Fox News reports that the Biden-Harris administration is pausing one of its (facially illegal) migrant-funneling programs, “CHNV Parole”, which allows up to 30,000 inadmissible nationals of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to fly to the United States each month, amidst concerns over widespread fraud. Who would have seen that coming? The Center, for one; we’ve been warning that the program is ripe for fraud – and for human exploitation – for the better part of a year.
The Biden-Harris Surge in Illegal Migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. To explain why such a program was ever created, it’s important to first note that illegal migration from those four countries wasn’t a big deal before Biden and Harris took office.
In FY 2020, Border Patrol agents at the Southwest border apprehended just over 17,500 illegal entrants from the four CHNV countries. By FY 2021, however, Border Patrol CHNV apprehensions jumped more than 10-fold, to 181,000-plus (nearly all after the inauguration), before skyrocketing to more than 600,000 in FY 2022.
There are several reasons why the number of illegal migrants from those four countries rose so rapidly, and more specifically, why the threat of expulsion under Title 42 – in effect from March 2020 to May 2023 – didn’t dissuade those migrants from entering the United States illegally. Administration policy exacerbated all of them.
First, the Biden-Harris administration almost categorically has refused to detain illegal border migrants who weren’t expelled under Title 42, even though section 235(b) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) requires DHS to do so.
Thus, the only consequence illegal entrants faced under Biden-Harris while Title 42 was in effect was expulsion, which simply left them free to reenter again.
Second, the biggest impediment to full compliance under Title 42 – aside from will on the part of the White House – was that the Mexican government isn’t obliged to accept the return of any nationals other than its own.
The Biden-Harris administration never pressed the issue with Mexico City, and Mexico increasingly refused to accept the return of Venezuelans, Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Haitians. Just 12 percent of apprehended nationals of those four countries were expelled under Title 42 in FY 2021, a figure that dropped to 3.6 percent in FY 2022.
That put the White House in a quandary, given the U.S. government has poor diplomatic relations with Havana, Caracas, and Managua, and therefore lacks leverage to force those governments to provide the documents DHS needs to send nationals of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua (respectively) back home.
Those would-be CHNV migrants knew that once they were here, there was little our government could do to either deport or expel them. Because the Biden-Harris DHS wouldn’t detain them and couldn’t return them, they saw their opening and came en masse.
As for Haiti, the political situation there has long been tenuous and only got worse after President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in July 2021.
Worse, once the administration received political blowback for sending Haitian nationals who surged across the Rio Grande into the small border town of Del Rio, Texas, back home in September 2021, the administration largely halted most returns to the Caribbean nation.
The Start of CHNV. In lieu of attempting to deter migrants from the four countries from entering illegally, the administration created CHNV Parole – a strictly executive-branch program unmoored from congressional sanction in the INA – complete with carrots (incentives) and sticks (deterrents).
CHNV began with a much more limited parole program for Venezuelan nationals, which the White House initiated in October 2022. It allowed those aliens to come in for two-year periods of parole, a ridiculous temporal limit given the administration had no plan to force them to leave once their stays expired.
A DHS press release for that program explained that, in exchange for that parole, Mexico had agreed to accept Venezuelan migrants who entered the United States illegally. Thus, if would-be illegal entrants from that country wanted to come to the United States, parole was the best option.
That Venezuelan parole program was capped at 24,000 slots total, and it did have some brief impacts: Southwest border apprehensions of migrants from the country dropped from nearly 25,000 in December 2022 to just over 3,000 in January 2023.
Thinking it had found a winning strategy, in January 2023 the White House announced it would expand Venezuelan parole into CHNV, which again would offer two-year periods of parole to beneficiaries. “Expand” is the key word there.
That’s because unlike the 24,000-parolee cap under the Venezuelan program, CHNV offers parole to up to 30,000 nationals of those four countries combined each month (360,000 per annum). Those paroles were the carrots in this scheme.
As noted, the administration could have – and by law should have – detained illegal CHNV migrants pending adjudication of their asylum claims, which would have driven illegal entries down to their pre-Biden-Harris levels. Even with border security on the line, though, the administration largely declined to do so.
The stick, the White House explained, was that Mexico had now agreed to accept the return of 30,000 nationals combined of those four countries each month who entered illegally and faced expulsion under Title 42.
Given the choice between a two-year period of parole on the one hand and expulsion on the other, the administration believed would-be illegal CHNV entrants would choose the former. While Title 42 has been over for nearly 15 months, it appears – and I stress “appears” because there is almost no visibility into the program – that Mexico continues to keep its end of the bargain.
Despite that, Border Patrol has apprehended more than 179,000 illegal CHNV migrants in the first nine months of FY 2024.
How CHNV Is Supposed to Work. CHNV is a six-step process, which begins when a “supporter” in the United States files an I-134A, “Online Request to be a Supporter and Declaration of Financial Support”, through a USCIS portal. In that form, the supporter ostensibly agrees to financially support a given CHNV national.
