By Stephen Dinan – The Washington Times – Wednesday, November 20, 2024

Sex traffickers may be using a Biden administration “parole” program to sneak illegal immigrant women into the U.S., the House Judiciary Committee is revealing Wednesday in an explosive new report exposing fraud in one of Homeland Security’s marquee border operations.

Welfare recipients, people involved with criminal activity and even other illegal immigrants have been approved as sponsors for parolees from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela (CHNV).

And Homeland Security admitted it doesn’t have a way to check criminal records of would-be sponsors. Indeed, the department said it approved sponsors who reported that at least some of their income came from illegal sources such as criminal activity.

The report, provided first to The Washington Times, is the latest black eye for the CHNV program, which had to be paused this summer amid shocking allegations of fraud.

“This oversight has uncovered how the Biden-Harris Administration’s willingness to cast aside the best interests of Americans has enabled fraud, undermined national security, and endangered public safety, all in favor of ensuring that hundreds of thousands of otherwise illegal aliens can come to the U.S. through CHNV,” the committee said in the interim staff report.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas invented the CHNV program two years ago, as the U.S. saw a startling surge of Venezuelans rushing the border.

His idea was to encourage them to skip the border and fly directly into airports, relieving pressure on Border Patrol agents, though the migrants still are here as inadmissible aliens, meaning they lack legal status, could be deported at any time and must leave the country when their two-year parole period is up.

Mr. Mayorkas’ key idea was that all arrivals would need to get a U.S.-based sponsor to promise to take care of them, ensuring they don’t become burdens on taxpayers.

But the sponsorship program has been swamped with fraud.

An internal investigation at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services found Venezuelan gang members, dead people and stolen identities being listed as applicants. One case even used former first lady Michelle Obama’s passport number.

The new report, from Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan’s staff, suggests the program was fatally flawed from conception, allowing people who seem to have been bad risks to act as sponsors.

Among the committee’s findings:

• At least 336 sponsors were approved despite receiving welfare benefits. The report said that undercuts the point of the program, since sponsors are supposed to prove they can support migrants on their own without them becoming dependent on the government.

• 21 sponsorship applications were approved even though the supporters admitted at least some of their income came from an illegal source. Homeland Security told the committee that was okay, as long as the department thought there was “sufficient income” from legal sources too.

• Homeland Security can’t say how many sponsors have other criminal records beyond their financial entanglements.

The department said it is “not aware” of any cases where it approved a sponsor with a serious criminal record.

But an internal document obtained by the committee said USCIS doesn’t do criminal records checks, and indeed couldn’t do them even if it wanted to because it is not authorized to run names through the FBI’s databases.

• More than 80,000 sponsors were approved despite being noncitizens with, at best, only temporary visas to be in the U.S. That included 311 DACA recipients, nearly 20,000 asylum-seekers and even 224 other parolees.

“In other words, the Biden-Harris Administration’s CHNV program incentivizes a new form of chain migration, in which foreign nationals in the U.S. on a temporary basis can sponsor additional foreign nationals to travel to the U.S. on a temporary basis, who can then sponsor additional foreign nationals to enter the country, and so on,” the committee said in the new report.

• The sex-trafficker issue was raised after analysts at Homeland Security found large numbers of electronic applications were filed from the same Internet Protocol addresses. In one case a single address filed 21 sponsorship applications and 18 of them were for female migrants — six of them under the age of 18.

• Homeland Security doesn’t even appear to be monitoring sponsors to see if they are actually supporting the migrants they promised to back. Officials told the committee they have a complaint line for government agencies to “share concerns” but had received no referrals as of Aug. 6.

Yet there’s shocking evidence supporters aren’t living up to their promises.

In one case a Haitian man was arrested and charged with raping a fellow migrant in a taxpayer-funded migrant shelter in Massachusetts was here on parole.

Responsibility for CHNV is split between U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which approves the sponsorships, and Customs and Border Protection, which actually issues the parole to would-be migrants.

The program has proved wildly popular.

Some 3 million sponsorship applications have been filed and as of Aug. 6, some 650,200 had been approved.

As of Sept. 30, the end of fiscal year 2024, 531,000 migrants had arrived under the program. By early August more than 400,000 of them had been granted work permits, meaning they could legally compete with Americans for jobs,

Would-be Haitian migrants have been the most prolific users, accounting for nearly 1.5 million of the sponsorship applications. Cubans are second at about 760,000, Venezuelans are third at more than 432,300 applications and Nicaraguans trailed with 178,000 sponsorship requests.

• Stephen Dinan can be reached at [email protected].