Attorney General Ken Paxton, America First Legal, and 20 other state attorneys general have filed a motion to ask federal courts to reconsider Texas’ lawsuit against the Biden administration for allowing air travel transport of unlawful migrants into the country.
The processes for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV), as outlined by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, attempt to mitigate the flow of unlawful migration by flying up to 30,000 migrants directly into the U.S. each month.
The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas initially dismissed the lawsuit after ruling that the plaintiffs did not prove significant harm to the states due to these processes.
However, the motion to reconsider claims that the court “wrongly evaluated the challenge to the particular program here by evaluating overall immigration flows for a discrete period of time rather than the indisputable increased flows of 30,000 aliens a month created by the CHNV Program itself.”
“Indeed, the key point is that even if overall immigration flows decreased for such a discrete period of time, they would have decreased even more if the unlawful CHNV Program were enjoined,” continues the motion.
Stephen Miller, president of America First Legal, said in a news release that the CHNV program is a “covert plan to resettle our communities, and we will use every legal tool we have to oppose it.”
“America First Legal stands proudly with Ken Paxton and brave Attorneys General to battle in court to stop Biden’s secret migrant flights of illegals into American cities. This is a vast clandestine migrant smuggling operation in which Biden flies illegals over the border to get them into our towns without registering as border patrol apprehensions,” Miller added.
A recent study by the Center for Immigration found that over 386,000 people have been flown into the U.S. since the program began in October 2022, with nearly 90% of arrivals going to Offices of Field Operations in either Miami or Houston.
Of the roughly 386,000 reported arrivals since the program began, more than 346,000 migrants have gone to Miami or Houston, with no other city having received more than 10,000 arrivals.
These processes for CHNV continue as the U.S. faces the crisis along the southern border due to the significant increases in unlawful crossings. U.S. Customs and Border Protection has reported more than 7.5 million encounters with unlawful migrants along the southern border since President Biden took office in 2021.
Similarly, the House Committee on Homeland Security states that an estimated 1.7 million migrants have crossed into the U.S. without being apprehended in any way, meaning there is no record of the exact number of people who have entered.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has attempted to manage this crisis through a program that buses unlawful migrants out of Texas and to sanctuary cities across the country.
Since this program began in April 2022, more than 108,000 migrants have been transported across the country in buses, according to a news release from Abbott’s office. Some of the transports have also been conducted by plane.
Contending with the massive stream of unlawful migrants into the state has been expensive for Texas.
The state has had to spend more than $148 million as of January 24 to bus unlawful migrants to other cities, having been forced to spend a total of over $10 billion to manage the crisis since Biden took office, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.