The Government Accountability Office (GAO) — Congress’s non-partisan watchdog — just issued a report with the anodyne caption “DHS Identified Fraud Risks in Parole Processes for Noncitizens and Should Assess Lessons Learned”. Skip the headline and you’ll realize what happens when an administration prioritizes speed over security in an effort to move as many aliens without visas or any right to enter into the United States as quickly as possible.
“U4U”, “CHNV”, and “Family Reunification”
That report focuses on three so-called “humanitarian parole” programs implemented under Biden: one for Ukrainians displaced following the Russian invasion of that European country (“Uniting for Ukraine” or “U4U”); the second for would-be illegal migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela (“CHNV Parole”); and the third for beneficiaries of approved immigrant visas but no way to immigrate for years (“family reunification”).
To make those programs politically palatable, the Biden administration made them “supporter-based”; that is, it required would-be beneficiaries of those programs to find supporters in this country to provide for them, and most (but not all) the fraud associated with those programs related to those supporters.
Even as those three humanitarian parole programs were implemented, the Center identified vulnerabilities in each of them. Not that anybody in the Biden White House or DHS bothered to listen.
For example, in August 2023 I analyzed CHNV parole and explained why it was “ripe for human exploitation” by the aforementioned “sponsors”.
A month earlier, my colleague Elizabeth Jacobs noted that family reunification allowed its beneficiaries “to skip the line to enter the United States ahead of all other green card-eligible aliens who must wait outside the country for an immigrant visa to become available”.
And back in 2022, my colleague Nayla Rush explained there was no requirement for U.S.-based supporters under U4U to “be a U.S. national or citizen, or even a green card holder. Asylees, refugees, parolees, TPS holders, and beneficiaries of deferred action (including DACA) or Deferred Enforced Departure can also act as supporters under this program.”
Rush also noted those U4U aliens could also receive federal funding — not just private sponsor support.
In July 2024, DHS paused both CHNV Parole and U4U in response to concerns over fraud in that “sponsorship” process.
Fox News reporting at the time indicated that “100,948 forms were filled out by 3,218 serial sponsors — those whose number appears on 20 or more forms”; “24 of the 1,000 most used numbers belonged to a dead person”; and “100 physical addresses were used between 124 and 739 times on over 19,000 forms”.
Nonetheless, those programs resumed, albeit at a much lower level. President Trump has subsequently attempted to suspend all three.
The Six-Step Humanitarian Parole Process
There were six steps in each of those humanitarian parole programs, the first of which required the putative sponsor to file an I-134A, “Online Request to be a Supporter and Declaration of Financial Support”, with USCIS.
USCIS would then screen those potential supporters to ensure they met the relevant requirements; if they did, the agency would send a notification to the prospective beneficiary in step 3, which directed the foreign national to create an online account and upload biographic information.
CBP would then vet that would-be beneficiary against federal databases and, if no derogatory information was found, send the foreign national a travel authorization, step 4.
In step 5, beneficiaries would travel to the United States, usually flying into domestic airports of entry in the interior and presenting themselves for inspection.
The last step, step 6, occurred when CBP screened those aliens at the ports and either paroled them into the United States, returned them from whence they came, or placed them into proceedings.
Strain on the Ports
All told, according to GAO, 774,000 aliens were paroled under the three programs, the vast majority (69 percent) of whom arrived under CHNV. U4U accounted for an additional 30 percent, and family reunification the rest, less than 2 percent.
Technically, those aliens could have entered through any of the 328 ports of entry throughout the United States, but as GAO explained, 88 percent (almost 685,000 individuals) came in through 10 specific U.S. airports, and more than half (roughly 436,000 aliens) entered through just two: Miami International Airport (MIA), and Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport (FLL).
That makes sense, because MIA is the United States’ gateway to the Caribbean and South America, and (as noted) more than two-thirds of the parolees came from Caribbean-adjacent countries or South American ones.
And once they were through the gates and on the street, many didn’t travel far, with 40 percent of parolees (300,000 aliens) providing CBP with a Florida address as their intended destinations.
Not surprisingly, screening large numbers of facially inadmissible aliens at the ports of entry daily placed a strain on CBP resources, particularly given that all of them had to be sent to more intensive “secondary” inspection screening by agency officers.
Consequently, as per GAO, CBP had to “reallocate[] officers from other mission areas, such as countering terrorism and illegal narcotics smuggling and inspecting baggage, which officials from three ports said reduced the capacity of those other missions”.
No concerns there.
Those strains were particularly acute at MIA and FLL, and GAO quoted one CBP official who complained that “the volume of arrivals through the parole processes essentially shifted the work of processing border arrivals from the southwest border to south Florida”, in an act of administrative legerdemain.
Then there was the inevitable language barrier. Most CBP officers in the Sunshine State are fluent in Spanish, but few officers anywhere in this country can speak Haitian Creole, Russian, or Ukrainian.
According to GAO, “This made processing arriving beneficiaries — particularly those from Haiti and Ukraine — more difficult and placed additional burdens on the few officers who did speak these languages.”
“Children Arriving through the Parole Processes”
There was no minimum age for these humanitarian parole programs and, shockingly, GAO reported that:
CBP officers and supervisors at three of the four ports [it] visited said they had encountered children arriving through the parole processes accompanied by adults who were not their parents or legal guardians, which took additional time for CBP to address.
