What’s Going on with CHNV Parole?

The Center has written extensively about “CHNV Parole” — a Biden-Harris scheme to allow up to 30,000 inadmissible nationals of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to enter the United States monthly for two-year periods, during which each of them can seek work authorization and some of them (the “CH” nationals) can receive public benefits. But the latest CBP stats reveal something odd: “Only” about 1,620 beneficiaries of the entered during the months of September and October as the CHNV has come under increasing criticism in the House of Representatives. So what is going on with CHNV Parole?

The Program, in Brief. It’s important to first note that, not so long ago, few CHNV nationals entered the United States illegally.

In FY 2020, for example, Border Patrol agents at the Southwest border apprehended just 17,531 illegal entrants from those four countries: 1,227 from Venezuela, 9,822 from Cuba, 4,359 from Haiti, and 2,123 from Nicaragua.

By FY 2021, however, Southwest Border Patrol apprehensions of nationals from the quartet of states increased more than 10-fold, to 181,000-plus, before skyrocketing to more than 600,000 in FY 2022.

Why did that surge occur, and more importantly, why didn’t the threat of expulsion under Title 42 deter those aliens from entering the United States illegally?

The short answer is that those CHNV migrants came for the same reason millions of others arrived illegally in the past four years: The Biden-Harris administration largely refused to detain illegal border migrants who weren’t expelled under Title 42, even though Congress requires DHS to detain them all.

Thus, the only real consequence most illegal entrants faced under Biden-Harris while Title 42 was in effect was expulsion.

A key defect in Title 42, though, is that the Mexican government isn’t obliged to accept any expelled nationals other than its own, and increasingly under Biden it refused to take back Venezuelans, Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Haitians. Just 3.6 percent of the 600,000-plus nationals of those countries who were apprehended at the Southwest border in FY 2022 were expelled under Title 42, for example.

That put the administration in a quandary, as the U.S. government has tenuous diplomatic relations with Havana, Caracas, and Managua, and thus lacks leverage to force those governments to provide the travel documents DHS needs to send nationals of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua home.

As for Haiti, the political situation there has long been shaky and got worse after President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in July 2021.

After receiving political blowback for sending Haitian migrants who poured into the border town of Del Rio, Texas, in September 2021, back home, the White House apparently halted any major returns to the Caribbean nation.

Thus, CHNV migrants knew that once they were here, Biden wouldn’t detain them and there was little our government could do to expel them, which is why they continued to come.

The Genesis of CHNV Parole. To hide the massive increase in illegal Venezuelan entrants, the administration implemented a parole program specifically for nationals of that country in October 2022. That program was capped, however, at 24,000 entrants, total.

In January 2023, the White House expanded that Venezuelan parole program to cover Cuban, Haitian, and Nicaraguan nationals as well — the start of the CHNV parole program. Again, under that program, up to 30,000 inadmissible nationals of those four countries are allowed to enter per month, on two-year periods of parole.

Issues with the Program. The Center has identified major issues with CHNV Parole, beginning with the fact that Congress amended the parole statute — section 212(d)(5)(A) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) — in 1996 to curb the sorts of abuses that this program embodies.

On top of that, as the Center revealed in June, many of those CHNV parolees aren’t coming to escape persecution in their home countries. Instead, they were arriving here on flights from such “safe countries” and “vacation wonderlands” as Australia, Sweden, and Switzerland.

And as I explained in August 2023, this parole program is uniquely ripe for exploitation by unscrupulous employers and human traffickers posing as would-be “sponsors” of CHNV beneficiaries — which is likely why Congress never authorized the program or anything like it.

In that vein — and not surprisingly — DHS “paused” CHNV parole in July amidst concerns over sponsor fraud.

Specifically, the Fraud Detection and National Security (FDNS) unit at USCIS reportedly determined that nearly 101,000 CHNV sponsorship forms had been “filled out by 3,218 serial sponsors — those whose [Social Security] number appears on 20 or more forms”.

Moreover, according to Fox News, FDNS:

also found that 24 of the 1,000 most used numbers belonged to a dead person. Meanwhile, 100 physical addresses were used between 124 and 739 times on over 19,000 forms. Those addresses included storage units. One sponsor phone number was submitted on over 2,000 forms, and there were 2,839 forms with non-existent sponsor zip codes, according to the leak.

The program didn’t stay paused for long, however, with CHNV travel authorizations resuming by the end of August.

August and Everything After. According to CBP, nearly 530,000 CHNV nationals had entered under the program by August 31, but only about 1,000 more came in during September, as per an agency press release.

And in October, according to the latest CBP “Monthly Update” (which was published on November 19), fewer than 620 more CHNV nationals followed.

Perhaps the Biden-Harris DHS realized that fraud was rampant in the CHNV parole program — which as I mentioned is uniquely vulnerable to exploitation by rapacious “sponsors” in the United States — and was determined to ensure that such abuses were addressed.

If that’s the case, kudos to the department, but it hardly explains why USCIS went to the trouble of issuing an alert on its CHNV web page telling would-be applicants it had restarted the program — and inviting even more of them to submit their paperwork.

News of CHNV’s resumption triggered sharp criticism from Chairman Mark Green (R-Tenn.) of the House Homeland Security Committee, who wrote on August 29:

My Committee has engaged with the department since this pause was announced, and the results were sobering. 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.

Things only got worse for CHNV from there, with the House Judiciary Committee issuing an interim staff report on November 20, which revealed (among other issues) that:

USCIS has approved CHNV supporters even when the supporter submitted fraudulent documents as a part of the supporter application.

USCIS has approved CHNV supporters who admitted that the income they plan to use to support the CHNV alien includes income derived from criminal activity.

USCIS has approved CHNV supporters who admitted to receiving means-tested public benefits as part of their income listed as evidence that they can support a CHNV alien. Thus, American taxpayers may actually end up supporting CHNV aliens despite Biden-Harris Administration claims that those aliens will have supporters in the U.S.

Worst of all, the Judiciary Committee staff concluded that:

Sex traffickers have potentially used CHNV to exploit women and girls. 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. (Emphasis added.)

Limping Along. CHNV parole was never a good idea. Not only isn’t it sanctioned by the INA, but it also provides bad actors opportunities for the worst sorts of harm. The good news is few inadmissible aliens are now coming in under CHNV. The bad news is that the program is still, nonetheless, limping along.