Did Joe Biden Really Parole In Nearly 3 Million Aliens?

Based on the information then available, I estimated in June 2024 that Bidens DHS had allowed 2.062 million-plus inadmissible aliens to enter the United States under what is supposed to be the extremely narrow parole authority in section 212(d)(5)(A) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). Now, with more data, I believe that figure topped more than 2.86 million. Sharpen your pencils, fire up your laptops, and get ready for some heady number crunching – followed by an explanation of what the Trump administration is now doing with those parolees. 

What Is Immigration Parole?

Section 212(d)(5)(A) of the INA provides the DHS secretary with discretionary authority to “parole into the United States temporarily under such conditions as he may prescribe only on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit any alien applying for admission to the United States”. 

As my colleague, George Fishman, and I have explained elsewhere, Congress added those adjectives to the parole provision because prior administrations had abused the parole power to permit entry to tens of thousands of facially inadmissible aliens over and above the limits Congress had placed on lawful immigrant admissions. 

And as Fishman and I made clear, those adjectives actually have meaning. “Urgent humanitarian reasons” equates to a need for the alien to seek emergency medical treatment, while “significant public benefit” means a request to present the alien in judicial proceedings in this country, sometimes as a witness but more often as a defendant. 

But, as I have explained, when detailing the rushed drafting of regulations implementing the parole provision in the summer of 1982, those meanings were lost in implementation, with the administrative rules appearing to be more expansive in scope than the legislative grant of parole authority. 

Worse, when Congress tightened the parole provision in 1996, the Clinton administration failed (or refused) to fix those regulations to reflect the more narrowly constrained legislative intent. 

Consequently, the implementing regulations, at 8 C.F.R. § 212.5(b)(5), “permit” the DHS secretary to parole from custody any alien “whose continued detention is not in the public interest”.

That may sound the same as the statute at first blush, but it’s the opposite of what the statute allows in providing for parole of aliens only when their releases provide for a “significant public benefit”, especially given that Congress (in section 235(b) of the INA) has mandated that such inadmissible aliens otherwise be detained – meaning detention is always assumed to be in the “public interest”.

Biden Parole Policies 

If prior administrations stretched Congress’s parole limits, the last one simply blew past and ignored them. 

It began by releasing illegal migrants apprehended by Border Patrol agents at the Southwest border on parole – again even though Congress requires them to be detained – before implementing “Operation Allies Welcome/Refuge” to release on parole Afghans the U.S. government brought to this country following the chaotic evacuation from Kabul in August 2021, and then “Uniting for Ukraine” for Ukrainians fleeing the February 2022 Russian invasion of that country.

Congress largely acquiesced after the fact to paroles of the latter two groups, but never okayed border releases. 

In fact, a federal judge concluded that the only reason the Biden administration opted to parole illegal migrants at the Southwest border (under a policy called “Parole+ATD”) was because it took less time (15 to 30 minutes) than processing them and releasing them on their own recognizance (“between 2 to 2.5 hours”). 

Consequently, that judge shut Parole+ATD down in March 2023, only for the administration to repackage it as “Parole with Conditions” just over two months later (which the now displeased judge also shut down). 

Prior to the issuance of those judicial orders, and to hide the surge in illegal migrants coming illegally each month, in January 2023 the Biden administration opened what it referred to as “Legal Pathways for Safe, Orderly, and Humane Migration”.

Two of those “pathways” supercharged paroles. The first was “CHNV Parole”, a program under which up to 30,000 nationals of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela could to apply for parole from abroad per month and fly to interior U.S. airports in the United States, allegedly for their own protection and in lieu of entering illegally.

The second pathway enabled would-be illegal migrants in Mexico to preschedule unauthorized entries at the Southwest border ports of entry using the CBP One app, a program I dubbed the “CBP One app interview scheme”. 

Under that scheme, would-be illegal migrants could download the CBP One app and then up to 1,450 of them per day could use the app to schedule interview appointments at Southwestern border ports of entry. 