That forced CBP to scramble to find parents and legal guardians in the United States for those children, “which officials said was the outcome in most cases”.
When they couldn’t find parents or guardians, however, CBP had to send those kids to shelters run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), a transfer mandated by a poorly reasoned (and even more poorly implemented) 2008 law.
Thus, in addition to the 393,000-plus unaccompanied alien children (UACs) whom Border Patrol agents apprehended and were forced to care for at the Southwest border between FY 2022 and FY 2024, their colleagues at the ports had to deal with other UACs who came in under “humanitarian parole”.
It wasn’t an easy task, because as GAO noted, “processing these children and locating their parents took extra time” at the ports, and “verifying the authenticity of foreign guardianship documents was a challenge”. I’ll bet.
“Urgent Humanitarian Reasons” and “Significant Public Benefit”
The Biden administration repeatedly described these humanitarian programs as lawful exercises of DHS’s parole authority. Consider the following, from a June 2023 DOJ filing in Texas v. U.S. DHS, opposing a suit by plaintiff states to enjoin CHNV parole:
Plaintiffs cannot succeed on the merits because DHS is statutorily authorized to use parole in its discretion on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit. DHS has reasonably explained why an immigration official could conclude that parole of a noncitizen from one of the covered countries would address an urgent humanitarian need or provide a significant public benefit.
According to GAO, however, DHS repeatedly failed to make those key parole determinations as it ushered aliens into the United States. Let me explain.
The parole power in section 212(d)(5)(A) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) is the authority the Biden administration used to justify U4U, CHNV, and family reunification. It states, in pertinent part:
The Secretary of Homeland Security may ... in his discretion parole into the United States temporarily under such conditions as he may prescribe only on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit any alien applying for admission to the United States. [Emphasis added.]
Aliens paroled into this country are not lawfully “admitted”, and in fact DHS cannot parole aliens who have proper admission documents and are admissible. In other words, the beneficiaries of these programs were all aliens whom Congress has stated should be excluded from entry.
Parole is an exception to the general rule that aliens must be admitted to legally enter this country, and in response to prior abuses of that parole authority, Congress in 1996 placed those restrictions — that DHS may grant parole “only on a case-by-case basis” and then only for “urgent humanitarian reasons” or “significant public benefit” — on the executive’s section 212(d)(5)(A) parole power.
As I have explained in the past, “urgent humanitarian reasons” in the parole context has traditionally been equated with an alien’s need for emergency medical treatment, and “significant public benefit” with a need for the alien to appear in judicial proceedings in the United States.
The Biden administration, however, interpreted those terms to mean whatever it wanted them to mean, which caused it issues when it abused that parole authority to release hundreds of thousands of illegal entrants apprehended at the Southwest border.
Specifically, in his March 2023 opinion in Florida v. U.S. (a state challenge to border releases), Judge T. Kent Wetherell concluded that CBP’s paroles of illegal migrants were improper, in part, because the agency didn’t “limit parole to urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit”.
The border is admittedly chaotic, but these three parole programs logically were implemented in a calmer and more orderly fashion.
Except, according to GAO, they weren’t, and nobody ultimately took responsibility for determining whether urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit justified those aliens’ parole.
USCIS initially didn’t ask U4U and CHNV sponsors why beneficiaries merited humanitarian parole, and even after it added a question to that effect, didn’t “use the responses to this question to determine whether any prospective beneficiary had an urgent humanitarian reason or significant public benefit that merited parole”.
USCIS claimed it didn’t make such determinations because “it was ultimately up to CBP to determine if the prospective beneficiary met the requirements for parole once they arrived for inspection at a port of entry”.
Somebody should have told CBP, because officials from that agency informed GAO that:
they felt that DHS had already done the research to determine that these populations merited parole, as described in the Federal Register notices for the processes, and that it was not up to [CBP] officers to make a determination to the contrary.
Curiously, GAO mentions these facts in passing (at pages 51 to 52 in the report), but those findings suggest few if any aliens who came in under these programs were properly and (more importantly) legally paroled into the United States in accordance with statute.
“Urgent humanitarian reasons” and “significant public benefit” aren’t “magic words” or legalese; again, they are essential determinations DHS must make before it permits an alien to enter this country whom Congress has concluded shouldn’t be admitted.
In failing to make those determinations, Biden’s DHS unconstitutionally intruded on Congress’s “plenary power” to formulate “policies pertaining to the entry of aliens and their right to remain here”. In legal terms, that’s a “big honking deal”.
The Center Warned
Keep in mind that I haven’t even discussed the fraud aspects of these three programs. According to GAO, a “USCIS review found that fraud indicators were widespread in U4U and CHNV”, and “728 supporter applications” were filed in family reunification cases “under the names of deceased individuals — of which USCIS confirmed half” — among other issues with those programs.
Some supporters exploited beneficiaries and failed to follow through on their support commitments, while ICE failed to create enforcement guidance that focused on beneficiaries until Trump returned.
It was “turtles all the way down”, and the taxpayers are now left holding the bag.
From the outset, the Center warned that “Uniting for Ukraine”, CHNV Parole, and “family reunification” were defective programs. Until this GAO report was published, however, few could know how deeply flawed they were.
https://cis.org/Arthur/GAO-Report-Blasts-DHSs-Handling-Biden-Humanitarian-Parole-Programs
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