. laws. That’s our system, we were taught. Three branches of government. Checks and balances. Separation of powers.

But we’ve seen few checks on Joe Biden’s arrogation of power when it comes to the border.

Despite clear congressional intent, Biden decided he could use immigration parole to allow unlimited numbers of foreign nationals to enter the United States, and for an indefinitely renewable period. The only limits on this imagined authority are logistical.

The government phone app CBP One (for “Customs and Border Protection One”) was intended to speed the legal transport of goods through U.S. ports of entry from Mexico, but the Biden administration has hijacked it to facilitate mass migration.

Biden’s parole programs have already brought in more inadmissible aliens (meaning they have no valid visa to enter the U.S.) so far—well over a million a year—than the number of visas Congress has authorized for legal immigrants each year (about 850,000).

There is nothing stopping a future president from ramping up parole into even more of a fire hose of illegal immigration with merely a fig-leaf of legality.

Axios recently reported that outgoing Secretary of State Antony Blinken had a plan to put Gaza back together. What if it had contained a new parole program, just for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip?

The template is there already. Biden has mass parole programs specifically for Afghans, Ukrainians, Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans, and more. Plus, his administration allows 1,450 additional inadmissible aliens to schedule their illegal entry using CBP One every day.

A recent notice in the Federal Register reveals how CBP One is used to allow aliens who don’t qualify for a U.S. visa to bypass the limits Congress has set and show up at designated border ports of entry. There, almost all of them are let in on “parole”—supposedly so they can claim asylum. As the notice says, “CBP collects certain biographic and biometric information from undocumented noncitizens … to streamline their processing.”

That’s the point: “streamlining” the processing of aliens. Not verifying their identity or vetting them for criminal records or national security threats.

Some information CBP One collects is useful, such as name, address, and country of birth, but none of that information can be confirmed. Gender (which today can be changed on a whim) is required, but employment history is “optional.” There’s also nothing about police records or whether applicants are already living in a designated safe country—which should render them ineligible from getting asylum in the U.S.

CBP One requires a photograph, but it can be matched only with U.S. databases, not with any in the applicant’s home country. So, if we don’t have someone’s picture in our records, which we usually don’t, the photograph doesn’t help us to verify their identity.

Customs and Border Protection estimates it will let in 500,000 inadmissible aliens using CBP One by the end of the year, with each person taking 12 minutes to process.

Yes, just 12 minutes to figure out whether someone is telling the truth and who they really are. The 100,000 officer-hours it will take every year is time CBP could have spent looking for human traffickers, interdicting fentanyl, or interviewing legitimate travelers.

U.S. law clearly states that parole can’t be used to bypass the U.S. refugee program, but Congress didn’t set numerical limits for parolees. That was a big mistake. In the hands of an activist president, any leeway is a fatal liability.

There is nothing to stop a future president from increasing parole with another country-specific program or by using CBP One at the border for more than the current limit of 1,450 a day.

Why not a “Pakistan, Palestine, and Syria” parole program, with another 30,000 parolees a month—or why not 300,000? Why not parole 5,000 more aliens a day at the border using CBP One? With the rules out the window, there is nothing to constrain a rogue administration from diverting more officers and resources to CBP One instead of border security and interior enforcement.

Unchecked abuse of immigration parole by any president is an abuse of executive authority, an abuse of the American people, is detrimental to U.S. national security, and is unfair to immigrants and visitors who play by the rules. Congress should numerically limit parole to 1,000 cases a year—or just end it entirely.

The BorderLine is a weekly Daily Signal feature examining everything from the unprecedented illegal immigration crisis at the border to immigration’s impact on cities and states throughout the land. We will also shed light on other critical border-related issues such as human trafficking, drug smuggling, terrorism, and more.