Not much is known about what occurred during those interviews, but congressional disclosures revealed that 95.8 percent of aliens who scheduled appointments using the app were subsequently paroled into this country. 

Biden Administration Paroles

With the “legal” background out of the way, here comes some math.

The DHS Office of Homeland Security Statistics (OHSS) publishes a webpage, “Immigration Enforcement and Legal Processes Monthly Tables”, with links to a series of Excel spreadsheets. 

Among other things, those spreadsheets provide statistics on how DHS has dealt in the recent past with aliens encountered at the borders and ports by CBP, including those transferred to ICE for detention. 

One of those Excel spreadsheets, “CBP SW Border Encounters Book-Outs by Agency: Fiscal Years 2014 to 2025 YTD” (CBP SW Book-Outs), reveals that between February and September 2021 (the last eight months of FY 2021, coinciding with the first eight months of the Biden administration), CBP officers in the agency’s Office of Field Operations (OFO) at the Southwest border ports paroled 23,750 inadmissible aliens.

A separate Excel spreadsheet, “ICE Book-Outs by Arrest Location: Fiscal Years 2018 to 2025 YTD” (ICE Bookouts), shows that during the last eight months of FY 2021, ICE paroled 34,980 aliens originally encountered at the borders by CBP who subsequently were transferred to ICE. 

Total DHS parole releases in the last eight months of FY 2021 (February to September 2021): 58,730.

In July 2023, CBP published “Parole Requests Fiscal Year 2022”, a compendium of DHS paroles in a format much easier to access than the OHSS website. 

It reveals that in FY 2022, Border Patrol agents in CBP paroled 378,235 inadmissible aliens, while OFO paroled: 178,465 aliens encountered at ports of entry; 22,842 Afghan nationals under Operation Allies Welcome/Refuge (Afghans); and 63,529 inadmissible Ukrainian nationals for “humanitarian” reasons.

Meanwhile, according to the OHSS ICE Bookouts spreadsheet, ICE paroled 78,600 aliens originally encountered at the border in FY 2022.

Total DHS parole releases in FY 2022: 721,671.

Similarly, in April 2024, CBP published “Parole Requests Fiscal Year 2023, Fourth Quarter”. 

According to that report, in FY 2023, Border Patrol agents paroled 304,000 apprehended migrants, while CBP officers in OFO paroled another 699,187 inadmissible aliens in total under Biden administration policies. 

Specifically, under CHNV Parole, OFO paroled: 50,236 Cuban nationals; 85,345 Haitian nationals; 38,113 nationals of Nicaragua; and 66,978 Venezuelans; for a CHNV Parole total in FY 2023 of 240,672. 

In addition, OFO officers at the ports paroled 362,255 other inadmissible aliens under the code “Noncitizen issued a Form I-94 + NTA [“Notice to Appear”, the charging document in removal proceedings] and released”, which represents releases under the CBP One app interview scheme.

Added to that OFO total are 96,260 inadmissible aliens who were paroled under Uniting for Ukraine, but I’ve excluded 64,437 others with the code “Parole at a POE” (for unstated reasons) and 1,426 who came in under the Biden-era “Family Reunification Task Force”. 

Finally, the OHSS ICE Bookouts spreadsheets show that ICE paroled 84,080 aliens originally encountered by CBP at the border in FY 2023.

Total DHS parole releases in FY 2023: 1,087,267. 

CBP has yet to publish a parole report for FY 2024. 

The OHSS CBP SW Book-Outs Excel spreadsheet, however, shows that CBP officers at the Southwest border ports paroled 547,660 inadmissible aliens last fiscal year, most of whom were among the 574,000 aliens who scheduled port interviews in FY 2024 under the CBP One app interview scheme. 

In addition, by subtracting the total number of CHNV Paroles in CBP’s September 2024 Monthly Update from the total for FY 2023 (in the agency’s September 2023 Monthly Update) I’ve concluded that 59,815 Cubans, 125,742 Haitians, 54,930 Nicaraguans, and 50,107 Venezuelans were paroled under that program in FY 2024, for an FY 2024 CHNV Parole total of 290,594.

