How A California ‘Study Abroad’ Program Is Aiding Obama’s Amnesty

Commentary

February 25, 2016

By Dale L. Wilcox

The state of California has apparently been facilitating an obscure part of the President’s amnesty program that converts certain beneficiaries of deferred action from illegal to legal status. The state program’s being funded in part by California taxpayers and has the backing of the Mexican government.

Under the guise of a “study abroad” program, California state universities have begun sending illegal aliens covered by the President’s 2012 DACA initiative out of the country for so-called “cultural exchanges.” When they return they’ll be allowed to adjust to legal permanent status through the president’s “parole” power. The executive’s parole authority, a discretionary grant of deportation-relief, has become a source of controversy under the Obama Administration. As Senator Grassley detailed in a recent letter to the Homeland Security department (DHS), the president has widely abused his authority to parole, applying not on a “case-by-case” basis as Congress originally intended, but to entire groups, like the waves of Central American minors coming over the border hoping to receive “permisos.”

Under section 212(d)(5) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), immigration authorities may grant parole to an otherwise removeable alien “only on a case-by-case basis” and only “for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.” Before the power was concretely defined in statute in 1965, the executive had purported to apply parole en masse as a kind of blanket refugee — or Temporary Protected Status –program when the recipients in question clearly couldn’t meet the standards of either. But blanket grants of parole persisted, pushing Congress to further limit via statute the executive’s use of the authority. As the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has noted … Read the full story by IRLI’s Dale WIlcox.

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