The Trump administration is set to put an end to a Biden-era program on Tuesday that paroled hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals into the United States during the height of the southern border crisis.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced the determination of the CHNV program, a sponsorship process that brought in roughly 530,000 non-citizens from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, per a memo released by the agency. The Biden administration launched the CHNV program in 2022 in an attempt to help alleviate the U.S.-Mexico border crisis and continued to parole thousands into the country every month despite internal reports indicating massive fraud.
“DHS has determined that it is now appropriate and necessary to terminate the CHNV parole programs,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wrote in the notice. “These programs do not serve a significant public benefit, are not necessary to reduce levels of illegal immigration, did not sufficiently mitigate the domestic effects of illegal immigration, are not serving their intended purposes, and are inconsistent with the Administration’s foreign policy goals.”
“Regarding previous arguments or determinations that these programs were consistent with the requirement of ‘urgent humanitarian reasons’ for granting parole, DHS believes that consideration of any urgent humanitarian reasons for granting parole is best addressed on a case-by-case basis consistent with the statute, and taking into consideration each alien’s specific circumstances,” Noem continued. “These reasons, independently and cumulatively, support termination of the CHNV parole programs.”
First launched for Venezuelans in October 2022, the CHNV program was later expanded in January 2023 to include Haitian, Nicaraguan and Cuban nationals. The mass parole initiative gave foreign nationals two-year authorization into the U.S. and work permits, provided they had not previously entered the U.S. illegally and passed other vetting processes.
Hundreds of thousands of migrants were flying into the U.S. each month under the program. However, the initiative was plagued with massive accounts of fraud, forcing the Biden administration to place it on hold in August 2024.
In August 2024, Biden’s DHS confirmed that they placed the program on pause following an internal audit. That 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 deceased person and an IP address located in Tijuana, Mexico, being used more than 1,300 times.
Despite the rampant fraud, the Biden administration chose to resume the CHNV program. However, the administration in October ultimately decided that it would not extend parole for those who entered through CHNV — meaning these migrants knew their time in the U.S. was drawing to a close well before President Donald Trump re-entered office in January.
Republicans long argued that the program was a farce, flying otherwise-inadmissible aliens into the U.S. en masse in order to keep pressure off the southern border.
“The CHNV program, along with the use of the CBP One app at the Southwest border, has helped the president and his border czar play a massive shell game, encouraging otherwise-inadmissible aliens to simply cross at ports of entry instead of between them,” House Homeland Security Chairman Mark Green said in an August statement, in reaction to the Biden administration’s decision to resume the program.
An investigation by the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, D.C.,-based immigration group, uncovered that many of the migrants who entered the U.S. through CHNV had already settled in incredibly 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.
CHNV enrollees in the U.S. will lose their deportation protections and work permits by the end of April, per Noem’s memo. They will need to establish other legal means of remaining in the U.S., self-deport or be forcibly repatriated by federal immigration authorities.
“One of the stated goals of the CHNV parole programs was to promote the foreign policy objectives of the prior administration,” the DHS secretary stated. “The foreign policy objectives underlying the CHNV parole programs, however, are not consistent with those of the current Administration.”
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