Only 3 Months After CHNV Parole Program Resumes, More Problems Surface

FAIR Take | November 2024

Only three months after the Biden administration re-started the infamous CHNV parole program, the House Judiciary Committee released a new report detailing more fraud and abuse in the program designed to benefit Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans. Last summer, the controversial program was temporarily shut down due to fraud but then quickly resumed with only token fixes.

As highlighted by the new Judiciary Committee report, the CHNV program was created without Congressional approval in an effort “to mask the border crisis and artificially decrease historically high border encounters.” The program allows up to 30,000 otherwise inadmissible aliens each month to fly into a port of entry and be paroled into the U.S. for a period of two years. These aliens are then offered work authorization and treated as green card holders in terms of welfare benefits. As of September, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) says that more than 531,000 illegal aliens have entered the U.S. through the CHNV program.

This summer, FAIR’s investigative efforts helped expose fraud in thousands of uses of Form I-134A, the paperwork filed by sponsors for each alien seeking parole through the CHNV program. The Committee highlighted FAIR’s work and raised several other key findings, including that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has approved applications to allow aliens into the country who did not even reside in one of the four CHNV countries.

The Committee’s report also states that fraud is not the only flaw in the Biden-Harris parole program. It claims that lax eligibility requirements mean that CHNV sponsors “are approved by USCIS despite the supporters’ participation in illegal activity, use of welfare benefits, and temporary status in the United States.” It explains that supporters who “cannot even support themselves” are being approved to sponsor and financially support illegal aliens who enter under the program. Thus, it is likely that American taxpayers will end up supporting those illegal aliens who end up being paroled into the United States through the program.

Even more disturbing, the report discusses how sponsors of illegal aliens are approved without vetting the source of funds that will be used to financially support the illegal aliens. “[A]s of August 6, 2024,” the report states, “USCIS had approved 21 supporter applications despite the supporter’s admission that at least part of the income was derived from an illegal source or activity.” The approval of cases like these raises red flags about whether USCIS is making decisions and granting other benefits based on nothing more than an applicant’s claims.

The House Judiciary Committee is not only concerned about the integrity of the immigration system but also about the risk this program poses to the American people. For example, the Committee report states there is evidence that sex traffickers have used CHNV to exploit women and girls. As the committee described, “A fraud analysis of CHNV applications revealed that some applications that were sent from the same IP addresses were submitted on behalf of a high proportion of female CHNV aliens. In one such case, 21 supporter applications were submitted from the same IP address on behalf of 18 females and only three males. At least six of the females were under the age of 18.”

The House Judiciary Committee expressed outrage that “[c]ommunities across the country have been negatively affected by the influx of aliens under this Administration, including the more than half a million CHNV parolees. These damaging effects on American communities are all the more disturbing in light of the massive fraud and other concerns discovered in the CHNV program. That the Biden-Harris Administration implemented the program without regard to fraud prevention, criminal activity, or the effect on American communities serves as further proof that the Administration prioritizes the best interests of illegal aliens above the best interests of Americans.”

Remarkably, the clear evidence of rampant fraud in the CHNV program has not deterred the Biden-Harris administration. Instead, it willfully looks the other way and lets the CHNV program continue as if nothing were wrong. Hopefully, that will change soon. Americans voted in November to end the abuse of immigration by the Biden-Harris administration. News media report that ending the CHNV parole program is a high priority when the new administration takes over in January. The CHNV program should never have been established, and it is clearly past time to terminate it.

Source: House Judiciary Committee

Source: House Judiciary Committee