In a challenge to the Biden administration’s immigration policy, Republican states are denouncing a humanitarian parole program under which 181,000 people have entered America as “lawless.”

Court arguments will begin on Thursday as Texas will lead twenty-one states in a lawsuit challenging the administration’s policy of allowing nationals of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to apply for a two-year “humanitarian parole” status in the United States in order to reduce migrant traffic on the United States-Mexico border. 

President Biden initiated this process for Ukrainians in April 2022, and later expanded it to include Venezuelans, Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans as part of a package of border security measures. It permits up to 30,000 people a month from the authorized countries to enter America if they make an appointment via a new mobile phone app dubbed CBP One. 

The complaint alleges that this process constitutes an overreach of the remit of the Department of Homeland Security, which is by statute only allowed to use this parole power circumstantially and in isolated cases for humanitarian purposes or substantial public benefit. 

The states will “face substantial, irreparable harms from the Department’s abuses of its parole authority, which allow potentially hundreds of thousands of additional aliens to enter each of their already overwhelmed territories,” according to the complaint, which was filed in January.

Data released Friday by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection suggest that encounters at the border dropped significantly in March upon the expiration of Title 42, an emergency action invoked to regulate border crossings during the Covid pandemic. Encounters have risen since then and are now approaching the record levels seen through most of 2022 again.

Immigration rights groups claim that the existing policy helps connect American sponsors to migrants, many of whom are leaving behind countries ravaged by political violence and economic calamity. The Biden administration has defended the parole program by claiming that it was a necessary initiative to severely cut migrant crossings on the Southern border amid congressional inaction on the immigration system.

A successful suit will complicate the situation at the border and “undermine the president’s ability to conduct foreign relations and promote regional solutions to migration challenges common throughout the Western Hemisphere,” states a report by the liberal public policy institute, Center for American Progress. 

Although this case may be one of the largest single uses of the humanitarian parole authority, it has been invoked repeatedly throughout American history and provided entry to Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians in the late 1970s, to take one example. 

The lawsuit suggests heightened tensions around the key issue of immigration in the upcoming presidential election. Although Mr. Biden has promised to mitigate the border crisis through a loosening of policies, he has faced widespread scrutiny. According to polls this spring, 57 percent of Americans disapproved of Mr. Biden’s handling of the issue of immigration, and only 35 percent approved. 

President Trump, meanwhile, has proposed stricter immigration restrictions, including ideological screening to determine if applicants are “Marxists” and a naval blockade to stop drug smuggling boats, according to reporting from Axios. 

Mr. Trump’s proposed policies, which would go much further than the border wall initiative the former president launched during his first term in office, may resonate amongst the 69 percent of Republicans who told Gallup last year they wanted less immigration into the United States.

The case led by Republican states will be presided over by Judge Drew Tipton, a Trump appointee, who denied the Biden administration’s attempt to transfer the case to obtain a random assignment of a judge. Judge Tipton did approve a request by a group of U.S. citizens involved with the parole program to advocate for its legality alongside federal government defendants.