Biden's DHS Halting Migrant Program Raises Border Security Concerns

Suspending the parole program for Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela could increase illegal entries and undermine border security.

President Joe Biden's Department of Homeland Security (DHS) paused a key component of its immigration agenda last week, which allowed immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to enter and work legally in the United States. Known as the CHNV parole process, this program has helped reduce illegal entries by hundreds of thousands since its launch. DHS should restart the CHNV program immediately.

CHNV has provided an important lifeline for migrants fleeing the horrors of totalitarian socialism and communism in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, as well as the endemic chaos of Haiti. This process offers a lawful and orderly way for migrants to pursue the American dream. As these countries spiral further into political and economic dysfunction, CHNV has become more important than ever to prevent chaos at the border.

Under the CHNV process, immigrants required sponsorship from U.S. citizens or legal residents to lawfully enter the United States. DHS has halted the program in response to an internal report that allegedly found evidence of sponsor fraud. In fact, all it shows is the agency's anti-fraud directorate's ineptitude at analyzing big data.

Until now, nearly all immigration applications were filed on paper. For the first time in its history, DHS required all CHNV parole applications to be filed online, resulting in a monstrous data file of 2.6 million records. The agency's Fraud and National Security Directorate (FDNS) apparently took its first stab at assessing "potential fraud indicators" within it.

FDNS found blank entry fields, phone numbers that don't work, zip codes that don't exist, strange street addresses, Social Security numbers associated with dead people, repetitive text and repeat filers, and other similar anomalies. FDNS concluded that these issues indicate fraud.

But those oddities and errors are not evidence of fraud—they are part and parcel of large administrative datasets, especially those compiled by the government. Fraud involves intentional deception, deliberate misrepresentation, or omission by applicants to obtain benefits they do not qualify for. These issues are more likely due to changing circumstances between the time when the forms were filed and the FDNS analyzed them, copying-and-pasting between different types of electronic documents, and simple human error.

Finding mistakes like this in big data is absolutely normal. For starters, statistically, some sponsors have certainly died since filing their sponsorship applications. The bigger issue is that when 2.6 million people fill out a form—sometimes on behalf of a relative or client—errors such as transposing numbers and letters, writing their mailing address when they should write their physical address, or mixing up mailing and physical addresses are inevitable.

Errors can be introduced precisely because of the shortcomings of DHS's new online filing system. As one of us learned firsthand when sponsoring someone, DHS's system purges application drafts after 30 days. This means many applicants draft their responses on paper or in a separate electronic format and then paste the responses. This inevitably results in some answers being accidentally duplicated or put in the wrong field. These shortcomings can be easily understood as honest errors instead of fraud.

FDNS also inaccurately interprets repeat applications from sponsors as indicative of fraud. Yet the CHNV parole process explicitly allows sponsoring multiple applicants. Even when all the beneficiaries are from the same family, DHS requires the sponsor to submit separate applications for each person. Of course, there will be repetitive text and repeat filings—DHS mandates it. It's as if FDNS looked for evidence of fraud in the CHNV's data before understanding how CHNV works.

Some charitable Americans have each submitted dozens of applications to help people. DHS encouraged that, at least until last week.

Some people will undoubtedly try to exploit the CHNV process. But before claiming that something unusual is occurring, FDNS must calculate the baseline rate for these types of errors—a task that it apparently hasn't done or perhaps can't do, given that this is the first form filed entirely online. 

More importantly, FDNS's findings pertain to all applications, even though nearly one in five applications are rejected. There is no sign that officials reviewing applications cannot address any issues or that any group of fraudulent applicants were admitted to the United States.

One sign that this is all bureaucratic smoke and no actual fire is that DHS has already announced that it is not canceling parole status for anyone already approved under CHNV.

That FDNS is overreacting to these issues is no surprise. It has long been subject to criticism for inflating fraud risks and lacking strategic thinking. In 2022, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that, over two decades, the FDNS had "not developed an antifraud strategy." One FDNS employee told DHS's inspector general that the FDNS leadership pressures agents to "find the fraud" and becomes frustrated when it isn't found. The agent said leadership is "completely out of touch with reality."

There is likely some fraud in CHNV, just like there is fraud in any large program, but it's better to focus on trying to identify individual instances rather than shutting down the entire program over misunderstanding administrative data. Since the CHNV program came online, illegal entries from these countries have fallen dramatically.

A Texas district court found that the state government could not challenge the program because it had actually reduced illegal immigration in the state. The Biden administration risks restarting illegal immigration by these populations—who are difficult to remove thanks to the lack of U.S. relations with their governments. This situation will not lend itself to better vetting or security.

This is also one of the worst times to shut down CHNV from border security and humanitarian perspectives. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro recently stole the country's presidency in a fraudulent election and is busy transforming it into a poverty-ridden socialist dystopia run by a man who appears to have attended the Joseph Stalin School of Good Government. As a result, the number of asylum seekers will likely increase, with many of them attempting to reach the U.S. 

A deepening economic crisis in communist Cuba is threatening to drive even more Cubans to flee the island. Without a CHNV program to channel those migrants into the legal migration system, Border Patrol will soon have to deal with many more Cubans and Venezuelans just as border apprehensions fell to the lowest level since mid-2020. Border security demands the reopening of CHNV as soon as possible.

Experience with CHNV does suggest some reforms to improve the system. The first is to reinstate the $575 filing fee for humanitarian parole to ensure that restarting g CHNV doesn't reduce bureaucratic processing resources for other visas. The second is to increase the monthly cap from 30,000 immigrants to at least 60,000, or ideally to uncap it entirely to remove long wait lists and incentivize people to use the legal system rather than face years-long delays.

The third reform is to allow parolees to work immediately without having to apply for an employment authorization document after arriving in the United States. There should be no legal barrier to them working and paying taxes.

DHS should not overreact to the illusions of fraud inherent in big datasets. Any actual instances of fraud should be addressed through the agency's normal procedures, targeting individual fraudsters or reforming paperwork and electronic filing procedures and audits.

Biden should immediately order the agency to restart processing applications with the reforms we recommend. CHNV was the most novel and important part of Biden's immigration agenda. To undermine it now would be a catastrophic mistake that could undermine American border security, reduce the economic gains from immigration, and impose huge humanitarian burdens on migrants fleeing totalitarian socialism in Latin America and the Caribbean.