Although federal law allows foreigners to submit applications for asylum, the same laws and court rulings also show that applicants aren’t legal immigrants unless their applications are approved. Thus, federal law explicitly requires the Department of Homeland Security to detain or expel asylum applicants while their applications are pending. The only exception to this is a temporary grant of parole, which doesn’t confer legal status and can be revoked by DHS. As such, a federal appeals court explained in 2022 that grants of “parole” don’t bestow “legal status” and create a “legal fiction” in which the “paroled alien is physically allowed to enter the country,” but the “legal status of the alien is the same as if he or she were still being held at the border waiting for his or her application for admission to be granted or denied.”