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HOUSTON (CN) A group of red states began to make their case Thursday, asking to federal judge to do away with a Biden administration program that allows 30,000 people per month from four troubled countries to be paroled into the United States.

With their home nations struggling amid political turmoil, natural disasters, economic crisis and gang violence, people from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti have been traveling to the U.S. in search of better lives like never before: Last fiscal year, for the first time, Border Patrol encounters with people from those four countries exceeded those of nationals from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

President Joe Bidens Department of Homeland Security over the first two years of his presidency released many of the travelers into the U.S. with notices to appear for deportation proceedings or to report to immigration offices.

America struggles to deport the group due to icy relations with their countries governments or dangerous conditions in their homelands, and they cannot be indefinitely detained in immigration prisons.

Desperate for a solution, as Republicans decried the White Houses open-border policies, Homeland Security started a parole program for Venezuelans in October. The agency added Nicaraguans, Cubans and Haitians in January. Around 181,000 people have come to the U.S. through the policy.

The initiative required buy-in from Mexicos government, which is also eager to stop emigrants from crossing its country to get to the U.S.

Mexico agreed to accept the return of those who enter the U.S. without papers instead of going through the parole process. After they are expelled, they must abide by a five-year ban on admission and could be charged with illegal reentry if they return before then.

Under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, the president has the authority to grant parole on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefits.

Both Democratic and Republican administrations have created similar parole pathways for a variety of groups: family of U.S. military members, children from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, relatives of Filipino World War II veterans and Afghans who helped the U.S. military during the Afghanistan war.

Despite that history, Texas and 20 other Republican-leaning states sued the administration in January, alleging it had overstepped Bidens parole powers.

Texas claims the parolees who move to the state will increase its costs for education, health care, issuing drivers licenses and incarcerating immigrants convicted of felonies. It is the only one of the plaintiff states to provide financial data.

But the feds say in court filings the results were swift and dramatic: In the first months of the program, conditional releases of people from these countries dropped 90%, from 2,356 to 245 per day.

To qualify for parole, which allows for a two-year stay in the U.S. and a work permit, immigrants must have a U.S. sponsor who swears under penalty of perjury they will house them, and help them obtain health care, learn English and get a job. The sponsors themselves must file papers to start the application process and undergo extensive background checks along with the applicants.

Seven sponsors intervened as defendants in the case.

One of their attorneys, Monika Langarica of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy, UCLA School of Law, said in opening statements of Thursdays bench trial that Texas is asking U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton, a Trump appointee, to be the first judge in history to block such a parole plan.

Five administrations have enacted over 120 parole programs over seven decades. None have been found to be unlawful by a court and none have been overridden by Congress, she said.

Eric Sype, one of the intervenors and the only witness in the trial, described befriending a man named Oldryn, and Oldryns family, in 2014 while working for a nonprofit in Nicaragua. Over the years they have become so close they call each other chosen family.

Sype said Oldryn, whose last name has been withheld, lives in a coastal community that was devastated by tropical storms that swept away his in-laws home. Then in 2018, an uprising against authoritarian President Daniel Ortega led to blockades across the countrys highways.

All economic activity stopped. His family said there was no work for a long time, Sype testified.

The Covid-19 pandemic also stifled Nicaragua's economy. And with Oldryn struggling to find full-time construction work, Sype said Oldryn asked him for advice on ways to support his wife and two young children.

Sype said he and his parents decided to sponsor Oldryn as a form of reciprocity.

They supported me when I first left home and traveled out of country. Theyve welcomed me into their home again and again. And we see this as a chance to welcome him into our family and home during a time of need for him, Sype explained.

Oldryn arrived in the U.S. via San Francisco International Airport on Aug. 12, where he was vetted by a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent and granted parole.

Oldryn is now living at Sypes parents home in Cashmere, Washington, and sleeping in Sypes childhood bedroom. He is waiting on a work permit so he can work on Sypes cousins apple farm, Sype testified.

