The Government Accountability Office (GAO) — the nonpartisan government watchdog that oversees the executive branch on Congress’s behalf — just issued a report with the anodyne headline “Additional Information Could Inform Enforcement Decisions for Noncitizens Paroled at the Southwest Border”. That header matches the bland tone of the document (it’s nonpartisan, after all), but don’t be fooled: It is stuffed with facts and figures that confirm everything the Center told Americans in real time about the scope and harmful impacts of the Biden administration’s (extralegal) parole schemes.
“Parole” in General
Congress, in sections 212 and 235 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), imposed strict rules on the admission of aliens into the United States, and in general requires DHS to expel aliens who fail to comply with those rules.
The legislative branch, however, understood that there may be extreme situations where inadmissible aliens should be temporarily allowed to enter the United States, which brings me to the parole authority in section 212(d)(5)(A) of the INA. That parole provision states, in pertinent part, that the DHS secretary:
may ... in his discretion parole into the United States temporarily under such conditions as he may prescribe only on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit any alien applying for admission to the United States, but such parole of such alien shall not be regarded as an admission of the alien. [Emphasis added.]
Congress provided the executive branch that parole authority when it first enacted the INA in 1952, but as my colleague George Fishman has explained, has increasingly restricted that authority in intervening years as various administrations abused parole to ignore the legislature’s power over immigration and exceed the limits it has set on the annual admission of immigrants.
The most recent restriction was in Pub. L. 119-1, the “Laken Riley Act” (LRA), passed in January 2025 and which, among other things, gives state attorneys general the authority to sue the executive branch when the DHS secretary exceeds his authority under the highlighted portions of the parole statute above.
Biden’s Border Parole Schemes
The LRA was a reaction to the excesses of the Biden administration’s various parole schemes, including policies implemented to hide the true scope of the disaster at the Southwest border as CBP officers in the agency’s Office of Field Operations (OFO) at the land ports of entry and Border Patrol agents, responsible for securing the border between those ports, were dealing with 10.4 million inadmissible aliens between January 2021 and the start of Trump II in January 2025.
Parole+ATD
The first of those schemes, as GAO explained, was “Parole plus Alternatives to Detention” (Parole+ATD), a CBP Policy agents were required to follow whenever CBP processing facilities became too crowded and ICE lacked detention space to hold border migrants.
Illegal entrants who benefited from that policy were released onto “ATD”, a costly and ineffective program that purportedly ensured they could be tracked by ICE and would appear for removal hearings.
Of course, the reason that ICE lacked detention space was because the Biden administration refused to ask Congress for funding to expand migrant beds in response to the FY 2021-2025 border surge, and in fact the White House attempted to ask appropriators for even less detention money.
In March 2023, a federal district court judge in Florida underscored what should have been obvious to any objective observer (which is likely why it wasn’t obvious to most in the media): Those Parole+ATD releases simply encouraged even more aliens to enter illegally, further straining limited detention space and requiring even more paroles.
Thus, Parole+ATD became a combination of two popular D.C. tropes: the “self-licking ice cream cone” and the “dog chasing its tail”.
In any event, the federal judge Florida judge (T. Kent Wetherell), at the behest of then-Florida Attorney General (now Republican Sen. Ashley Moody), shut down Parole+ATD in March 2023, and when Biden’s Border Patrol tried to repackage it as “Parole with Conditions” two months later, the court smacked the plan down again.
The “CBP One Interview Scheme”
The second Biden program, launched in January 2023, allowed would-be illegal migrants in Mexico to schedule appointments at designated Southwest border ports of entry using the CBP One app, which I deemed the “CBP One interview scheme”, in lieu of crossing illicitly.
The sole purpose behind that scheme was to drive down the increasing number of illegal migrants whom Border Patrol agents were apprehending at the Southwest border, which hit an all-time monthly high of more than 222,000 in December 2022.
There’s no difference under the INA between, on the one hand, migrants who cross illegally, are apprehended by Border Patrol, and released on parole, and on the other, aliens who show up at the ports with appointments but without documents, are encountered by OFO, and then released on parole — both are here illegally, and releases of both impose crushing fiscal costs on the places where they settle in the United States.
But it took until roughly the day after the 2024 presidential election for most in the media to wise up to those facts, and until early January 2025 for Republicans to take control of both houses of Congress and pass the Laken Riley Act to make it less likely a future administration could run this shell game again.
