The Trump administration locked in a consent decree last week that does what congressional gridlock never could: it declares one of President Biden's mass migrant "parole" programs unlawful and binds the federal government for the next 15 years from resurrecting it. The settlement was signed off by Judge T. Kent Wetherell in a federal court in northern Florida.
The decree emerged from a lawsuit Florida filed in 2023, and the language leaves little room for creative reinterpretation. The federal government agreed not to use the Secretary of Homeland Security's parole authority under Section 1182(d)(5) to create any categorical processing pathway for aliens at the border designed to alleviate detention capacity concerns or improve DHS operational efficiency. That includes any policy that would shift removal proceedings from the border to the interior or postpone them altogether.
In plain English: the pipeline Biden built to wave millions through the border is sealed shut — and the next president who tries to reopen it will have a federal court order standing in the way.
As The Washington Times noted, parole was never designed to be a mass-entry program. It exists as a narrow tool allowing the Secretary of Homeland Security to admit individuals on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit. The Biden administration turned that scalpel into a firehose.
Under Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, categorical parole programs welcomed tens of thousands of Afghans, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, and millions more from other countries. Former immigration judge Andrew "Art" Arthur calculated that nearly 3 million migrants were paroled into the United States during the Biden era — a figure he says accounts for a large portion, if not an outright majority, of the illegal immigrants who successfully settled in the country.
The mechanics weren't subtle. Biden didn't want to maintain the stiff controls President Trump left in place. Rather than work through Congress to change immigration law, the administration turned to parole to alleviate pressure at the border — pressure that its own policy reversals had created.
A 2022 deposition proved how deliberate this was. Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody's office deposed Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz, who admitted that Biden policy changes had made it tougher to detain and remove illegal immigrants caught at the border. Arthur put it bluntly:
"When Moody deposed Raul Ortiz, the entire Biden administration catch-and-release scheme, which up to that point had been operating under the wire, was exposed."
That deposition became the foundation for Florida's 2023 lawsuit — and ultimately, this consent decree.
The consent decree doesn't merely reverse a Biden-era memo. It constrains executive discretion for 15 years, a timeline that stretches across at least three presidential terms. Arthur framed the stakes clearly:
"This consent decree will prevent a future administration from abusing DHS's limited parole authority in the way that the Biden administration did."
Under the decree's terms, Arthur estimated parole numbers would drop to maybe a couple of hundred per year, which is far closer to what the statute actually contemplated. Case-by-case, not categorical. Individual, not industrial.
Jae Williams, press secretary for Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, who finalized the decree as Moody's successor, connected the legal victory to the broader enforcement picture:
"We thank the Trump administration for working with our office to obtain this result, which ensures that the next Democratic administration cannot abuse the parole system to allow another invasion of illegal aliens into our country."
The Trump administration had already moved to suspend the Biden parole programs upon taking office and is now working to remove those who entered through the legally questionable pathways. The consent decree ensures that the suspension isn't just a policy preference of one administration — it's a judicially enforceable commitment.
Critics will note the tactic at work here: "sue and settle," where a plaintiff files suit against a sympathetic administration and both sides agree to a binding resolution that bypasses Congress and the standard rulemaking process. Left-leaning activists have been the most prolific users of this approach for decades, leveraging friendly administrations to lock in environmental regulations, housing mandates, and immigration expansions that would never survive a floor vote.
Now it cuts the other direction, and the discomfort is already audible. Jennifer Coberly, a lawyer with the American Immigration Lawyers Association, objected to the decree's reach:
"The biggest thing about this is it's directly contrary to law. Generally, [the law] does provide discretion to the administration, and this is saying you can't do that for 15 years."
The irony is rich. For years, the immigration bar cheered as the Biden administration stretched "discretion" past its statutory breaking point to parole nearly 3 million people into the country. Now that a court has drawn the line, discretion is suddenly sacred. The argument isn't really about legal principle — it's about who gets to exercise the power.
Coberly did note that some Biden parole programs might fall outside the decree's scope, pointing to the pathway that allowed Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans to skip the southern border and fly directly into American airports without visas. That interpretation hasn't been confirmed by either party to the settlement, and it remains to be tested. But even if that narrow carve-out survives scrutiny, the core architecture of Biden's border parole regime is gone.
Executive orders are temporary. Regulations can be rewritten. But a consent decree is a court order, enforceable through contempt proceedings. A future administration that wanted to revive categorical parole at the border wouldn't just need to issue a new memo — it would need to go back to a federal court in northern Florida and convince a judge to dissolve the agreement. That's a fundamentally different legal obstacle than anything a policy reversal alone could create.
This matters because the Biden playbook was always about exploiting the gap between what the law says and what an administration can get away with before courts intervene. Parole authority existed in statute. The Biden team simply decided that a tool meant for individual cases could be scaled to millions. By the time courts caught up, the people were already here.
The consent decree closes that gap preemptively. It doesn't rely on the next Republican president remembering to reverse the policy on day one. It doesn't depend on Congress passing legislation that Senate rules would likely kill. It creates a durable, enforceable boundary that exists independent of who holds the White House.
Nearly 3 million people entered the country through a system that a federal court has now declared unlawful. The programs that admitted them have been suspended. The legal mechanism that enabled them has been locked for 15 years. And the administration that built them never responded to a request for comment.
The decree speaks for itself.
