House Homeland Security Committee Demands Answers from DHS after FAIR Exposes Fraud in CHNV Parole Program

On the day FAIR released information about massive fraud in the Cuban-Haitian-Nicaraguan-Venezuelan (CHNV) parole program which was published by FoxNews.com, House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green (R-Tenn.) called for the program to be terminated immediately. Shortly after, he followed-up on that demand.

In an Aug. 13 letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Chairman Green demanded to know what the Secretary of Homeland Security and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the agency running the CHNV program, knew about fraud and when they knew it. The basis of his letter, which was co-signed by two subcommittee chairs, Clay Higgins (R-La.) and Dan Bishop (R-N.C.), was “an internal [DHS] report obtained by a public interest organization.” That public interest organization is identified as FAIR.

Green’s letter shed new light on USCIS’s failure to take adequate steps to safeguard CHNV from fraud. The letter revealed that a full year before the fraud became public, the committee issued a subpoena seeking information about what USCIS was doing to prevent the sort of fraud that was later revealed in the department’s internal investigation. The letter charges that DHS was not forthcoming and that the limited information that was provided made it clear that the program could be easily defrauded. “In partial compliance with the subpoena, the Department produced to the Committee documents that revealed USCIS officers were instructed not to issue Requests for Evidence, which might have resolved disputable or unconfirmable information about potential sponsors’ identities, unless such requests were to ascertain a sponsor’s immigration status or to correct illegible documents.”

Just three days after the information obtained by FAIR made headline news, the committee was briefed by two senior USCIS officials, during which members were again stonewalled. “USCIS repeatedly failed to adequately respond to even basic questions about the confirmation of the dates that parole processing was suspended, fraud indicators used by the Department to screen sponsors, sponsorship threshold numbers that would trigger concerns for fraud, the Department’s plan for tracking upcoming parole expirations, or the current backlog of CHNV travel authorizations awaiting Department approval.” The letter included a list of 11 specific demands for information about the USCIS’s management of the CHNV program that, very likely, will also be met with inadequate responses.

FAIR staff has been working with the Committee to shed light on the abuse of the parole authority, and has helped members draft and pass legislation to stop the administration from continuing to use it. While getting answers about how USCIS allowed the CHNV program to be defrauded and what steps will be taken to prevent it in the future are important, Congress must take steps to end the CHNV program and other parole programs that have allowed millions of inadmissible aliens to enter the country under the Biden-Harris administration. As FAIR has asserted, long before we obtained information about the fraud, the administration has no legal authority to conduct large-scale parole programs for illegal aliens.