In March, I reported on the arrest of Haitian national Cory Alvarez, who entered under the Biden-Harris administration’s “CHNV” parole program and was then arraigned in state court in Massachusetts on one count of aggravated rape of a 15-year-old girl at a state-funded shelter. The case has taken a few strange turns since, with a state court judge cutting him loose on a low bond and refusing to honor an ICE detainer request, forcing the agency to find Alvarez and take him into custody. Things got really odd, though, once ICE blamed federal officials for a lack of transparency concerning the administration’s CHNV program. I feel the agency’s pain.
Before I continue, though, I note that Alvarez is presumed innocent until proven guilty. I don’t know what evidence the state has presented to prove that he is guilty of the offense, but at this stage I’ll simply observe that a grand jury considered it sufficient to charge him.
A Brief Recap of CHNV. To slow (or hide) a massive surge of Cuban, Haitian, and Nicaraguan illegal migrants at the Southwest border, the White House announced a plan in January 2023 to expand a parole program implemented the previous October for Venezuelan migrants to include nationals of those three countries as well.
The administration refers to the program as the “CHNV parole processes”, an acronym for Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and it allowed up 30,000 nationals of those four countries to enter the United States per month (360,000 per annum) on two-year periods of “parole”.
I use the past tense “allowed” because DHS has “temporarily paused” the program “while it undertakes a review of the supporter application process”.
The department had contended that applicants for CHNV parole were required to “undergo and clear robust security vetting”, and that to come to this country, applicants had to have a “supporter” here who would agree to provide for them.
“Supporters” don’t have to be U.S. citizens or even green card holders; even earlier parolees were eligible to sponsor subsequent parolees, as my colleague Nayla Rush has explained. Apparently, that easily defrauded supporter system was subject to widespread fraud. Who would have guessed?
In any event, as of the end of June, nearly 495,000 CHNV nationals had entered the United States under the program — a population larger than the number of residents in Cleveland, New Orleans, or Pittsburgh.
Reporting on Cory Alvarez’s Arrest. Fox News has reported that Alvarez flew directly from Haiti to JFK in New York City in June 2023 “and was sponsored by someone in New Jersey” for parole under the CHNV program. Alvarez, however, wasn’t in New Jersey when arrested, and didn’t seem to be receiving much support from his “supporter”, either.
Instead, the crime allegedly occurred on the evening of March 13 at a Comfort Inn in Rockland, Mass., where both the accused and the purported victim resided.
That hotel, Time has noted, was “designated as a shelter” for migrants last October, so Alvarez was ostensibly living there at taxpayer expense.
He was indicted in May by a state grand jury on one count of “aggravated rape of a child with 10-year age difference” and a second count of “rape of a child by force”, at which time his case was transferred from the district court in Plymouth, Mass., to the Plymouth Superior Court, a tribunal “where more serious cases are tried and defendants can face longer sentences if convicted”.
Alvarez was denied bond in March, but in late June was released by the superior court on a $500 bond, subject to home confinement and with twice-monthly check-ins. While ICE had placed a detainer on the alien, the superior court refused to honor it, and Alvarez was released onto the streets.
“Our Office Has Repeatedly Asked Questions ... About Specifics of the CHNV Process”. Fast forward to August 13, when ICE reported it finally caught up with Alvarez “near his residence” in Brockton, Mass., and took him into custody.
The Fox News story on that most recent arrest includes an interesting quote, which I will repeat in its entirety for context:
"As part of the Alvarez case, for months now, our office has repeatedly asked questions of state and federal officials about specifics of the CHNV process. We have received little to no answers. There is clearly a reason that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has paused the issuance of travel authorizations for new CHNV beneficiaries while it undertakes a massive review of the process," ICE said in a statement. [Emphasis added.]
Curiously, aside from including that quote in its article, Fox News failed to otherwise comment on what would appear to be an astounding (and unambivalent) internal complaint about the administration’s massive CHNV parole program.
“Our office” in that excerpt appears to be either ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) office in Boston (which made the arrest) or ICE headquarters in Washington, D.C. — more likely the former.
While I’m not surprised the Biden-Harris administration has given short shrift to questions that both congressional Republicans and I have raised about the CHNV program, I’d have assumed DHS and the administration would have been more forthcoming with ICE itself. Plainly, any such assumption was in error.
There are clearly tensions between the ICE ERO folks and agency leadership over efforts by another ICE component (Homeland Security Investigations, or “HSI”) to distance itself from the “immigration” part of the “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement” mission, which I described in April, but it now appears that ERO is crosswise with DHS and the administration over CHNV parole, as well.
Not that I can blame them. It’s all-but impossible to vet nationals of any of those four countries, given that three of them (Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela) have socialist governments openly hostile to U.S. interests, while the fourth (Haiti) has no functioning government at this time.
All of that “robust security vetting” talk is nonsense, and everyone in any position of authority over the program — including DHS leadership and the administration itself — knows it is.
That means ICE officers have no idea what they’ll be getting into when dealing with any CHNV parolee who — like Alvarez — runs afoul of the law and then is released by a sanctuary jurisdiction. To paraphrase Norm Peterson (George Wendt) on the 1980s sitcom, “Cheers”: “It’s a dog-eat-dog world, and ICE officers are wearing Milk Bone underwear.”
If even ICE — with sole jurisdiction over interior immigration enforcement — can’t get answers about CHNV, what aren’t the American people being told about this Biden-Harris scheme that has funneled nearly half a million inadmissible aliens into the United States in less than 18 months? I hazard to guess, because I probably wouldn’t like the answer.