Editorial: Fight against families: States get federal judge to endanger mixed-status couples

Texas Federal Judge J. Campbell Barker, appointed by Donald Trump in 2019, has frozen a Biden administration policy that could have helped some half-million undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens get legal status. Hopefully, Barker’s stay will not be staying.

Basically, these folks would already be eligible to receive permanent residency, if it weren’t for the Catch-22 of having to leave the country to get it, triggering a re-entry ban. The policy would use a power called parole-in-place to give those without a criminal record who’ve been in the country for 10 years at least the ability to seek status without leaving. Naturally, 16 states led by the ever-zealous Texas sued, and got Barker to agree to stop it.

Why is anyone against this? And how does it harm those 16 states? The idea of keeping families together should not be controversial and it appeals to the sentiments expressed by vice presidential candidate JD Vance. Children need both of their parents and so efforts should be made to keep parents married and in a family unit. Yet, clearly, that does not extend to these families, where one of the spouses is an immigrant.

What these states want is to stop people who have long been living in and contributing to their own state economies, who have gotten married to citizens and often had citizen children, and who have a full-fledged legal pathway to status, to be permanently blocked from that path on a technicality. They want those people to lose out on a chance to retroactively comply with the law — something they’re also supposedly very keen on, though perhaps only when it’s some giant polluter or a white collar criminal who got caught tax cheating — and face the extreme consequence of exile.

This doesn’t only hurt these people and families themselves, but the consequences spread out to the entire community. These individuals are working across crucial industries or creating jobs themselves as small business owners. If they were to suddenly be removed, that would cost jobs and expertise and put those families in precarious situations of just the type that these state officials love to grumble about; are they going to provide benefits and assistance to the families left practically destitute by their efforts? That’s a good reason for Texas and other states to be in court fighting to support the Biden policy, not shut it down.

Is their point that parole-in-place isn’t the right way to achieve this goal, that it should have been done with legislation? Well, it was Trump who killed the bipartisan Senate immigration package. Or are immigrants just best to be used as political pawns in an election year?

All this just puts the absurdity to the legal argument that the states will suffer some harm from this policy, particularly given that this argument is anchored on the premise that it will spur illegal immigration. We can’t say we’ve spoken to any migrants with the nefarious plan of falling in love, getting married and, maybe, a decade later getting a permanent status out of it. This is a fiction to justify the opposition to the policy, opposition which is much more likely to cause actual harm to their state fabric.

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