He said his cousin always has difficulty finding enough labor for his farm, and Oldryn will help meet that need before returning to Nicaragua in August 2025.

Later on Thursday, Gene Hamilton of the America First Legal Foundation started closing arguments for the plaintiff states. The foundation was started by Stephen Miller, who served as a senior adviser to former President Donald Trump and helped craft his anti-immigration policies.

Hamilton accused the Biden administration of creating a shadow immigration system under the guise of managing the crisis at the border without analyzing their ability to remove parolees after two years.

He argued Biden does not have the same parole authority presidents had in the past because Congress curtailed it in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996.

Under their interpretation there is no limiting principle to how they can use this statute, Hamilton said. Any time they want, for any nation, they can start one of these programs and parole as many people as they want.

Trying to establish standing, Texas assistant attorney general Ryan Walters also argued in closings the administration violated the Administrative Procedure Act by starting the policy without first letting the public weigh in through a notice-and-comment period.

Tipton indicated it may take more than that. "I find that remarkable you said every time you sue for notice-and-comment you automatically get standing," he said.

He is presiding over the trial in Victoria, Texas. The proceedings are being livestreamed at the Houston federal courthouse.

The judge has a history of thwarting Bidens immigration policies.

Trial is expected to end Friday and Tipton said he will issue a ruling several weeks later.

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Trial over key Biden immigration policy underway in Texas - Courthouse News Service

Republican Congressmen Juan Ciscomani and Democrat Raul Grijalva held a rare bipartisan conversation on Tuesday, Aug. 22.

It is increasingly rare for two congressional representatives on opposing sides to appear on the same stage, especially in an event that is not an official debate. The conversation was hosted by the Tucson Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

Federal spending and border policy dominated the conversation at Pima Community College.

Both men expressed strong opposing stances on immigration. As both of the representatives districts cover the entire Arizona border with Mexico, immigration is an important issue to both them and their constituents.

Grijalva is a supporter of comprehensive immigration reform.

I'm a comprehensive immigration reform person. And I think that that's the way to solve this crisis. And it is a crisis, he said.

As an immigrant himself, Rep. Ciscomani said immigration is a deeply personal issue to him.

He told the audience that he sees immigration policy as falling into three separate buckets; the actual immigration process, security, and trade. To Ciscomani, border policy should deal separately in these three areas instead of sweeping reform.

Grijalva also called out his Republican colleagues Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar for injecting race into border conversations.

As I pointed out, Mr. Gosar and Mr. Biggs, the comments that they make are insulting. Sometimes, if not racist, right on the border. Im not going to stop calling them out on that kind of stuff. Thats not part of the dialogue, Grijalva said. With that point of view and to continue to interject that into the discussion, then there is no opportunity to find the middle ground.

Given the environment today, trying to do this in a long comprehensive way poses serious challenges that I dont see moving forward. What we need to do is take separate bites of the apple that deal with issues that we can fix now, Ciscomani said.

When representatives return to Washington D.C. next week, their first priority will be to pass a budget before the end of the fiscal year on Sept 30. As the deadline looms, each representative said they still have deal breakers theyll stand firm on.

Both men agreed that a budget must pass and a government shutdown cannot happen. However, they also said there are certain deal breakers they will stand on when it comes to passing a budget.

One of Ciscomanis is excessive government spending.

No new taxes, no new government programs, we can get to where we need to get to while being very responsible and funding the top priorities as well, Ciscomani said.

Grijalva attacked what he sees as Republicans poison pills, or culture issues injected into legislation proposals. He says these prevent important legislation from passing.

Let's take out those poison pills. Restricting a woman's rights, reproductive or otherwise, limiting and marginalizing groups of people because of who they love. Taking these cultural grievances and making them part of a budget process where the investment is what's at stake, he said.

Grijalva, a senior congressman, said that if it came down to a choice between his conscience and passing a budget, he would have to choose his conscience.

