(Ken Silva, Headline USA) A federal judge said Thursday that she will prevent the Trump administration from ordering hundreds of thousands of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans that were flown into the country by the Biden administration to leave the country later this month.
The ruling is a significant, although perhaps temporary, setback for the administration as it dismantles Biden-era policies that directly flew third-world immigrants into the United States, generally for two years with work authorization.
U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani said she would issue a stay on an order for more than 500,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans to leave the country, sparing them until the case advances to the next phase. Their permits were to be canceled April 24.
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.
The DHS said on March 22 that parolees without a lawful basis to stay in the U.S. “must depart” before their parole termination date.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Ken Silva is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
