The Biden administration has paused a program that has flown thousands of migrants directly into the United States from four foreign countries, Fox News reports.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) told Fox News Digital it temporarily paused the program “out of an abundance of caution.”

It allowed up to 30,000 individuals from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to travel into the United States each month.

Fox News reports:

A congressional source had told Fox News Digital the pause came in mid-July after an internal report unearthed large amounts of fraud in applications for those sponsoring the applicants. DHS said the pause was occurring as it reviewed sponsor applications. The focus is on issues with supporter filings, and not with the filings from the beneficiaries of the program themselves.

“DHS has review mechanisms in place to detect and prevent fraud and abuse in our immigration processes. DHS takes any abuse of its processes very seriously,” a DHS spokesperson said. “Where fraud is identified, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will investigate and litigate applicable cases in immigration court and make criminal referrals to the Department of Justice.”

“Out of an abundance of caution, DHS has temporarily paused the issuance of advanced travel authorizations for new beneficiaries while it undertakes a review of supporter applications. DHS will restart application processing as quickly as possible, with appropriate safeguards,” they said.

The program was initially announced for Venezuelans in October 2022, and allowed a limited number to fly or travel directly into the U.S. as long as they had not entered illegally, had a sponsor in the U.S., and passed certain biometric and biographical vetting. The program does not itself facilitate flights, and migrants are responsible for their own travel.

“The Biden administration has temporarily paused its controversial CHNV mass parole program that allows migrants to fly into the U.S. after an internal report unearthed large amounts of fraud in the program,” Fox News national correspondent Bill Melugin wrote.

Per Daily Mail:

Just 3,200 individual sponsors signed up to support roughly 101,000 migrants according to the report, prompting concerns at DHS that the system is being abused.

The report indicating fraud also shockingly found that some of the names used to fill out sponsor forms belonged to dead people.

Additionally, storage units were found to be the home address for some sponsor applications, while certain phone numbers were used on thousands of applications.

Almost 3,000 sponsors applications were filled out using fake zip codes, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) a conservative immigration nonprofit which first obtained the report, found.

 

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