Whether you're a freshman or a senior member like myself, the only thing you have to take away with you is your conscience and the values that you stood for, he said.

Both men agreed on the necessity of passing a budget. As a Congressional veteran, Grijalva said that a budget deal can be reached in time to avoid a government shutdown.

Although Ciscomani is a freshman congressman, he holds a seat on the House Appropriations Committee. Despite demands from the far-right Freedom Caucus, he said he is confident that a workable budget can be reached.

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Grijalva and Ciscomani sitdown together - AZPM - AZPM

Most Americans didnt have email access the last time Charles Kamasaki lobbied for a comprehensive immigration reform bill that actually became law. In 1986, cellphones had barely hit the scene. He envied a co-worker who owned a clunky car phone.

It took years of face-to-face advocacy work before the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 made it to President Ronald Reagans desk. Kamasaki barely saw the inside of his own office while he and his fellow members with the National Council of La Raza, now UnidosUS, haunted the halls of Congress and monitored every subcommittee meeting.

That act increased border enforcement, upped the penalties for hiring illegal workers, and included a pathway to citizenship for nearly 3 million illegal immigrants living in the United States. It was a bill that died three times before it was enacted, Kamasaki said. And if you want to go back even further, antecedents of this bill had been debated since 1952. No bipartisan, comprehensive reform has made it through since, though Congress nearly passed bills in 2006 and again in 2013.

An ambitious bipartisan overhaul, known as the Dignity Act, might have a chance, Kamasaki said. Reps. Veronica Escobar, D-Texas, and Maria Elvira Salazar, R-Fla., introduced the act last month. The Dignity Act is based on the biblical principles of dignity and redemption, Salazar said in a statement. The proposed legislation boosts border security along with legal immigration. It gives immigrants living in the United States illegally an opportunity to earn legal status. It may take years of legislative ping-pong for the bill to move forward, but experts say it has the potential to gain traction more quickly if something triggers demands for immediate reform.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle admit the immigration situation has reached crisis proportions. Immigration authorities encountered illegal immigrants at the southern border a record 2.76 million times last year. Asylum cases piled up in court, so U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement released thousands of immigrants into the country to await court hearings that are years away. A pending court ruling could end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program this summer, creating an uncertain future for more than 600,000 immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children.

And legal immigration has become all but impossible, David Bier, the associate director for immigration studies at the Cato Institute, argued in an analysis released earlier this month. Less than 0.1 percent of refugees are selected for resettlement, and caps on family sponsorship visas mean most immigrants wait for years.

Employer-sponsored immigration is an expensive and lengthy process that is often too difficult for employers to complete. There are no temporary, year-round work visas for lesser-skilled workers without a college education to work in the United States, Bier explained. Employers continue to hire workers who are overstaying their visas and living in the country illegally. About 50 percent of U.S. agricultural laborers are illegal immigrants.

The Dignity Act would create an uncapped, temporary visa program for agricultural workers living in the United States illegally. Farmworkers who worked in an agricultural industry for at least 180 days out of the last two years could apply for the renewable, 5-year certified agricultural worker visa and later apply for lawful permanent resident status.

The act would also gradually implement an E-Verify system requiring employers to confirm that their employees lived and worked in the United States legally.

El Paso County Commissioner David Stout chairs the Texas Border Coalition, a group of business owners, city officials, and community leaders advocating for federal immigration reform. He supports the bills focus on expanding employment-based visas. Our farmers and ranchers dont have people to work their fields, he said. We have people that are in the construction industry that cant find people to work on their projects.

Instead of releasing asylum-seekers into the country to await their hearing, the bill proposes setting up five humanitarian campuses where asylum officers would process claims within 60 days.

Right now, its years in the queue of waiting for an asylum claim, said Tara Watson, a Brookings Institution economist who focuses on immigration. They make their home here. And then if their asylum claim is turned down, thats a very disruptive removal.

Under the proposal, about 1.9 million children brought to the United States illegally, including the 600,000 DACA recipients, could adjust to 10-year conditional permanent resident status.

