The CHNV parole program was finalized by the Biden administration in January of this year. The program permitted residents of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to apply remotedly for “humanitarian parole” admittance into the United States, bypassing normal immigration requirements. By late June, the program had admitted an average of 30,000 every month to a total of more than 494,799 immigrants up to that point.
At the outset, the Department of Homeland Security assured us that it had procedures in place to detect and prevent fraud. Unsurprisingly, that wasn’t true. Now the DHS has called a sudden halt to the program, pending an investigation into findings of wholesale fraud released this week by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). In summary, here is what FAIR has uncovered:
- CHNV applicants have used the Social Security numbers of deceased sponsors. Otherwise, totally bogus SS numbers — such as “111111111” or “123456789” or “666666666″ appear throughout the applications.
- CHNV applications contained 3,264 phone numbers that didn’t exist.
- The same 100 physical addresses appeared on 19,062 application forms.
- 465 fradulent zip codes were found on a total of 2,839 forms.
- And so on.
Republican lawmakers, such as House Homeland Security Chairman Mark Green (R-TN), have been warning all along that the program illegally circumvented the legal immigration process. Green said in a statement:
This is exactly what happens when you create an unlawful mass-parole program in order to spare your administration the political embarrassment and bad optics of overrun borders. The Biden-Harris administration should terminate the CHNV program immediately.
And so they have, at least temporarily. A DHS spokesman said Friday:
Out of an abundance of caution, DHS has temporarily paused the issuance of advanced travel authorizations for new beneficiaries while it undertakes a review of supporter applications. DHS will restart application processing as quickly as possible, with appropriate safeguards.
Of course. Yeah. That’s what they said the first time.
For more, see the Washington Examiner.