Once USCIS confirms those supporters, the agency sends the beneficiaries e-mails directing them to set up an online account attesting to eligibility (i.e., they are nationals of one of those countries or the spouse, common-law partner, or minor child of a beneficiary) and averring they’re not inadmissible on medical grounds.
Once that is done, beneficiaries are then sent to the CBP One app to upload photos and enter biographic information. At that point, beneficiaries are notified through the online account whether CBP will give them permission to fly to the United States to seek parole at a port of entry.
Keep in mind that nothing requires those CHNV beneficiaries to actually be living in either Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, or Venezuela. In fact, the Center determined after a lengthy FOIA battle that beneficiaries are flying into the United States from 77 different countries, including Australia, Argentina, and Iceland.
It’s questionable that any of them were headed to the Southwest border to enter illegally anytime soon.
In any event, once at their U.S. destination airports, CBP fingerprints beneficiaries and formally decides whether to grant them parole. It’s again not clear how many alien beneficiaries are denied parole, but if any are it’s up to ICE to remove them (as noted, no easy feat).
Otherwise, they receive parole good for up to two years (which brings with it the right to work authorization and a Social Security number). The Cubans and Haitians among the beneficiaries are immediately eligible for food stamps, Medicaid, and cash welfare.
“Stinks All Over”. Not to give Congress too much credit, but members are often hardened cynics, and when they create a benefits program, they generally think about how it could be exploited. There are plenty of exceptions, of course.
But as noted, Congress didn’t create CHNV, or even sanction it. The responsible party is the Biden-Harris administration, which appears to be largely staffed by starry-eyed migrants’ advocates.
Personally, I honed my cynicism on Capitol Hill, and in August 2023, I explained at length how that CHNV supporter requirement was vulnerable to exploitation generally and to human trafficking in particular.
To recap briefly, it’s first important to note that supporters of CHNV applicants doesn’t need to have any preexisting relationship to those aliens.
In fact, supporters don’t have to be “people” at all — “organizations, businesses, [and] other entities” all qualify. If unscrupulous and/or unsavory employers seek cheap and exploitable workers, all they have to do is find a CHNV applicant, file papers, and wait for their soon-to-be victim to arrive.
Then, there’s the fraud.
In March, the Washington Times reported that scammers were charging CHNV applicants $5,000 or more to serve as sponsors, under a scheme in which they demand part of the payment up front to file the necessary paperwork and then receive the rest once the parole is approved.
The potential for such fraud and abuse is so deeply embedded in this program that USCIS warns would-be applicants on its CHNV webpage to: “Beware of any scams or potential exploitation by anyone who asks for money associated with participation in this process”.
Not that such warnings are likely to convince would-be applicants not to play along. But as former USCIS Director Emilio Gonzalez told the Times: “If there’s a way to monetize this, people will figure it out. ... This just stinks all over.”
Congress would never have authorized any program as vulnerable to fraud and exploitation as CHNV, but then, as noted, the administration never asked Congress’s permission.
“An Abundance of Caution”. Which brings me to the Fox News article, headlined: “Biden admin freezes controversial migrant flight program after fraud revelations”.
It reveals that DHS actually paused CHNV in mid-July “out of an abundance of caution”, after an internal report by the USCIS Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate (FDNS) “unearthed large amounts of fraud in applications for those sponsoring the applicants”.
Maybe they should invite former Director Gonzalez back to run the agency again.
The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) managed to get a portion of that FDNS report, and the Fox News report says it reveals that “100,948 forms were filled out by 3,218 serial sponsors – those whose [Social Security] number appears on 20 or more forms”.
Fox News further explains that FDNS:
also found that 24 of the 1,000 most used numbers belonged to a dead person. Meanwhile, 100 physical addresses were used between 124 and 739 times on over 19,000 forms. Those addresses included storage units. One sponsor phone number was submitted on over 2,000 forms, and there were 2,839 forms with non-existent sponsor zip codes, according to the leak.
Perish the thought that any beneficiaries are engaged in fraud, however:
DHS stressed to Fox News Digital that CHNV beneficiaries are "thoroughly screened and vetted prior to their arrival to the United States."
"The multi-layered screening and vetting for advanced travel authorizations is separate from the screening of U.S.-based supporters," the spokesperson said. "DHS has not identified issues of concern relating to the screening and vetting of beneficiaries."
Color me skeptical about the effectiveness of that screening, given the fact that on March 14, a 26-year-old Haitian national who entered under the program, was arraigned in state court in Massachusetts on one count of aggravated rape of a 15-year-old girl.
The presence of dead and serial “supporters” should be a sign that the Biden-Harris CHNV parole program is not only illegal, but rotten to the core. And the fact parolees are arriving from as far away as the pampas and the antipodes should suggest it’s not really stemming illegal migration at the border.