Previously hidden information reveals gap between White House justifications for CHNV program and reality
By Todd Bensman as published June 17, 2024 by the Center for Immigration Studies
In late 2022 and early 2023, President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security launched one of the most unusual humanitarian programs in U.S. immigration history: it unilaterally began authorizing inadmissible Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (thus the shorthand name CHNV Program) and their immediate family members to fly commercially from foreign countries into more than 40 American airports.
The administration has used this legally dubious program to authorize more than 460,000 ostensibly endangered nationals of those four countries to fly directly from undisclosed airports abroad into some 45 U.S. airports from October 2022 through May 2024. They are then released on temporary humanitarian parole of renewable two-year periods with work permits, during which time they are assumed (but not required) to be applying for asylum.
From this massive “rescue” program’s inception, the Biden administration has claimed that its purpose was to provide temporary U.S. sanctuary “for urgent humanitarian reasons” for those facing persecution in their native countries, and thus reduce the incentive to pass through Mexico on “dangerous routes that pose serious risks to migrant’s lives and safety” on their way to illegally cross the U.S. border.
But new information that the Center for Immigration Studies has forced from the government through litigation now reveals that, while all participants are nationals of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, or Venezuela, many are flying to the United States from 73 other nations. (See the list of countries provided by DHS here.)
The departure country list casts serious doubt on whether the Biden administration has used the humanitarian rescue flights program as it was sold to the American public.
In fact, the new departure country information shows that many migrants from these four nationalities have been heading to the U.S. from some of the safest, most prosperous nations on Earth, some heralded worldwide as vacation wonderlands.
They could not have been suffering urgent humanitarian problems there, nor were they anywhere near dangerous migration trails.
CHNV nationals are flying to the U.S. from Iceland and from Fiji and from Greece.
ALSO: Listen to the Parsing Immigration Policy Podcast, “CIS Litigation Forces Transparency of ‘Humanitarian’ Parole Program”
