The Biden administration temporarily waved in over half a million foreigners with no concrete strategy on how to keep their stay in the country temporary, a government watchdog found.
Between July 2021 to January 2025, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) opened the door to well over 800,000 noncitizens through various parole programs, but had no “defined process” to address their parole expiration, according to the DHS Office of Inspector General (OIG). The report also concluded that the Biden administration did not initiate enforcement actions for those whose parole had expired and had no assurances that former parolees were even legally present.
“DHS had defined policies, processes, procedures, and roles for certain aspects of the parole processes, such as granting re-parole and adjudicating applications for legal status, but DHS did not have a well-defined process or designate a responsible entity for monitoring and addressing parole expiration,” the OIG report states.
“As a result, DHS did not have assurance that the end of the parole process was operating as intended,” the report continues.
DHS is authorized to temporarily parole foreign nationals into the U.S. on a case-by-case basis for various humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit, according to the Immigration and Nationality Act. Parole allows eligible noncitizens temporary lawful presence, but does not provide immigration status or a pathway to legal permanent residence.
President Joe Biden — who presided over the worst immigration crisis in U.S. history — began initiating various parole programs that allowed migrants to enter the U.S. legally and bypass the southern border altogether.
The largest such parole program was CHNV, which brought more than half a million Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans into the country between October 2022 to January 2025. The Biden administration also paroled over 230,000 Ukrainian nationals through Uniting for Ukraine and another 77,000 Afghan nationals through Operation Allies Refuge and Operation Allies Welcome, according to the OIG.
However, investigators found that the DHS agencies tasked with managing these hundreds of thousands of parolees — Customs and Border Protection (CBP), U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and Immigration and Customs Enforcement — had no designated components to manage the individuals whose time in the U.S. had ended and largely did not take action against them.
A growing number of illegal migrants are living in the U.S. unlawfully as a consequence, the OIG concluded.
“Aliens may already be unlawfully in the United States after parole expiration without facing enforcement consequences,” the report states. “The number of aliens unlawfully present is likely to increase, as initial parole periods for many more aliens continue to expire and the January 2025 policy changes are implemented, leaving many aliens with no available pathway to remain lawfully in the United States.”
Fieldwork for the OIG review ended in September 2024, months before President Donald Trump re-entered office and took a chopping block to the parole apparatus his predecessor initiated.
The Trump administration in March announced the termination of the CHNV program, with DHS Secretary Kristi Noem saying at the time that the program did not serve “a significant public benefit.” Following a legal challenge to the move, the Supreme Court in May ultimately allowed the administration to cancel the legal status of those who entered via CHNV.
Trump also scrapped the Biden-era CBP One app, which had allowed migrants to apply for asylum at the border en masse, and in April revoked the legal status of the hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals paroled through the program. That same app has since been reformatted into the CBP Home app, which is designed for migrants to declare their self-deportation.
The Biden administration launched Operation Allies Welcome and Operation Allies Refuge in 2021 amid the disastrous pullout of Afghanistan. A government watchdog report released in June found that 55 Afghan evacuees on the terrorist watchlist made it to a U.S. port of entry or were included on the watchlist during their evacuation and resettlement into the country.
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