On Thursday, November 7, 2024, Trump-appointed District Court Judge J. Campbell Barker struck down the Biden Administration's "Keeping Families Together" parole-in-place program. The opinion, widely viewed as partisan, ended the hopes of hundreds of thousands of families seeking an avenue to lawful permanent residency for certain undocumented spouses and stepchildren of U.S. citizens who have spent ten years or more in the United States and have no serious criminal convictions.
The program was originally announced by President Biden in June of 2024. Lauded as one of the biggest presidential actions to help immigrant families in recent history, it aimed to promote family unity by providing an avenue through which some undocumented spouses and stepchildren of U.S. citizens could stay in the country while they pursue lawful permanent residency, a measure known as "parole in place" ("PIP"), as opposed to being required to return to their country of nationality to await completion of the process. The Biden administration program estimated that the program would have offered a legal solution to around 500,000 mixed-status families.
In addition, Keeping Families Together sought to relieve the backlog of family-based immigration cases and promote greater efficiency in the immigration process, currently marked by lengthy adjudication periods.
The lawsuit against the program, litigated by a coalition of 16 Republican-led states, was filed in a Federal District Court in the Fifth Circuit due to the Circuit's historic favoritism toward conservative arguments, particularly immigration issues.
The Court's decision held that, in implementing the program, the Biden administration's interpretation of U.S. immigration law had "stretche[d] legal interpretation past its breaking point."
In response, American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) President Kelli Stump stated, "This ruling is simply wrong on the law. The administration was using its congressionally enacted authority as a sensible solution for hundreds of thousands of American families facing uncertainty and fear due to our broken immigration system. To be clear, these applicants were already eligible for adjustment of status, the only thing the parole did was ensure they wouldn't be separated while the bureaucratic process was underway. It is shameful that people who are the spouses of U.S. citizens who have lived in the United States for over a decade, or are the stepchildren of a U.S. citizen, are being left in the cold again."
For our previous posts on this subject, see UPDATED: Coalition of GOP-led States Files Challenge to Keeping Families Together Parole in Place Program | US Immigration Lawyers | Green and Spiegel.
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