The Supreme Court handed the Trump administration a major victory Friday, opening the door for the White House to finally roll back a Biden-era migrant program that experts say was designed to hide the border crisis.
The White House is now able to cancel the legal status of hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals who entered the United States under the Biden-era CHNV program, paving the way for their removal from the country. Immigration hawks and GOP critics of the Biden administration have argued that the program was established as a run-around for non-citizens who would’ve otherwise unlawfully crossed the U.S.-Mexico border.
“This is a great decision for the rule of law and prioritizing American interests first,” Dale Wilcox, executive director of the Immigration Reform Law Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that advocates for tougher immigration enforcement policies, said Friday to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“The CHNV program was not lawful, but the Biden Administration implemented it anyway to bring more than a half million foreign nationals into the country who should not be here,” Wilcox continued. “The Trump White House deserves credit for having the resolve to terminate this program.”
An acronym for the Cuban, Haitian, Nicaragua and Venezuelan nationals paroled under the process, the CHNV program sponsored more than 530,000 non-citizens into the country under the Biden administration, according to figures provided by Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
Originally launched for Venezuelans in October 2022, the CHNV program was later expanded in January 2023 to include Haitians, Nicaraguans and Cubans. The massive parole initiative gave foreign nationals two-year authorization into the U.S. and work permits, provided they had not previously entered the country illegally and passed other vetting measures.
At CHNV’s peak, the Biden administration was flying around 30,000 foreign nationals into the U.S. each month under the program. The parole process was taking place at a time of unprecedented illegal immigration at the southern border.
CBP officials experienced the highest and second highest border encounters in fiscal years 2023 and 2024 respectively, according to the agency’s data, placing incredible strain on enforcement resources and serving as an embarrassment for the Biden White House. In total, there were roughly 8.5 million migrant encounters along the U.S.-Mexico border during the four fiscal years of the Biden-Harris administration.
The border crisis was born after President Joe Biden immediately began unrolling the border security apparatus established under the first Trump administration.
In the first year of Biden’s presidency, his administration took 296 executive actions on immigration, according to an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute. Of these executive actions, 89 specifically reversed or began the process of undoing President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. Biden went on to undo major initiatives undertaken by his then-predecessor, such as ending border wall construction, shutting down the Remain in Mexico program and ending the COVID-era Title 42 health order that quickly expelled migrants.
Amid the ensuing immigration crisis, GOP leaders accused Biden of creating the CHNV program as a way to cover up the chaotic scenes taking place at the border. House Homeland Security Chairman Mark Green in August referred to it as “a massive shell game” that encouraged otherwise inadmissible migrants to simply cross into the country at ports of entry instead of in between them.
Many of the migrants who entered the U.S. through CHNV had already settled in stable and prosperous countries, including many wealthy nations in Western Europe — drawing into question the legitimacy of their needs for parole into the U.S., according to an investigation by the Center for Immigration Studies, another Washington, D.C.,-based organization that advocates for lower levels of immigration.
“CHNV was an illegal parole program established by the Biden administration to obscure the scope of the border crisis they created,” Ira Mehlman, media director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), stated Friday to the DCNF.
“By statute, immigration parole is supposed to be used to allow otherwise inadmissible aliens to enter the country temporarily on a case-by-case basis for compelling national or humanitarian interests,” Mehlman said. “Under the Biden administration, it was used to allow millions of illegal aliens to not only enter the country but also be given work authorization.”
Flying roughly 530,000 foreign nationals into the U.S. was “less conspicuous” than having them pour across the southern border, Mehlman noted.
FAIR obtained an internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) document in July detailing massive evidence of fraud within CHNV, prompting Biden administration officials at the time to pause the program. The internal report identified a litany of red flags, such as 100,948 CHNV forms being completed by just 3,218 sponsors, 24 of the 1,000 most used Social Security numbers by sponsors belonging to a dead person and an IP address located in Tijuana, Mexico, being used more than 1,300 times.
While the Biden administration eventually resumed CHNV, it announced in October that those paroled under the program would not have their status renewed — meaning their legal status in the U.S. was due to end unless they obtained an alternative means to remain in the country.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in March announced she would be terminating the program early, stating that the program did not serve “a significant public benefit” and was inconsistent with the Trump administration’s foreign policy goals. However, an Obama-appointed federal judge temporarily blocked the directive in April.
Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor were the only justices who dissented to the Supreme Court’s Friday decision.
Fresh off the Supreme Court victory, immigration hawks are calling on lawmakers to pass reforms to ensure another administration does not abuse migrant parole programs down the road.
“The Supreme Court has now cleared the way for CHNV parolees to be returned to their countries,” Mehlman said to the DCNF. “It is now incumbent on Congress to enact reforms to the parole statute to ensure that no future administration can abuse its authority the way the Biden administration did.”
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