“CHNV Parole”
In January 2023, the Biden administration implemented a third policy to hide the decline in operational control at the Southwest border, “CHNV Parole”, which allowed up to 30,000 nationals of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to fly into interior airports in the United States per month and be released on two-year periods of parole.
As I explained at the time, if human traffickers, smugglers, sweatshop owners, and massage parlor managers had created an exploitation machine, they could hardly have done a worse job, but it was fraud concerns that prompted the Biden administration to briefly pause CHNV Parole in the summer of 2024 before restarting it a few weeks later.
Again, the sole reason for such a program was to provide a shady safety valve for aliens who might otherwise cross illegally, show up in the Border Patrol apprehension stats, and prompt even the most malleable reporter to start asking uncomfortable questions, but instead (as the Center revealed in June 2024) it drew to the United States CHNV nationals already residing in dozens of other safe countries, defeating its supposed purpose.
“About” 2.4 Million Southwest Border Paroles — Nearly All Under Biden
Because the latest GAO report solely focuses on Southwest border paroles, however, and those CHNV parolees almost exclusively landed at interior airports of entry, the report mentioned the program only in passing.
Not to worry, however, because between Parole+ATD and the CBP One interview scheme, and other releases, GAO tallied up “about” 2.4 million Southwest border paroles between October 2018 and May 2025.
Keen-eyed observers will note October 2018 was the first month in FY 2019, the second full fiscal year of Trump I, though there were far fewer CBP paroles during the president’s first go-round than under Biden.
According to the GAO, OFO paroled 72,358 aliens at the Southwest border ports in FY 2019, and just short of 23,000 in FY 2020, while Border Patrol paroled an additional 903 and 53 at the U.S.-Mexico line in each of those respective years.
Finally, GAO reports that between February and May 2025 (the first four full months of Trump 2), OFO paroled fewer than 3,000 aliens at the Southwest border per month, and Border Patrol agents didn’t release any aliens on parole.
In other words, of the roughly 2.4 million Southwest border paroles GAO identified between the end of FY 2018 and the middle of FY 2025, roughly 2.3 million occurred under Biden — raising the question as to why the report mentioned any period other than the Biden years.
In May 2025, I calculated total paroles under Biden and came to just over 2.863 million, a figure that included CHNV Parole as well as Biden-era parole programs for Afghanistan (“Operation Allies Welcome” and “Operation Allies Refuge”) and Ukraine (“Uniting for Ukraine” or “U4U”), and separate ICE paroles, none of which were included in the latest GAO report.
Given that, my earlier calculation of Biden Parole+ATD and CBP One parole releases was close to accurate or perhaps a little low.
Demographic Makeup of Parolees
Per GAO, 49 percent of the aliens paroled during the study period were adults travelling illegally with children in “family units” (FMUs), while half (50 percent) were single adults, and 1 percent were unaccompanied alien children (UACs).
Given that under a (poorly conceived and implemented) 2008 law, CBP must transfer all UACs it encounters within 72 hours to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for care and placement with “sponsors” in the United States, it’s not clear why any were paroled, and yet that’s exactly how the agency handled more than 15,000 migrant kids in FY 2023 and 2024 alone.
And normally, unless they required emergency medical treatment, Border Patrol would never parole illegal single adult migrants, either.
Note that in all of FY 2019 and 2020, agents at the Southwest border paroled a grand total of 194 single adults, or eight per month. Border Patrol parole releases of single adults under Biden jumped to more than 388,000 in FY 2022 and 2023, more than 16,000 per month — 2,000 times the monthly average under Trump I, reflecting the scope and impact of Parole+ATD.
Paroles by Nationality
A plurality of CBP Southwest border paroles during the GAO study period, 22 percent or nearly 527,000 aliens, involved Mexican nationals, who in most instances can be quickly processed and returned across the border.
Respectfully, paroling any Mexican national not in acute medical distress is a derogation of duty, and yet that was exactly the deleterious result of Parole+ATD and the CBP One port interview scheme.
Nationals of Cuba (17 percent of the total or almost 408,500 aliens) and Venezuela (16 percent or nearly 377,000 aliens) were next, followed by Haitian (9 percent or more than 221,000 aliens) and Nicaraguan nationals (7 percent or just short of 159,000 aliens).
