DHS restarts migrant flights from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela — weeks after halting program over ‘fraud’ concerns
The Department of Homeland Security said Thursday it is resuming migrant flights into the US from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela — one month after putting the program on pause due to potentially massive “fraud.”
Under the Harris-Biden administration, the program had brought up to 30,000 migrants from those four nations into the US every month under two-year work permits, so long as they passed a vetting process.
Nearly half a million migrants had already received advance travel authorizations and then made their own arrangements to enter America via the humanitarian parole process before it was paused in mid-July.
Around that time, an internal DHS report found thousands of sponsors allegedly committing fraud by listing fake Social Security numbers, home addresses or phone numbers — some of which belonged to dead people.
A DHS spokesperson said in a statement Thursday that the so-called CHNV parole program would now include “additional vetting,” which would dig into the backgrounds of sponsors who receive the migrants.
At least two subagencies will probe the “financial records and criminal background” of sponsors to safeguard against “fraudulent” ones, fingerprint them and eliminate “serial filing trends” identified in the leaked report, the spokesperson claimed.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) vowed earlier this month to also “investigate and litigate applicable cases in immigration court” of any fraudulent sponsors and refer them to the Department of Justice.
The DHS spokesperson said that only a small number of sponsors were culpable for fraud, adding that referrals will be made to the Justice Department in the future for potential prosecution. The majority of cases involved errors or other oversights in applications for the program that were not considered fraudulent.
When the program was paused, however, DHS reps previously claimed “CHNV beneficiaries are thoroughly screened and vetted prior to their arrival to the United States.”
House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green (R-Tenn.) fired back Thursday, saying that DHS was restarting the “clearly flawed” program “without rooting out the fraud or putting adequate safeguards in place to prevent exploitation by sponsors.”
“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,” he added.
“But fundamentally, there would be no fraud to prevent if DHS simply stopped importing 30,000 inadmissible aliens every month in the first place.”
The humanitarian parole of Venezuelans started in October 2022, followed by the inclusion of Haitians, Nicaraguans and Cubans in the program three months later.
Most parolees were jetted to either Miami, Ft. Lauderdale or New York City.
The DHS spokesperson said US Border Patrol had encountered 98% fewer foreign nationals from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela trying to illegally cross the border since December 2022, though critics like Green and National Border Patrol Council president Brandon Judd have accused the agency of implementing a “bait and switch” on border crossings.
Biden and his border czar, Vice President Kamala Harris, approved of the flights “so that the border doesn’t look as out of control,” Judd told The Post in March, predicting an “amnesty program in the future” to accommodate the millions who have come into the country since their administration began in January 2021.
Since 2022, the Harris-Biden White House has scuttled at least 350,000 asylum cases on immigration court dockets nationwide as long as the migrants had no criminal records.
