Former President Donald Trump has accused the Biden-Harris administration of carrying out a backdoor operation to admit immigrants into the United States that goes around the southern border and makes Border Patrol arrests appear low.
Trump told Fox News host Harris Faulkner in a town hall that aired Wednesday that the government was helping immigrants bypass the border to “fly them over in airplanes.”
“The word is probation,” Trump said. “In order to get the people in legally. They call it probation.”
The process that Trump was referring to is known as parole and is a valid immigration process for admitting non-U.S. citizens into the country, but it has been used at a staggering rate by the Biden-Harris administration over the past two years, according to federal data reviewed by the Washington Examiner.
Arrests of illegal border crossers
While administration officials and Democrats have defended parole as a legal way to deter immigrants from crossing the border on foot, Republicans and immigration restrictionists have blasted the operation as going on behind closed doors and out of public view, on purpose.
For example, Trump points to this reason for Haitian immigrants moving to Springfield, Ohio, and eating neighbors’ pets, a claim that has been unfounded.
“Springfield, Ohio, they have 50,000, 52,000 people, no problems, no real crime, beautiful community. They just dropped 30,000 illegal aliens in Springfield, Ohio, and it’s become a different place,” Trump told Faulkner. “We’re going to destroy our country. Our country is going to — it’s horrible.”
“Actually, there’s more to that story. They are here legally, and there are programs that the current administration has put into place to do those flights,” Faulkner said, referring to the use of parole and CHNV, or Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans, program. “We know the numbers have lessened at the border because of what [the Biden-Harris administration] is doing partially.”
Arrests of illegal border crossers at the southern border jumped from around 60,000 per month when Trump left office to regularly topping 150,000 and 200,000 per month under President Joe Biden, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection numbers.
After peaking at nearly 250,000 last December, the Biden-Harris administration has seen figures reduce to below 60,000 each of the last few months, but Republicans say it is because the administration has pushed immigrants into the country through other means.
“Murder is down, and fewer people are crossing the border, and Trump calls that a hellscape?” Biden said during a speech at Philadelphia’s City Committee dinner. “He talks about America being a failed nation. Where the hell’s he from?”
The Biden-Harris administration has been able to claim progress with illegal immigration, a message it is pushing this election as immigration tops voters’ list of concerns nationwide.
However, the border crisis has not abated, as at least 130,000 immigrants continue to be admitted per month by encouraging people to come through the ports of entry.
What the data show
Until the previous administrations, parole was rarely used. Between 2014 and 2020, parole was used to admit between 11,000 and 54,000 immigrants each year, according to Department of Homeland Security data. The government stats show parole in these cases was used only at ports of entry.
Under Biden, those figures have shot up to 370,190 parolees in 2023 alone and 416,450 in 2024, only counting the first nine months of the fiscal year.
In less than two years, more than 786,000 immigrants have been paroled into the U.S.
Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies, said the change in parole under Biden was not a matter of just making a few exceptions.
“This is a massive entry program that’s not authorized by law and that has profound impacts on the receiving communities,” said Vaughan, whose organization is nonpartisan but takes a stricter approach to immigration levels.
Why is parole use way up?
The number of immigrants who were caught attempting to enter the U.S. without authorization rose to the highest level in history under Biden.
Republicans have blamed Biden for rolling back Trump administration policies, while Democrats have pointed to a pent-up demand to migrate during the pandemic.
Regardless of what has driven migration to the U.S., the number of immigrants arrested by the Border Patrol crossing into the U.S. from Mexico between ports of entry has topped 2 million for the past couple of years, compared to historic annual norms of 400,000 to 1 million under the Obama and Trump administrations.
Parole entails being admitted into the country for two years and being given a work document, more than immigrants who enter the country illegally and are released receive.
“The authority of parole is a genuine authority but the purpose is for urgent humanitarian situations or some defined significant public benefit,” said Vaughan, adding the circumstances should be “safe, legal, and rare.”
Parole use in the CHNV program
In late 2022 into early 2023, the Biden-Harris administration launched two ways, known as the CHNV program and through port of entry appointments, that immigrants could use the federal agency’s CBP One app to apply from outside the U.S. to enter.
