Stephen Miller and GOP AGs sue to protect feds’ right to rip apart multi-status families

23 August 2024

Sixteen Republican-led states in partnership with former top Trump aide Stephen Miller have filed a lawsuit against the federal government to prevent President Joe Biden from implementing his plan that would protect half-a-million American families from being ripped apart, while providing a path to citizenship when one spouse married to a U.S. citizen does not have legal status.

Currently, there are about 500,000 undocumented adults married to U.S citizens, who have been in the country for at least a decade, and would qualify to apply for President Biden’s program. Another 50,000 children believed to be subject to possible deportation would also be protected under the new Biden rule.

The sixteen states, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton are claiming President Biden implemented the policy back in June for “blatant political purposes,” the Associated Press reports. “Under the policy, which started taking applications Monday, many spouses without legal status can apply for something called ‘parole in place,’ offering permission to stay in the U.S., apply for a green card and eventually get on a path to citizenship.”

Miller is the architect of the Trump administration’s program to intentionally separate migrant children from their parents and even from their own siblings. NBC News reported that in a meeting with top officials, Miller said of his 2018 “zero tolerance” plan to break apart families: “If we don’t enforce this, it is the end of our country as we know it.”

Now, Miller is the founder of the right-wing organization America First Legal. On social media, AFL claims they filed the lawsuit to “block a new Biden-Harris executive amnesty that provides a path to citizenship for over 1 million illegal aliens currently in the United States,” a number far-higher than the Associated Press’s. Paxton reposted AFL’s social media claim.

Requirements for Biden’s program are strong and specific: applicants must have lived in the United States for at least ten years and present documents supporting their claim of having been in the U.S. for at least a decade, not pose a security threat “or have a disqualifying criminal history,” pay a $580 fee, “and fill out a lengthy application, including an explanation of why they deserve humanitarian parole,” the AP reports.

President Biden’s policy would allow applicants to avoid having to leave the country, and instead apply for “parole in place,” then “apply for a green card and eventually get on a path to citizenship.”

In a statement Paxton, who appears to be under federal investigation according to a June report from The Texas Tribune, claims Biden’s plan is unconstitutional, “and actively worsens the illegal immigration disaster that is hurting Texas and our country.”

NBC News, in that 2020 report, noted that “Miller saw the separation of families not as an unfortunate byproduct but as a tool to deter more immigration. According to three former officials, he had devised plans that would have separated even more children. Miller, with the support of [Attorney General Jeff] Sessions, advocated for separating all immigrant families, even those going through civil court proceedings, the former officials said.”

“While zero tolerance ultimately separated nearly 3,000 children from their parents,” NBC added, “what Miller proposed would have separated 25,000 more, including those who legally presented themselves at ports of entry seeking asylum, according to Customs and Border Protection data from May and June 2018.”

Miller, who has been called a conspiracy theorist, a white nationalist, and a white supremacist, and appears on the Southern Poverty Law Center‘s list of anti-immigrant extremists, was largely responsible for the separations of more than 5000 infants and children, “with no tracking process that would allow them to be reunited,” an investigation revealed, PBS reported in 2022.

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