Facing the left-wing voters of a Democratic primary, Vice President Kamala Harris staked out radical positions on a slew of issues far outside mainstream opinion during her failed 2019 presidential run. Now facing a much more centrist general election electorate, Harris is desperate to distance herself from her extremist past, and one of her favorite dodges is her claim that she will “follow the law” if elected president.
Problem is, presidents have far-reaching powers to make the law through both regulatory and prosecutorial decision-making, especially on the issues on which Harris is most desperate to dodge accountability.
Take Harris’s Fox News interview in which Bret Baier asked, “When it comes to immigration, you supported allowing immigrants in the country illegally to apply for driver’s license, to qualify for free tuition at universities, to be enrolled in free healthcare. Do you still support those things?”
To which Harris responded, “Listen, that was five years ago, and I’m very clear that I will follow the law.”
Except, the Biden-Harris administration has not only not been following our nation’s immigration laws. It has been actively subverting them.
Federal law is quite clear that all people encountered by Border Patrol illegally crossing the southern border, even those who express a fear of returning to their home country, “shall be detained” until they are either deported or granted asylum.
But that is not what the Biden-Harris administration has done. Instead of following the law and detaining migrants, or returning them to Mexico, the Biden-Harris administration has been abusing the parole power by releasing migrants en masse into the country.
Even worse, the Biden-Harris administration created, via executive fiat rather than actual legislation, two new parole programs that are specifically designed to decriminalize illegal border crossings. Here is how they work. Instead of recognizing that a migrant committed a crime by illegally crossing the border, the Biden-Harris administration has created the CHNV parole program and the CBP One app parole program.
Through the CHNV program, entities in the United States can sponsor otherwise inadmissible aliens from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to be paroled into the U.S. and made immediately eligible for work permits, food stamps, Medicaid, and welfare. The migrants’ names are checked against existing Department of Homeland Security databases for past trouble with the law, but these DHS databases contain no data of criminal history from any of the countries involved.
Importantly, by using this program to fly into the U.S., the migrants have not crossed the border illegally. They are still every bit as inadmissible as before, but by abusing the parole power, Harris has essentially made good on her 2019 promise to decriminalize illegal border crossings.
The same goes for the Biden-Harris CBP One program. Through CBP One, migrants from any notation can apply to make an appointment with a Border Patrol agent at a port of entry at the border as long as their mobile device shows they are within a certain distance from the Mexico border. After a similar cursory check of DHS databases, these migrants are also paroled into the country. Again, because they participated in the parole program, and met a Border Patrol agent at a port of entry, they have not “illegally” crossed the border even though they are every bit as inadmissible into the United States as every illegal immigrant that sneaks across the border. Again, Harris has functionally decriminalized illegal border crossings by not following the law.
The Biden-Harris administration is not the first administration to create new illegal immigration programs by not following the law. That honor goes to President Barack Obama, who in June of 2012 created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which granted temporary legal status and work permits to illegal immigrants who had first entered the country as minors.
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The entire legal justification of that program was that, as president, Obama had prosecutorial discretion not to follow the law and deport otherwise deportable migrants. DACA has never been overturned by a federal court, but Obama’s later Deferred Action for Parents of Americans was overturned by a federal court. DAPA and DACA have identical legal justifications, or lack thereof.
Harris knows exactly what she is saying when she promises to “follow the law.” What she means is that she is going to abuse her power to the fullest extent possible to achieve the exact same radical positions on every issue that she took in 2019. Voters should not fall for it.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
