EXCLUSIVE — House Republicans are pushing the Trump administration to provide answers about the extent to which the Biden administration broadly paroled immigrants into the United States, asking the Department of Homeland Security to spill details that its former leader refused to divulge.
House Homeland Security Chairman Mark Green (R-TN) and subcommittee leaders sent a letter to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem Wednesday, asking the department to turn over previously subpoenaed documents on how broadly it waved non-U.S. citizens into the country. A copy of the letter was obtained first by the Washington Examiner.
“Under the Biden-Harris administration, the Department refused to respond to the Committee’s basic requests for information regarding parole programs, even after the Committee issued a subpoena,” wrote Green and subcommittee chairman, Reps. Michael Guest (R-MS) and Josh Brecheen (R-OK).
“The Biden-Harris administration’s lack of transparency created challenges to the Committee’s ability to determine the full extent of the Biden-Harris administration’s use of parole, the fiscal consequences of each individual parole program, and whether the current state of parole requires additional statutory remedies,” the lawmakers wrote.
Green first requested information from the DHS on the extent of the parole programs in April 2023. The committee then sent the DHS a subpoena in August 2023 and a follow-up letter in September 2023, demanding that the federal entity comply with the committee’s oversight efforts.
The committee is seeking exact totals on the number of immigrants admitted under parole during the Biden administration; their current immigration status, meaning if their two-year term to be in the country has expired or not; and a list of nonprofit organizations that were identified as the sponsors on immigrants’ applications. The deadline for turning over documents is April 23.
Precedence for parole
Until President Joe Biden, parole was rarely used. Between 2014 and 2020, parole was used to admit between 11,000 and 54,000 immigrants each year, according to the DHS.
During Biden’s four years, more than 531,000 immigrants were paroled into the country, according to the most recently published government figures in January.
Another 936,500 immigrants were in the process of being paroled in, though the government has not disclosed how many of that figure ultimately resulted in parole.
Biden’s expansion of parole
Halfway through the Biden-Harris administration, the DHS launched two ways that immigrants could use to seek admission from outside the United States to enter the country on parole. The hope was that it would radically decrease the number of immigrants illegally entering the U.S. from Mexico by walking over the border between ports of entry.
DHS agency U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) added an immigration function to its CBP One app, which allowed immigrants to schedule appointments with U.S. customs officers in hopes of being paroled into the country.
The app also allowed immigrants in Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to apply for admission on the basis that they had a financial sponsor inside the U.S. and could pay for their own commercial airline ticket into the country. CBP would then screen, vet, and decide each individual’s case once they had flown into one of 50 U.S. airports.
The Biden administration also used parole to admit Afghans during the turbulent Kabul withdrawal in 2021, as well as Ukrainians amid the Russian invasion.
“Through the end of December, about 531,690 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans arrived lawfully and were granted parole under the parole processes,” CBP said in a statement posted on Jan. 14.
Upon taking office in January, President Donald Trump immediately ceased the CBP One app’s immigration functions.
Problems with mass parole scheme
Republicans viewed the use of the CBP One app to help immigrants get paroled into the country as going around the legal processes in place. Normally, immigrants who illegally enter the U.S. at the border are returned to their home country, or they may be released with legal documents that allow them to remain indefinitely through court proceedings, typically years down the road.
Parole is a two-year period in which the recipient can work legally in the country, but once that two-year term is over, the immigrant must leave the U.S.
The Washington Examiner found in a previous investigation that Mexican cartels were selling access to appointments to immigrants by using a virtual private network (VPN) to overpower the app’s geofencing boundary.
Rather than only allowing immigrants in northern Mexico to seek appointments with U.S. customs officers, the cartels were able to use VPN to schedule appointments for anyone, anywhere in the world, overwhelming the system and leading to a monthslong wait for appointments.
Biden parole process deemed ripe for fraud
The use of parole came under sharp criticism from Republicans in mid-2024 when the DHS suspended the program that allowed Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans to fly into the country.
The decision to cancel the program followed a report by the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which found that an internal government audit documented a large number of fraudulent applications as the U.S. admitted nearly half a million migrants from four countries.
The report by FAIR, a nonprofit group in Washington that supports restricting immigration levels, said the Social Security numbers of deceased sponsors in the U.S. and fake phone numbers were used on applications.
Address fraud was also found to be widespread. Roughly 100 street addresses were listed on 19,000 applications and were often traced back to buildings that included a warehouse or storage unit.
In another example, 100 IP addresses used to access the internet, in other words, the connection from a particular phone, tablet, or computer, were used to apply in more than 51,133 instances.
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The Biden administration reinstated the program late last summer and maintained that it had made security enhancements to better screen applicants.
Though the CBP One app’s immigration functions are shut down, Republicans have continued to hold congressional hearings on the Biden-era border crisis and are still optimistic about getting answers on the extent of illegal immigration and the use of parole under Trump’s predecessor.