Every month, the Biden-Harris administration allows 30,000 immigrants to enter the U.S. through the CBP One app’s CHNV program — short for Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. It was created nearly two years ago to stop the massive numbers of immigrants from those four countries from illegally crossing the land border.
“Through the end of August 2024, nearly 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans arrived lawfully on commercial flights and were granted parole under these processes,” CBP said in a statement in September.
Of that total 530,000 figure, Haitians made up the largest percentage of parolees through CHNV. Nearly 210,000 Haitians, 117,000 Venezuelans, 110,000 Cubans, and 93,000 Nicaraguans have flown and been paroled into the country.
The CHNV program allows those immigrants to send documents through the app to Homeland Security officials and apply to be admitted to the U.S. on parole. The person must agree and pay for his or her own international airfare and can fly into any U.S. airport, where he or she will be further inspected by customs officers.
Vaughan characterized the CHNV program as a way for immigrants who do not meet the legal standards for admission — obtaining a visa, being from a country where a visa is not required, or receiving a green card — to “leapfrog” over the border.
In that time, CBP statistics show that immigrants from those four countries entering illegally through the southern border dropped. But Republicans say it is because of the backchannel to fly immigrants in and not be counted, while Democrats say the CBP One app is a legitimate means that deters illegal immigration.
The issue is Republicans don’t view anything about the CBP One app as being above the books. Therefore, anyone admitted through the app cannot be a “legal” immigrant. The CHNV program has also been riddled with fraud, according to an internal government audit by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General.
DHS suspended the CHNV program in July based on widespread fraud in applications. In some cases, immigrants used the same addresses to warehouses as the home addresses of where they would live once in the U.S. DHS reinstated the program later in the summer and reassured the public that it was carefully vetting applicants.
Further complicating the matter, the Biden-Harris administration said last month that it would not continue the temporary status for the 530,000 immigrants paroled into the country through CHNV, leaving them in legal limbo and possibly setting them up to become illegal immigrants within the U.S.
Immigrants outside the country may still apply to be admitted to fly in, but those already here will not be able to remain when their two-year parole concludes.
CBP One app appointments
Parole is also being given to immigrants who use the CBP One app to schedule appointments at the southern border. Immigrants from any country who make it to Mexico may use the app to request an appointment. The current wait times are between a few weeks and nine months.
Roughly 1,450 appointments are available per day for a total of 43,500 appointments in a month — or 522,000 appointments in a year.
“Since the appointment scheduling function in CBP One was introduced in January 2023 through the end of August 2024, approximately 813,000 individuals have successfully scheduled appointments to present at ports of entry instead of risking their lives in the hands of smugglers,” CBP said in a statement on Sept. 16.
CBP does not disclose how many of those appointments resulted in the immigrant being paroled into the country.
Solving a problem or creating a loophole?
A White House spokesperson said the use of parole through the CBP One app has had positive results on illegal immigration by way of the southern border.
“Since President Biden announced new executive actions to secure the border, encounters between ports of entry have dropped by more than 55% and remain at the lowest level in years,” the White House spokesperson wrote in an email.
The White House and Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, said there was no deception in how the government was tracking immigrants encountered at the border and admitted through parole.
“Republicans are fully aware that the Administration is counting and reporting numbers exactly like past administrations,” Thompson said. “Republicans are just complaining because the Biden administration has been successful in getting migrants to present at ports of entry for lawful, orderly processing, which past administrations also encouraged.”
The high number of parolees is a national security concern, according to House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green (R-TN). Green drew attention in September to a Haitian immigrant who had been admitted and allowed to fly into the country through the CHNV program and was arrested by local police on suspicion of molesting a 10-year-old child in Massachusetts.
“This is not the first time something like this has happened, and it may not be the last if President Biden and Vice President, and border czar, Kamala Harris do not secure our border and cease this unlawful program,” Green said in a statement.”We will continue to do everything in our power to hold the Biden-Harris administration accountable for releasing otherwise inadmissible aliens who commit such vile crimes into our communities.”
The White House has rebutted that it was Republicans in Congress who refused to support a Senate border security bill last winter that would have overhauled the system. Republicans said at the time that they did not approve the bipartisan bill amid private calls not to support it by Trump.
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