Parole program for Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and Venezuela goes to trial. Will it survive?

The fate of a Biden administration immigration program that has allowed tens of thousands of Cubans, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans and Haitians to enter the United States on humanitarian grounds is in the hands of a Texas federal judge overseeing a lawsuit that will go to trial Thursday.

The lawsuit challenging the Department of Homeland Security program, filed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the governors of 20 other Republican-led states less than a month after it was announced in January, is scheduled for trial in southern Texas. District Judge Drew Tipton, a Trump appointee who was confirmed in 2020, is presiding over the case in the city of Victoria.

The states asked the federal courts in their original complaint to “enjoin, declare unlawful,and set aside the Department’s lawless programs.” Riding on the lawsuit’s outcome: the access of potential and current beneficiaries to the humanitarian parole program, which has generated so much interest that sponsors and beneficiaries who applied in January are still waiting for permission to travel.

More than 181,000 Cubans, Haitians, Venezuelans and Nicaraguans have come to the United States through the humanitarian program as of July 31. The U.S. has capped travel approvals through the program to 30,000 people a month. Many more have applied: CBS reported in May that the U.S. government had received at least 1.5 million applications from sponsors.

Last week, New York, California, Connecticut, Delaware, 11 other states and the District of Columbia submitted a friend-of-the-court brief asking Judge Tipton to deny any requests to block the program. The states argued that an injunction would cause social and economic harm, result in family separations and put parolees at risk of deportation to home countries facing extreme social, political and economic instability.

“Enjoining parole pathways would inflict severe harm within our respective jurisdictions and across the nation. These harms to the public interest — which plaintiffs ignore — warrant a denial of plaintiffs’ request for injunctive relief,” the brief said.

The humanitarian parole process is among several immigration efforts the current administration has rolled out using the executive branch’s powers to try to curb both illegal immigration to the U.S.-Mexico border and the wave of Haitian and Cuban refugees trying to reach the U.S. via the Florida Straits and the Mona passage near Puerto Rico.

The states opposing the program argue that Homeland Security violated the limits of its own authority when it created the humanitarian parole, which they likened to a de facto visa program without congressional oversight and approval. On Feb. 14, the plaintiffs asked for a preliminary injunction, which the judge said in later court documents from June he would rule upon after Thursday’s trial.

In the lawsuit, the Republican-led states say that they “face substantial, irreparable harms from the Department’s abuses of its parole authority, which allow potentially hundreds of thousands of additional aliens to enter their already overwhelmed territories.”

READ MORE: Florida, other states sue feds over parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans

Homeland Security and its chief, Alejandro Mayorkas, are named as defendants, along with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and all of the heads of the agencies, which fall under the Homeland Security umbrella. The University of Los Angeles Law School, the Justice Action Center, and the immigration advocacy group RAICES are defendants representing parole-program financial sponsors.

Several immigration rights organizations and service providers, including Haitian Americans United and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services, have also submitted statements in support of the parole program.

The Legal Information Network for Ukraine, which wrote one of the supporting briefs, that the Ukrainian parole program was “materially indistinguishable” from the programs for Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Haiti. The Ukrainian program, a model for the humanitarian programs for the four countries, is not being contested by the governors.

“The Uniting for Ukraine Program has fewer limitations, whereas the parole programs currently being challenged have more restrictions and monthly limits on approvals,” the group said.

Nicaraguans, Venezuelans, Haitians and Cubans who want to come through the parole program must first have a financial sponsor submit an application on their behalf. They must pass background and medical checks. Once approved for travel, they have three months to fly to the U.S., where border authorities will determine whether they are allowed to be paroled into the country. Once here, they can apply for a work permit. Though the program has been touted as a two-year parole, the administration has not said what happens after two years.

When it announced the humanitarian parole program, the Biden administration also required applicants to apply using a new Customs and Border Protection smartphone app, CBP One. Asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border are also required to use CBP One for an appointment.

More than 39,000 Cubans, more than 60,000 Haitians, almost 27,000 Nicaraguans, and more than 55,000 Venezuelans had already come to the United States through the two-year parole program as of late July.

The Department of Homeland Security also created a similar program for Ukrainians fleeing war, which preceded the parole program for the four Latin American and Caribbean countries, along with family reunification programs for Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

After rolling out the humanitarian program, Homeland Security announced that migrants caught trying to illegally come to the United States could be barred from entering for up to five years. The Biden administration also enacted a policy that presumes migrants who come to the border are generally ineligible for asylum unless they have a travel approval for a humanitarian parole process, scheduled an appointment through a government phone application, or been previously denied asylum while coming to the United States.

Despite these efforts, undocumented migrants have continued to make their way toward the U.S. Customs and Border Protection has registered nearly 2 million encounters at the southwest border between October 2022 and July. The United Nations also reported earlier this month that a record 250,000 migrants have passed through the Darien Gap, the treacherous jungle between Colombia and Panama migrants cross by foot in efforts to reach the U.S.-Mexico border.