Finally, ICE paroled 59,540 aliens originally encountered at the border in FY 2024, according to the OHSS ICE Bookouts spreadsheet. 

Total DHS parole releases in FY 2024: 897,794. 

Returning to the CBP SW Book-Outs spreadsheet, CBP officers at the Southwest border ports paroled 88,450 inadmissible applicants for admission in the first two months of FY 2025 (October and November), the last months for which OHSS data is available. 

In addition, in that two-month period, ICE paroled 9,140 aliens initially encountered at the border. 

That brings the total DHS parole releases in the first two months of FY 2025 to 97,590.

Thus total paroles under the Biden administration (through the end of November) were: 2,863,052.

Trump Administration Takes Action

Apparently, I’m not the only one who’s noticed that millions of aliens were paroled into this country by the Biden administration. Trump’s DHS has, too, 

On May 22, the AP reported that ICE attorneys in increasing numbers have been appearing at preliminary removal hearings and requesting that immigration judges terminate aliens’ cases. 

That wasn’t unusual under Biden’s DHS, which required government trial attorneys to dismiss, terminate, or close about 700,000 cases involving facially removable aliens – a move the House Judiciary Committee described as a “quiet amnesty”. 

But according to AP, unlike under the last administration, ICE officers are now stationed in the hallways of some immigration courts to take aliens whose cases were dismissed into custody. 

The AP never explains why ICE is taking those aliens whose cases were dismissed into custody, but I believe in many of those cases, the answer is clear: those aliens were released on parole with NTAs to begin the years-long immigration-court process, but all remain subject to expedited removal, which allows Trump’s DHS to skip immigration court in most of their cases entirely. 

Let me explain. 

As the Fifth Circuit has held: 

parole creates something of legal fiction; although a paroled alien is physically allowed to enter the country, the legal status of the alien is the same as if he or she were still being held at the border waiting for his or her application for admission to be granted or denied.

Supreme Court precedent is clear that aliens who are stopped at the borders and ports have no due process rights besides those Congress has expressly given them by statute, and Congress hasn’t given most of those migrants many rights at all.

By statute, the DHS secretary can revoke parole status if she concludes the purposes of parole “have been served”, and when she does so those the alien “shall forthwith return or be returned to the custody from which he was paroled and thereafter his case shall continue to be dealt with in the same manner as that of any other applicant for admission” (emphasis added) – which is exactly what is described in the AP report. 

None of those previously paroled aliens have visas that permitting them to be admitted to this country, and therefore they are amenable to “expedited removal” under section 235(b)(1) of the INA.

Immigration officers can order the expulsion of aliens subject to expedited removal without first obtaining a removal order from an immigration judge, unless those aliens claim a fear of persecution if returned. 

Aliens making such claims are referred to USCIS asylum officers for “credible fear” interviews. If the asylum officer finds that the alien has a credible fear, the alien will be placed back into immigration court removal proceedings, but if the officer concludes the alien doesn’t have a credible fear, the alien’s only recourse is to ask an immigration judge to review that determination – there is no federal court appeal. 

In the first two weeks of January, nearly half (48.4 percent) of substantive asylum officer credible fear decisions were denials, and of the 14,700 immigration-judge decisions reviewing credible fear denials in the first half of FY 2025, more than three-quarters, 75.6 percent, affirmed the findings of asylum officers.

In other words, the odds that an alien in expedited removal who makes a persecution claim will be found to have a credible fear are roughly 63.4 percent. 

But not all aliens make credible fear claims, and DHS will now likely detain those aliens (as the INA requires) throughout the entire process – regardless of whether those aliens are found to have a credible fear or not. Given that, the percentage of formerly paroled aliens who are subjected to expedited removal and who make credible fear claims is likely to be low, at least by recent standards.

The Biden administration likely thought it was doing favors to more than 2.863 million aliens it paroled into the United States, but parole status is tenuous, and the current White House clearly believes it has a mandate to return parole to its statutory limits. Expect more immigration court arrests – likely a lot more.