Perhaps most controversially, the act would give the more than 11 million illegal immigrants living in the United States a chance to step out of the shadows. Illegal immigrants could only access the legal Dignity status if they completed a criminal background check and paid taxes along with $5,000 in restitution. They would also have to contribute to a fund for retraining American workers for high-demand jobs, and they could not receive federal welfare benefits.

The goal is to recognize that there was a violation of a law, Watson said. She added the acts use of fines rather than deportation and family separation is a more proportionate response to an immigration violation.

This is different from amnesty, said Matthew Soerens, vice president of advocacy and policy for World Relief and the national coordinator for the Evangelical Immigration Table. Its a restitution-based legalization process, he said. You have people paying significant restitution for having violated immigration law, but it does make it possible for them to pursue permanent legal status.

The idea is gaining ground among evangelicals. Last year, Lifeway Research found that 78 percent of evangelicals supported a pathway to permanent status for illegal immigrants if it involved paying restitutionup from 68 percent in a 2015 survey.

Once illegal immigrants completed the seven-year Dignity program, they would have two options. A five-year, renewable Dignity status would allow them to live and work legally in the United States and reenter the country. Or, if they completed the five-year, conditional Redemption program, they could adjust to lawful permanent status.

Reps. Escobar and Salazar paired the bills immigration reform measures with several border security initiatives. That speaks to the fact that there is an appetite in Congress to deal with this issue, to try to resolve it in a way that can be beneficial for our economy and for national security, said Christian Penichet-Paul, assistant vice president of policy and advocacy for the National Immigration Forum.

The Dignity Act authorizes at least $35 billion to improve infrastructure between and at ports of entry, including physical barriers and technology. It ups the minimum staffing levels for Border Patrol agents, Office of Field Operations officers, and Customs and Border Protection processing coordinators. And it requires the Department of Homeland Security to expand inspection lanes at ports of entry.

It also moves the border security goal posts away from operational control, which is preventing all unlawful entries. Instead, it aims for operational advantage, or finding and responding to high-priority security threats.

So far, the two representatives have recruited 10 co-sponsors: five Democrats and five Republicans. It could take a few years for something to pass, said Penichet-Paul. It could also be quicker than we expect. Another rush at the U.S.-Mexico border or the consequences of another court ruling on DACA could push Congress to act.

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A detailed analysis of U.S. immigration laws by the Cato Institute is alarming: Less than 1 percent of potential immigrants of men and women who attempt to begin the process to legally immigrate to the United States are able to complete the process and relocate to the U.S.

The myth that legal immigration is relatively easy or a matter of simply waiting a few years persists, writes Catos David J. Bier. The focus then becomes solely on how to deal with the symptom of the restrictions people crossing illegally rather than the restrictions themselves, and legal immigration reforms fall to the wayside.

For about a century, there were virtually no limitations placed on immigration. For another several decades until 1924, our immigration laws were modeled to presume eligibility for permanent residence unless the immigrant fit into specific, narrowly tailored categories.

In 1924, this presumption was flipped, Bier writes. Today, all immigrants are presumed to be ineligible, and the burden shifted from the government to the immigrant to prove that they fall into certain narrow, eligible categories.

As Bier and the Cato Institute note, closing avenues of legal immigration funnels increasingly desperate people into doing what many say we most do not want them to do attempt to immigrate to the U.S. illegally, whether by crossing the border without documentation or by overstaying a tourism or other temporary visa.

We agree that illegal immigration is an untenable situation. We recognize the need for border security and for investigation, enforcement and apprehension of illegal immigrants.

But we also agree with the Cato Institute. We admire the institutes commitment to skepticism about the size and scope of government. We recognize, along with the Cato Institute, that arbitrary and cumbersome limits on men, women and families who wish to migrate to the U.S. to pursue life, liberty and happiness are in fact invasive and excessive big government.

