President Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is taking its deportation mission one step further, announcing Thursday that it would be opening the door for immigration authorities to deport the more than one million migrants paroled into the U.S. under the Biden White House.
The administration is empowering Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials with the authority to revoke the legal status of hundreds of thousands of migrants paroled into the country and seek their deportation, according to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) memo provided to the Daily Caller News Foundation. The directive largely applies to the more than one million migrants paroled into the U.S. through the CHNV program and the CBP One app over the last several years by the Biden administration.
For any migrant that may be subject to expedited removal, the DHS memo directs officials with empowered authority to review their case and exercise their “enforcement discretion” on whether to quickly remove them from the country.
The memo additionally clarifies that, for any migrant who has been granted parole under a policy “paused, modified, or terminated” immediately by the Trump administration, federal immigration officials may choose whether they can be subjected to deportation proceedings and review their parole to determine if parole remains “appropriate in light of any changed legal or factual status.”
The Biden administration paroled more than 530,000 foreign nationals into the country through the CHNV program, according to the latest data from Customs and Border Protection. The program — which applies to Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan nationals — has allowed those approved to enter the U.S. temporarily under humanitarian parole.
The CHNV program had been plagued with rampant fraud throughout the duration of its existence, with the Biden administration even pausing the program after an internal report uncovered a litany of red flags by sponsors.
More than 900,000 foreign nationals successfully scheduled appointments through the CBP One app from January 2023 through the end of December 2024, according to CBP. Wildly popular with migrants attempting to seek asylum in the U.S., they reportedly made roughly 166 million attempts to secure an appointment on the app over the past two years.
GOP critics of the app and the CHNV program argued that the Biden administration was simply using the parole initiatives as a run-around to allow otherwise-inadmissible migrants into the U.S. in order to keep border-crossing numbers down.
Trump immediately cancelled the app upon entering office and has gone on to implement a growing slate of hardline immigration enforcement measures, as he moves forward fulfilling his pledge to control the illegal immigration crisis that sprang under the previous administration.
In an effort to take the handcuffs off deportation officers, the administration eliminated so-called sensitive locations, public areas like schools or hospitals in which ICE agents were previously not allowed to conduct enforcement activities. The Trump White House also expanded expedited removal — a policy that allows immigration enforcement officials to quickly remove illegal migrants from the U.S. by bypassing the immigration court process — from 100 miles within an international border to anywhere within the country.
“The Trump administration will not tie the hands of our brave law enforcement, and instead trusts them to use common sense,” a DHS spokesperson said of the policy changes.
“The Biden-Harris administration abused the humanitarian parole program to indiscriminately allow 1.5 million migrants to enter our country,” the spokesperson continued. “This was all stopped on day one of the Trump administration.”
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