If you want proof the Biden administration created CHNV Parole to artificially drive down apprehension numbers, look no further than those statistics, and given that the United States had poor diplomatic relations with three of those countries, and the fourth (Haiti) hasn’t had a functioning government in years, paroling those aliens all-but guaranteed they would be here indefinitely, if not forever.
Speaking of “derogation of duty”, GAO reports that 208 aliens paroled at the Southwest border during the study period were “identified as having a criminal history at the time of their parole” but were released anyway, apparently out of concern for preserving detention space should even more dangerous aliens show up.
Of course, those criminal determinations were based largely on U.S. government intelligence and info CBP was given by its partners abroad, meaning any number of serious criminals slipped by the parole vetting screen and were released into this country.
Finally, according to GAO, somewhere between 10,000 and 50,000 Russian nationals were paroled at the Southwest border, as were between 1,000 and 10,000 Chinese nationals, 1,000-10,000 Afghan nationals, and 1,000-10,000 Bangladeshi nationals.
The watchdog would have done a service to the American people if it had provided precise statistics on how many aliens of those nationalities CBP paroled, but if those figures don’t give you concerns about how effectively DHS was “securing the homeland” under Biden, nothing will.
Impact of CBP One Interview Scheme on Border Security
In that vein, GAO reports that the CBP One interview scheme had a direct impact on border security:
[O]fficials stated implementing the CBP One process was resource intensive and required that OFO reallocate officers from other locations and mission areas. For example, OFO reassigned officers from airports to southwest border ports of entry that offered CBP One appointments to help manage the workload. In addition, officials from one port said staffing so many officers to process CBP One appointments meant there were less resources available to conduct other CBP operations, such as inspecting cargo and screening travelers for narcotics. [Emphasis added.]
Keep in mind, the “reallocations” of CBP personnel from the interior were occurring as up to 30,000 CHNV parolees were flying into U.S. airports each month, which raises the question, again, of how many criminal beneficiaries of that program made it past overworked CBP officers each month, but given there was no law enforcement rationale for either CHNV or CBP One, those programs improperly endangered U.S. communities by exposing them to the threat of illicit drugs, among other dangers
ERO Relied on the “Honor System” to Ensure Parolees Would Report
Aliens released under Parole+ATD and the CBP One interview scheme were supposed to proceed to their destinations in the interior and report to the local ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) field office at least once per year.
As the report explains:
This reporting can be in-person at an ERO field office or one of its contractor locations, through a kiosk, or as instructed by ERO officers. According to the policy, the objective of this reporting is to encourage noncitizens to comply with the conditions of their release and discourage them from becoming fugitives.
The problem, according to GAO, is that “ERO is not conducting its required monitoring of all” the aliens CBP paroled at the southwest border, essentially leaving it the aliens themselves to decide whether they would report or not.
Consequently, the report explains, ERO relied on what its officials termed “the honor system” to ensure aliens reported to ICE field offices like they’re supposed to, and (not surprisingly) ERO officials told GAO “not all paroled [aliens] report as required”.
My colleague Mark Krikorian referred to an earlier Biden border release scheme, “Notices to Report” (NTRs), as “immigration enforcement on the honor system”, but: (1) NTR’s successor, Parole+ATD, wasn’t any more strict in ensuring compliance with our laws; and (2) Krikorian used the phrase derogatorily, not as an official description of agency action.
The Damage that Could Have Been Averted
Illegal migrants released on parole receive multiple benefits that illegal migrants whom DHS simply cuts loose do not: They can apply for work permits; had been placed on a track to receive Medicaid and other “means-tested public benefits” until Congress changed the law last year (Cuban and Haitian parolees are still “entitled” to those benefits automatically); can “adjust status”, i.e., receive a “green card”, if they have a visa available; and can even lawfully obtain firearms in a way some legal nonimmigrants cannot (and may even be allowed to become cops).
Despite all the lavish benefits illegal-alien parolees receive, most in the media sat by as Biden’s DHS abused its limited authorities to release more than 2.3 million illegal migrants (real and “would-be”) on parole under its Parole+ATD and CBP One interview schemes, even as the Center warned in real time about what was going on.
Kudos to Congress for passing the Laken Riley Act to ensure that future administrations can’t subvert parole to suit their political interests as Biden’s DHS did, and to GAO for highlighting the scope and impacts of the last administration’s parole release policies. Modestly, all of these harms could have been averted if those in a position to stop those policies had just followed cis.org.