And we join the Cato Institute in calling for immigration reform, in amending our laws so good people have better opportunities to openly join the our society and embrace its commitment to freedom and liberty.

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Catos numbers show immigration reform needed | News, Sports, Jobs - Williamsport Sun-Gazette

LODGING was LIVE at the 2023 NYU International Hospitality Industry Investment Conference. Find our show coveragehere.

ESG (Environmental, social and corporate governance) and immigration reform were among the key topics highlighted by a handful of high-profile CEOs at last weeks NYU International Hospitality Industry Investment Conference.

Speaking during the panel discussion entitled The CEOs Check In: A View From The Top, Hilton President & CEO Chris Nassetta emphasized that any efforts toward sustainability need to contribute positively to the bottom line.

In the end reducing energy use or carbon output, or using less water and pushing out less trash, if we can do all of those things in an intelligent way we can actually say to our owner community you get an ROI [return on investment], he said.

Nassetta added, What weve all been trying to figure out over time is how do you do it intelligently? My own view is there are thankfully lots of really, really good things were all doing that will make the environment much better over time and more resilient.

Keith Barr, CEO, IHG Hotels & Resorts, cited the value of industry leaders sharing best practices as he provided the franchisors perspective to solving problems for everyone involved.

Whats exciting to see is that tension of not being the asset owner forces you to become more creative and more collaborative. What are the solutions that can work for the owner, for the customer and for the environment? he asked.

Leslie Hale, President & CEO, RLJ Lodging Trust, was asked about the owners perspective specifically.

Were very focused on ESG. I would say about one out of every three meetings I had last year I would get a question about it. Its important to be able to collaborate with both the brands and management companies to identify opportunities like energy waste and water utilization. All of those things require that capital be put into the asset, she said, adding that leveraging technology is key to take advantage of such opportunities for savings.

Tony Capuano, President & CEO, Marriott International, reinforced some of the overall efforts throughout the industry.

Youve seen us start to concentrate on water conservation, energy conservation, and elimination of food waste. Those areas not only help us achieve those [sustainability] goals, but they drive profitability that ultimately benefits the owners, he said.

Sebastien Bazin, Chairman & CEO, Accor, agreed that elimination of food waste is critical for the entire lodging industry. One thing we have to do is get out of the buffet, he said, acknowledging that Accor is in the process of phasing such programs out.

Barr later referenced an AI [artificial intelligence] solution the company has utilized in the Middle East that enables properties to track food waste every single day coming off the buffet and provides real-time feedback to chefs and management.

We have significantly reduced our food waste in the Middle East. There are ways to use technology to make them [buffets] have less waste, he said.

Meanwhile, the CEOs unilaterally touted the importance of increasing temporary work visas as well as enacting some sort of immigration reform.

Capuano noted that U.S. resort destinations, in particular, are impacted on the labor front.

We are woefully inadequate in terms of the number of temporary work visas we have in this country, he said.

Nassettawho also serves as the current chair of the U.S. Travel Associationremained hopeful that a proposed bill limiting visa wait times for the U.S. to 21 days will be passed this year.

However, he further added that comprehensive immigration reform ultimately will be the game changer that we need for the country to get the right type of work force and for the U.S. economy to be competitive over the long term.

Nassetta continued, Were in a global competition economically. The way you win for the long term is you have the best and strongest economy. The way you do that is through energy, food and labor force. We are limiting ourselves from a work force point of view because of all the infighting and fund raising that goes on with both sides [of the aisle] around immigration. As a result were not solving a problem that needs to be solved, he said.

Barr, meanwhile, was given the last word as he prepares to retire from his position leading IHG by the end of the month.

Ive spent 30 years with the company, the last six of which have been as CEO and weve had amazing success. The company is in a great place so its time to get a bit of family time. Ill be back doing something. Ill be an advisor to the company for the rest of the year and then Ill figure out whats next, he said.

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ESG and Immigration Reform Were Among Key NYU Topics - LODGING Magazine