Sen. Tom Cotton: Biden’s Amnesty Plan Illegal

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Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., says President Joe Biden lacks the legal authority to offer relief to potentially hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants married to U.S. citizens.

The White House announced Tuesday the Biden administration will, in the months leading up to November’s election, allow certain spouses of U.S. citizens to apply for permanent residency and eventually citizenship. The move could affect upward of half a million immigrants, according to senior administration officials.

Cotton, during an appearance with radio host Hugh Hewitt, was asked whether Biden “has any claim to statutory authority” to issue an executive order implementing his plan.

“No, of course not, Hugh: Only the Congress can decide who has legal status and who doesn’t have legal status,” Cotton said. “And the people that he’s going to purport to grant legal status to today are plainly in the country illegally. The president does not have the legal authority to give them legal status.

“This is, at an event … another lawless executive action by Joe Biden.”

Cotton said Biden’s plan “kind of gives the lie to a supposedly tough crackdown on the border just two or three weeks ago, which I would call closing the barn door after the horses are out. It’s not even closing the barn door, because it’s still wide open.”

“I think it just goes to show the kind of chaotic Biden immigration policy that has let 15 million illegals into our country, including rapists and murderers and terrorists,” he added.

Donald Trump’s opponents have labeled the former president an authoritarian and a threat to democracy, but Cotton strongly suggested Biden has acted more like an autocrat.

“There were numerous cases in the Trump administration in which the president lost at the Supreme Court or at lower courts,” Cotton said. “He may have groused about it. He may not have liked it. I may not have liked it. In every case, he followed the court’s decision.

“Contrast that with Joe Biden, who for instance was rebuked totally on his student loan bailout. And what did he do? He didn’t just condemn the court, but he immediately started promising how they were going to get around it. And they’ve yet again tried to bail out student loans to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.

“And you see this pattern repeating itself over and over again with Joe Biden, is that he simply disregards court rulings he doesn’t like, in contrast to Donald Trump.”