The federal government is set to restart a migrant sponsorship program that offered additional pathways for immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
The program was suspended in July amid concern about fraud. The Department of Homeland Security now says it will introduce “additional vetting” of financial sponsors based in the United States.
"Together with our existing rigorous vetting of potential beneficiaries seeking to travel to the United States, these new procedures for supporters have strengthened the integrity of these processes and will help protect against exploitation of beneficiaries," the agency said in a statement, per Newsweek.
Under the program, up to 30,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela (CHNV) will be accepted into the U.S. each month and will be permitted to apply for work authorization. The migrants must have a U.S.-based financial sponsor, arrive at an American airport, and pay for their travel. Migrants who enter the United States via the southern border are disqualified.
The Biden administration Initially launched the program in October of 2022 exclusively for migrants from Venezuela. In January 2023, the federal government opened the program to migrants from Haiti, Nicaragua, and Cuba
According to a report from Fox News, internal DHS reporting indicated “forms from those applying for the program included social security numbers, addresses and phone numbers being used hundreds of times in some cases.”
The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) found that 3,218 sponsors filled out 100,948 forms. The sponsors each appeared on at least 20 applications and one sponsor’s number was used over 2,000 times. At least 24 of the 1,000 most used numbers belonged to a deceased person. The same 100 addresses appeared between 124 and 739 times on roughly 19,000 forms. The addresses were frequently storage units.
“Immigration enforcement advocates have strongly opposed the illegal parole programs created by the Biden-Harris administration, repeatedly warning lawmakers about the public safety and national security risks,” FAIR said in a statement this month. “Those concerns have now been confirmed by an internal investigation by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) which found the agency has been rubberstamping parole applications as quickly as possible – without verifying information provided by sponsors or parolees.”
Congressman Mark Green of Tennessee, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, condemned the relaunch of the program in a statement on Thursday.
“It should come as no surprise that the Biden-Harris administration has rushed to restart its unlawful CHNV mass-parole scheme, despite the clear evidence of fraud permeating the program,” Green said. “The CHNV program, along with the use of the CBP One app at the Southwest border, has helped the president and his border czar play a massive shell game, encouraging otherwise-inadmissible aliens to simply cross at ports of entry instead of between them.”
“My Committee has engaged with the department since this pause was announced, and the results were sobering,” he continued. “Instead of scrapping the clearly flawed program, the department is allowing it to continue without rooting out the fraud or putting adequate safeguards in place to prevent exploitation by sponsors here in the United States. But fundamentally, there would be no fraud to prevent if DHS simply stopped importing 30,000 inadmissible aliens every month in the first place.”
