Termination notices are being delivered to hundreds of thousands of migrants who entered the United States through a fraud-ridden parole program launched by the Biden administration.
The Trump White House earlier in March terminated the CHNV program, an initiative launched by the previous administration that flew in over half-a-million migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela over the past several years. The hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals enrolled in the program began receiving notices Thursday that their temporary status on CHNV is being terminated, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) confirmed.
In a public statement confirming the termination letters, DHS called CHNV a “disastrous” program and ripped the Biden White House for importing “loosely vetted” migrants en masse that competed with American workers.
“The previous administration lied to America,” a senior DHS official said Thursday.
“They allowed more than half a million loosely vetted aliens from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela and their immediate family members to enter the United States through these disastrous parole programs; granted them opportunities to compete for American jobs and undercut American workers; forced career civil servants to promote the programs even when fraud was identified; and then blamed Republicans in Congress for the chaos that ensued and the crime that followed,” the senior official continued.
First launched by the Biden administration in October 2022 for Venezuelans, 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 country unlawfully and cleared other vetting processes.
However, the program quickly began taking flak. Republicans accused the Biden administration of using CHNV — and other maneuvers, like the expansion of the CBP One app — to allow otherwise-inadmissible aliens into the U.S. en masse as a way to loosen pressure on the southerner border, which was experiencing a massive crisis at the time.
During its peak, CHNV was flying roughly 30,000 migrants into the U.S. every single month, allowing them to circumvent the U.S.-Mexico border entirely.
In August 2024, Biden’s DHS confirmed the program was placed on pause following an internal audit that uncovered rampant fraud. The internal report identified a long slate 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, among other discrepancies.
In October 2024, the Biden administration announced it would not be renewing parole for CHNV enrollees. The Trump administration earlier in March took this a step further by nixing the program altogether, meaning CHNV migrants will lose their deportation protections and work permits by the end of April.
“The Biden-Harris administration abused its limited authority to grant parole to inadmissible aliens en masse through programs like the Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan parole program (CHNV), which allowed inadmissible aliens entry partially on the basis that a ‘sponsor’ agreed to financially support them,” said House Homeland Security Chairman Mark Green and other subcommittee chairmen in a Wednesday letter to DHS, asking for more information of the Biden White House’s use of mass parole for non-citizens.
“The Biden-Harris administration went to great lengths to maintain this unconstitutional abuse of the Secretary’s parole authority despite indications that prospective sponsors were financing their income through illegal activities and were engaging in fraud,” the chairman continued.
The actions around CHNV are just a facet of President Donald Trump’s hawkish immigration platform. His administration has dramatically beefed up border security, escalated immigration apprehensions and scored numerous high-profile arrests of foreign student protesters accused of Hamas sympathies.
Termination notices to CHNV parolees will continue to be doled out in batches, according to DHS. Roughly 175,000 notices will be sent per day, with all 500,000 or so being delivered by Monday morning. Enrollees will need to find an alternative legal means to remain in the U.S., leave on their own accord or face deportation.
“The termination of the CHNV parole programs, and the termination of parole for those who exploited it, is a return to common-sense policies, a return to public safety, and a return to America First,” the senior DHS official said.
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