President Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) pause It was a key component of last week’s immigration agenda, which allowed immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to enter and work legally in the United States. The program, called the CHNV Parole Program, helps Reduce illegal immigration Hundreds of thousands since launch. DHS should immediately restart the CHNV program.
The CHNV provides a vital lifeline to immigrants fleeing totalitarian socialist and communist terror in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, as well as endemic chaos in Haiti. This process provides a legal and orderly path for immigrants to pursue the American dream. As these countries slide further into political and economic dislocation, CHNV becomes more important than ever in preventing chaos at the borders.
Under the CHNV process, immigrants require sponsorship from a U.S. citizen or legal resident to legally enter the United States. The Department of Homeland Security has halted the program in response internal report Evidence of sponsor fraud was allegedly discovered. In fact, it all points to the agency’s anti-fraud unit’s incompetence in analyzing big data.
Until now, almost all immigration applications have been submitted on paper. For the first time ever, DHS required all CHNV parole applications to be submitted online, resulting in a massive archive of 2.6 million records. The agency’s Fraud and National Security Directorate (FDNS) apparently first tried to assess “potential fraud indicators” within it.
FDNS finds blank input fields, phone numbers that don’t work, zip codes that don’t exist, strange street addresses, Social Security numbers associated with deceased persons, duplicate text and duplicate filers, and other similar anomalies. FDNS concluded that these issues indicated fraud.
But these oddities and errors are not evidence of fraud—they are an important part of large administrative collections, especially those compiled by governments. Fraud involves intentional deception, intentional misrepresentations or omissions by applicants to obtain benefits for which they are not eligible. These problems are more likely due to changes in circumstances between the submission form and the FDNS analysis form, copying and pasting between different types of electronic documents, and simple human error.
It’s absolutely normal to find errors like this in big data. First, statistically speaking, some sponsors must have died after submitting their sponsorship applications. The bigger problem is that when 2.6 million people fill out the forms, sometimes on behalf of relatives or clients, mistakes are made, such as swapping numbers and letters, writing a mailing address when a physical address should be written, or confusing mailing and physical addresses is inevitable.
It is precisely because of flaws in the Department of Homeland Security’s new online filing system that errors may have been introduced. As one of us learned firsthand when sponsoring someone, DHS’s system purges draft applications after 30 days. This means that many applicants draft responses on paper or in a separate electronic format and then post the responses. This will inevitably lead to some answers being accidentally repeated or put into the wrong field. These shortcomings can easily be interpreted as honest mistakes rather than fraud.
FDNS also incorrectly interpreted duplicate applications from sponsors as fraudulent. However, the CHNV parole process explicitly allowed Sponsor multiple applicants. Even if all beneficiaries are from the same household, DHS requires sponsors to submit separate applications for each person. Of course, there will be duplicate words and duplicate filings—which is mandated by the Department of Homeland Security. It’s as if the FDNS looked for evidence of fraud in CHNV materials before understanding how CHNV works.
Several U.S. philanthropists have each submitted dozens of applications to help people. The Department of Homeland Security encouraged this, at least until last week.
No doubt some people will try to take advantage of the CHNV process. But before claiming an anomaly occurred, the FDNS must calculate a baseline rate of such errors—a task that clearly has not been completed or may not be accomplished given that this is the first form to be submitted entirely online.
What’s more, the FDNS findings apply to all applications, even though nearly one in five applications are rejected. There is no indication that officials reviewing applications were unable to resolve any issues, nor is there any indication that any fraudulent applicants were allowed into the United States.
In a sign that this is all bureaucratic smoke and no real fire, the Department of Homeland Security has announced, Do not cancel Parole status of any person who has been approved by CHNV.
It’s not surprising that the FDNS overreacted to these issues. It has long been criticized for exaggerating fraud risks and lacking strategic thinking. In 2022, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that for more than two decades, the FDNS have “There is no anti-fraud strategy in place.” An FDNS employee Tell The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general said FDNS leadership pressured agents to “find fraud” but became frustrated when it didn’t. The agent said the leadership was “completely out of touch with reality.”
There may be some fraud in CHNV, just as there will be fraud in any large program, but it’s better to focus on trying to identify individual instances rather than shutting down the entire program because of misinterpretation of administrative data. Since the launch of the CHNV program, illegal immigration from these countries has sharp decline.
District Court of Texas established The state government cannot challenge the plan because it actually reduced illegal immigration in the state. The Biden administration faces the risk of a resumption of illegal immigration by these people — who are difficult to remove due to the U.S.’s lack of relationships with these governments. This situation is not conducive to better vetting or security.
This is also one of the worst times to close CHNV from a border security and humanitarian perspective. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro recently steal The country’s president was mired in a fraudulent election and is busy transforming it into an impoverished 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, many of whom are trying to make their way to the United States, is likely to increase
Communist Cuba’s deepening economic crisis is threatening forcing more Cubans to flee the island. Without the CHNV program to funnel these migrants into the legal immigration system, the Border Patrol will soon have to deal with even more Cubans and Venezuelans, just as border apprehensions drop to their lowest levels since mid-2020. Border security requires CHNV to reopen as soon as possible.
The CHNV experience does suggest some reforms to improve the system. The first is to reinstate the $575 humanitarian parole application fee to ensure that reactivating g CHNV does not reduce bureaucratic processing resources for other visas. The second would be to increase the monthly immigration cap from 30,000 to at least 60,000, or ideally remove the cap entirely, to eliminate long waiting lists and incentivize people to use the legal system rather than face years-long delays.
The third reform would allow parolees to work immediately upon arrival in the United States without applying for employment authorization documents. There should be no legal barriers to their working and paying taxes.
DHS should not overreact to the illusions of fraud inherent in big data sets. Any actual incidents of fraud should be addressed through the agency’s normal procedures to target individual fraudsters or reform paperwork and electronic filing procedures and audits.
Biden should immediately order the agency to restart processing applications under our proposed reforms. CHNV is the most novel and important part of Biden’s immigration agenda. To undermine it now would be a catastrophic mistake that could undermine U.S. border security, reduce the economic benefits of immigration, and place a huge humanitarian burden on immigrants fleeing totalitarian socialism in Latin America and the Caribbean.