Wyoming and 15 other Republican-majority states are fighting a new Biden administration program that could give citizen status to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants married to U.S. citizens.
Filed in Texas federal court Friday, Wyoming is part of a lawsuit seeking a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction to suspend the Biden program.
Wyoming and the other states argue that the Department of Homeland Security’s Keeping Families Together program is illegal because it exceeds the executive branch’s authority.
The states accuse the Biden administration of implementing an “en masse” use of “parole in place,” an authority exercised by the Homeland Security Department to allow people outside the United States to enter the country for only urgent humanitarian reasons.
“The “parole in place’ suit that Wyoming and 15 other states have filed challenges a Biden administration policy to provide blanket amnesty to 1.3 million illegal aliens that have family members in the United States,” said Michael Pearlman, a spokesman for Gov. Mark Gordon. “The DHS program ignores provisions of the law enacted by Congress and instead creates its own system that incentivizes illegal immigration.”
According to the lawsuit, some of these people live in Wyoming and would be eligible for the program.
On Monday, six illegal immigrants filed a motion seeking to join the government in defending the program. They are joined in their motion by the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, a California-based nonprofit.
Nationwide Issue
Although illegal immigration isn’t nearly as prevalent in Wyoming as some southern border states, it has gained heightened attention in the Cowboy State with growing Republican criticisms of Biden’s handling of the border crisis.
Earlier this month, four Wyoming state legislators visited the southern border in Arizona to learn more about the situation. All of the lawmakers vowed to craft legislation next year that will deploy more Wyoming resources to the border. Earlier this year, the Legislature approved $750,000 to assist Texas with its border security efforts and in 2023 Gordon spent $86,434 out of his office’s budget to deploy eight Wyoming law enforcement officers to provide support along the southern border.
Although Gordon expresses moderate conservative views on many topics, he is much more hardline on immigration, opposing Afghan refugees coming to Wyoming in the past. He’s also made his own trips to the southern border.
“Governor Gordon has been critical of the Biden/Harris administration’s policies that do nothing to address illegal immigration,” Pearlman said. “He has also been consistent in challenging the administration’s actions when he believes they violate federal law or result in federal overreach, as they do in this case. For those reasons, Wyoming is a party to this suit.”
There are roughly 1.1 million illegal immigrants married to American citizens in the United States, according to pro-immigrant group FWD.us.
Under the new policy promoted as protecting family unity, the Biden administration estimates as many as 500,000 undocumented spouses could be shielded from deportation and given a pathway to citizenship and permission to work legally in the United States.
The program is a significant new development as people who previously entered the country illegally were not given protected status upon marriage.
The new program allows people to skip the step of returning to their home country and waiting to get a green card, which often takes years.
In the lawsuit, Wyoming and the other states argue that the parole in place program causes irreparable damage because of the costs that the states have to assume paying for illegal immigrants’ education, health care and other expenses. They also say that the program will encourage more people to illegally immigrate into the U.S.
According to a 2017 report from the Federation for American Immigration Reform cited in the lawsuit, Wyoming has approximately 7,000 illegal immigrants, costing taxpayers more than $26.1 million a year.
“Wyoming spends substantial sums of money providing services to paroled and illegal aliens due to the federal government’s abuses of federal law,” the lawsuit reads. “Those services include education services and emergency healthcare, as well as many other social services. Federal law requires Wyoming to include paroled and illegal aliens in those programs and requires Wyoming to include paroled aliens in programs such as S-CHIP, Medicaid and SNAP.”
State Sen. Stacy Jones, R-Rock Springs, left, and Rep. Jon Conrad, R-Mountain View, approach a group of immigrants who had just crossed the border illegally. (Leo Wolfson, Cowboy State Daily) 
The tattered remains of a ladder that was used to help shuttle immigrants and drugs over the wall. (Leo Wolfson, Cowboy State Daily) 
The southern border wall is about 30-feet tall and made up by closely separated, dark red bars. (Leo Wolfson, Cowboy State Daily) 
The Border Patrol agent instructs the immigrants to stand facing the wall. (Leo Wolfson, Cowboy State Daily)
Defense
In a statement responding to the lawsuit, Angelo Fernández Hernández, a White House spokesman, said that “Republican elected officials continue to demonstrate that they are more focused on playing politics than helping American families or fixing our broken immigration system.”
“The lawsuit aims to separate American citizens from their spouses and stepchildren who are already eligible for lawful permanent residency and could remain together through this process,” he said.
The Biden program announced in June is one of the most drastic measures to assist immigrants since Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, was enacted 12 years ago under former President Barack Obama’s administration. The implementation of the new program came shortly after Biden enacted tougher asylum restrictions.
The new program is limited to people who have been living in the United States for a decade or more.
Also joining in the lawsuit are Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Tennessee.
Overseeing the lawsuit is Judge J. Campbell Barker, an appointee of former President Donald Trump.
Leo Wolfson can be reached at leo@cowboystatedaily.com.
