By: Todd Bensman, September 27, 2024
4 min read
For a short time, the Biden-Harris administration paused its legally dubious “humanitarian parole” program flying foreigners to the U.S., after discovering that thousands of the required U.S.-based financial “sponsors” were fraudsters or didn’t exist.
Having already imported more than 500,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans in need of “urgent humanitarian” rescue to the “sanctuary” of 45 different U.S. cities, the flights program proved far too essential a campaign aid for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris to let fraud stand in its way for long. Those 30,000 immigrants flying into U.S. airports every month would otherwise add to the southern border’s politically unsightly illegal crossing congestion during a tight race with former President Donald Trump.
So after supposedly girding against future sponsor fraud, the administration has just cranked the humanitarian rescue flights program right back up to its old giant self.
An Even Bigger Fraud
The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) has revealed through extended litigation another utterly egregious fraud that this administration will continue to perpetrate on the American people: Those Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans supposedly rescued for “urgent humanitarian reasons,” as the administration sold it to the American people, are flying to U.S. sanctuary from the safest, most prosperous, “happiest” nations and vacation wonderlands on planet Earth. Not from their problematic home countries, as the administration has mendaciously let the American people believe.
CIS was able to finally pry from government hands the stunning, unexpected list of 73 departure countries it was hiding.
The list shows Cubans, Haitians, Venezuelans, and Nicaraguans are flying from beautiful Caribbean vacation hotspots such as Barbados, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Martinique, St. Lucia, St. Kitts and Nevis, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Not to mention from Fiji and Australia.
Beneficiaries from Europe and Asia
In addition to humanitarian motives, the government’s original justification for this program was that it would provide a “significant public benefit” to the United States by decongesting the borderlands.
That, it turns out, was a big fat lie. Many of the flight beneficiaries were nowhere near the migration routes headed to the southern border, and were instead living in wealthy European Union countries such as France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, and Italy.
And also in the “happiest” of the wealthiest European countries of Finland, Sweden Norway, and the Netherlands. They’re flying in from Poland and the Czech Republic. From the vacation wonderlands of Iceland and Greece too.
The absurdity of this program is intense.
The chances that the flights program would save Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans from dangerous forced marches on Latin America’s migration routes to escape certain death, as the administration has publicly argued, amounts to exactly zero.
In Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, and some of the Arab world’s oil-rich Gulf states — those are all on the list of departure countries — they’re nowhere near either Latin American danger nor migration routes. In Israel, before the war started with Hamas? No urgent humanitarian reason comes to mind for an authorized flight from the Holy Land into America that is not happening in a congressionally approved immigrant admission program.
Presumably, many Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans have reached these countries to settle and work but could not have overlooked the irresistible opportunity extended by the American government to let them fly in to live famed, even more indulgent American lifestyles, or to join relatives.
False Justification
Those reasons do not align at all with the flight program’s publicly stated reason for being.
What is happening here, instead, is that the Biden-Harris administration is paroling in aliens who are already firmly resettled in safe and orderly countries but seek even greater public benefits. That’s a serious disservice to the American public. Misleading the public about the administration’s true use of parole prevents voters from understanding the real impact of this policy and from holding the administration accountable for abusing the nation’s immigration laws.
Those who flew from these 73 countries didn’t need a helping hand. Instead, a cadre of sneaky, dishonest anti-borders activists in the Biden-Harris administration are helping allied nonprofit migration advocates make a mint on all these incoming foreign nationals, who will show up asking for public assistance even with bank accounts from working abroad.
The program’s foundational premises, it must be restated, are a total lie, a fraud of high order far beyond the sponsor fraud that caught some brief news coverage. But this greater fraud has drawn no media coverage at all.
Beyond the absentee media, what have we heard about this outrageous systemic government fraud from U.S. Republican campaigners, Republican-controlled congressional oversight committees holding border-related hearings, or Trump?
Exactly what Harris wants between now and November 5: bupkis, as the flights hit tarmacs day after day after day.
Todd Bensman is a Texas-based senior national security fellow for the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington D.C.-based research institute, and a writing fellow for the Middle East Forum. His latest book is “Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History” (Bombardier Books). For nearly a decade, Bensman led counterterrorism-related intelligence efforts for the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division. Follow him on Twitter @BensmanTodd.
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