Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy asked White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt Tuesday on whether President Donald Trump’s administration can successfully deport a half-a-million foreign nationals admitted by his predecessor, former President Joe Biden.
U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, an Obama-appointed federal judge, halted Trump’s termination of the Biden administration’s fraud-ridden parole program, known as CHNV, that permitted Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan nationals to reside in the U.S. The press secretary told Doocy that the administration will continue deporting these individuals who had been “taken advantage of” by the Biden administration.
“There’s this CHNV thing, President Biden let over 530,000 people from Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti [and] Venezuela into the U.S. with this CHNV program. He did it with the stroke of a pen,” Doocy began. “And now, a judge will not let President Trump undo it with a stroke of a pen. So are you guys going to give all 530,000 plus people individual hearings or are you just going to try to deport them?”
“I spoke to the White House Counsel’s office about this this morning because obviously another rogue district court judge is trying to block the administration’s mass deportation efforts with this latest injunction,” Leavitt said. “We will fight this in the court of law and we will ensure that every individual who illegally entered our country and was really taken advantage of by the previous administration because they abused the parole system in this country to fast track legal status as they said for these illegal immigrants and they completely abused our legal system. Many of these paroled individuals were then given temporary protective status, which the intention of that was only supposed to be used in times of war or storm or destruction in the home countries of these migrants. It was completely abused.”
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Talwani ruled that suddenly revoking the legal status given to these non-citizens “without any case-by-case justification” is a violation of the rule of the law, adding that “the balance of equities and public interest weigh in favor of preliminary relief.”
Biden launched the CHNV program in October 2022 for Venezuelans, and later expanded it in January 2023 to include Cuban, Nicaraguan and Haitian nationals. The program gives non-citizens two-year authorization to live and work in the U.S. if they had not previously entered the U.S. illegally and had gone through the vetting process.
However, Republicans accused the previous administration of using CHNV to allow migrants who otherwise would not have been permitted into the U.S. as a way of mitigating the record border crisis occurring at the U.S.-Mexico border. As a result, over 200,000 nationals from the four countries were flown into the U.S. under the program, which allowed them to avoid the southern border entirely.
An internal report from August 2024 uncovered massive fraud from the CHNV program, which found 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 deceased person and an IP address located in Tijuana, Mexico, being used more than 1,300 times. Biden’s Department of Homeland Security put the program on pause as a result of the audit, and later announced in October 2024 that they would not be renewing parole for CHNV enrollees.
The Trump administration terminated CHNV altogether in March and began sending termination notices to the non-citizens who entered the U.S. through the program. Had the judge not blocked Trump’s efforts to end CHNV, the enrolled would have been ordered to leave the U.S. by April 24 or face deportation.
The Trump administration’s hawkish actions on the border and immigration have drastically reduced the number of illegal border crossings. Border Patrol agents counted roughly 7,180 crossings along the U.S.-Mexico border during March, marking the all-time lowest number of border crossings recorded in a single month.
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