(Ken Silva, Headline USA) The Department of Homeland Security said Friday that it will revoke legal protections for hundreds of thousands of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans who were flown directly into the country over the last two years under the Biden administration’s “CHVN Parole Program”—setting them up for potential deportation in about a month.
The order applies to about 532,000 people from the four countries who came to the country since October 2022. They were given two-year permits to live and work in the U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said they will lose their legal status on April 24, or 30 days after the publication of the notice in the Federal Register.
The new policy impacts people who are already in the U.S. and who came under the humanitarian parole program. It follows an earlier Trump administration decision to end what it called the “broad abuse” of the humanitarian parole.
Humanitarian parole is a long-standing legal tool presidents have used to allow people from countries where there’s war or political instability to enter and temporarily live in the U.S.
However, the tool was abused by the Biden administration to parole some 30,000 migrants per month. Federal law allows the Homeland Security Secretary to grant parole to migrants only on a “case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.”
Last November, the House Judiciary Committee published a report on Biden’s abuse of the program.
The Biden-Harris admin. flew more than 500K Haitians, Cubans, Venezuelans and Nicaraguans directly into the country over the last 2 years, according to this report. https://t.co/sYxfdk4Ke8 pic.twitter.com/84NNMzyIAw
— Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless) November 20, 2024
“Through CHNV, each month up to 30,000 aliens, who otherwise have no basis to enter the country and who have ‘a supporter’ in the United States, can bypass the U.S. border and fly directly into the country ‘on commercial flights’ to be ‘granted parole’ for a period of two years by the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security,” the House report said last November, quoting DHS’s own press releases.
“As of ‘the end of September 2024, more than 531,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans’ had done so.”
Earlier in 2024, an internal DHS report found that the CHNV program was plagued with fraud. For example, the internal review found that the same social security numbers, addresses, and phone numbers were being used hundreds of times in some cases.
The program was also found to have been exploited by sex traffickers. “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,” the House report said.
After the fraud was found, the CHNV program was temporarily shuttered. But the Biden administration restarted it about a month later. More than 3 million CHNV applications have been filed and more than 600,000 were approved before Biden left office—meaning hundreds of thousands more Haitians, Cubans, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans could have flown into the country before the DHS suspended the program Friday.
In its Friday notice, the DHS said parolees without a lawful basis to stay in the U.S. “must depart” before their parole termination date.
“Parole is inherently temporary, and parole alone is not an underlying basis for obtaining any immigration status,” DHS said.
Before the new order, the beneficiaries of the program could stay in the U.S. until their parole expires, although the administration had stopped processing their applications for asylum, visas and other requests that might allow them to remain longer.
The administration decision has already been challenged in federal courts.
A group of American citizens and immigrants sued the Trump administration for ending humanitarian parole and are seeking to reinstate the programs for the four nationalities.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Ken Silva is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
