The Department of Homeland Security announced Thursday that it would resume air transport of migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to the United States, one month after suspending the program due to possible large-scale “fraud.”
Under the Harris-Biden administration, the program allowed up to 30,000 migrants from four countries to enter the U.S. each month on two-year work permits, provided they passed a vetting process.
Before humanitarian parole procedures were suspended in mid-July, roughly 500,000 migrants had already received advance travel authorization and entered the United States.
Around that time, an internal Department of Homeland Security report found that thousands of sponsors were suspected of committing fraud by listing false Social Security numbers, home addresses and phone numbers, some of which belonged to deceased people.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesman said in a statement Thursday that the so-called CHNV parole program will now include “additional vetting” and more detailed scrutiny of the backgrounds of immigrant sponsors.
At least two sub-agencies will investigate sponsors' “financial records and criminal histories” to prevent “fraudulent” ones, fingerprint and eliminate the “serial application trends” identified in the leaked report, the spokesman claimed.
Earlier this month, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) vowed to “investigate and prosecute appropriate cases in immigration court” against fraudulent sponsors and refer them to the Department of Justice.
A DHS spokesman added that only a small number of sponsors were found to be responsible for fraud and would be referred to the Department of Justice for possible prosecution. Most cases involved errors or other oversights in program applications that were not considered fraudulent.
However, at the time the program was suspended, DHS representatives had previously asserted that “CHNV beneficiaries are thoroughly vetted and screened prior to their arrival in the United States.”
House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green, R-Tenn., countered Thursday that the Department of Homeland Security was relaunching a clearly flawed program “without rooting out fraud or putting in place adequate safeguards to prevent exploitation by sponsors.”
“It is not surprising that the Biden-Harris Administration has rushed to reinstate the unlawful CHNV mass parole program, despite evidence of clear fraud in the program,” Green said.
“The CHNV program, combined with the use of the CBP One app at the southwest border, helps the president and border control agents perpetrate a massive deception operation, encouraging inadmissible aliens to easily cross the border at ports of entry rather than bouncing between ports of entry,” he added.
“But fundamentally, if DHS stopped importing 30,000 inadmissible aliens each month in the first place, there would be no fraud to prevent.”
Humanitarian parole for Venezuelans will begin in October 2022, with Haitians, Nicaraguans and Cubans to be included in the program three months later.
Most of the parolees were flown to Miami, Fort Lauderdale or New York City.
A DHS spokesperson said the U.S. Border Patrol has seen a 98% drop in encounters with foreign nationals attempting to cross illegally from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela since December 2022, but critics, including Greene and Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, have accused the agency of conducting a “bait-and-switch” tactic regarding border crossings.
Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, his border chief, authorized the flights “to make sure the border doesn't look out of control,” Judd told The Washington Post in March, predicting “an amnesty program will be in place down the line” to accommodate the millions who have entered the country since his administration took office in January 2021.
Since 2022, the Harris-Biden administration has denied at least 350,000 asylum claims on immigration court dockets across the country unless the migrants have criminal records.
