Concerns grow over fraud in Biden’s immigration parole process

In the run-up to the November election, Vice President Kamala Harris is attempting to rewrite history and undo her administration’s policies that facilitated mass illegal migration into the U.S. through reckless releases of aliens caught at the border and bogus “parole” programs for aliens.

Contrary to much of the existing evidence, a new ad from her campaign claims that Harris is a border hawk. She touts her past prosecutions of gang members and her recent support for a Senate bill on border crossings that has been defeated twice. The bill would have effectively codified many of the Biden-Harris administration’s open-border policies into law.

Although Harris said in 2017, “An illegal immigrant is not a criminal,” her campaign team recently told Fox News, “the vice president’s position is the same as the administration’s: Unauthorized border crossings are illegal.”

In an August 29 interview on CNN, Dana Bash asked Harris about her changed position. The vice president said, “I believe there should be consequences” for entering the U.S. illegally, because “we have laws.”

We do. Our laws say that aliens who enter the U.S. illegally “will be held” pending their immigration court hearings. But under the Biden-Harris administration, they are being caught and almost all are being released immediately, often with government-funded tickets to wherever they want to go in this country.

So what “consequence” did Harris have in mind? Dana Bash didn’t elaborate, but if the past three years are any guide, Harris isn’t seriously considering any more enforcement than the reckless standard of the past three years.

Meanwhile, amid the smokescreens of a heated election campaign, Biden and Harris’ mass release programs continue to bring in some 70,000 inadmissible aliens every month.

But in early August, the Department of Homeland Security shut down a program that was admitting 30,000 inadmissible aliens from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela each month. What was the reason they shut it down?

It wasn’t because it violated the law or Congress’s clear intent to give the executive branch only very limited parole authority, as Art Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies explains.

It wasn’t because DHS didn’t have a way to check applicants for criminal records in these four countries. The countries are either too disorganized to have criminal records or too hostile to share them with us.

And this was not because many of the recipients of this parole plundered the state coffers by receiving tax money for food, clothing and shelter; by increasing urban disorder; and by committing crimes, including murder.

No, they paused the parole programs of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela because the blatant fraud within them had temporarily become a source of embarrassment. With political appointees at the top of every federal agency, evidence of dysfunction is usually kept secret, but a recent report from U.S. Citizens and Immigration Services obtained by the Federation for American Immigration Reform revealed to lawmakers and the public just how bad things were.

Entities within the U.S. filed applications to become “financial sponsors” of the released migrants, using false or deceased Social Security numbers. According to U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services, a “financial sponsor” can be any person or entity “that agrees to provide financial support to the beneficiary (the released alien) while in the United States for the duration of the release authorization period.”

Multiple sponsorship applications came from the same address, email address, or phone number, or used the exact same wording. Nearly 600 financial supporters applied using a single Florida warehouse as their address. There were 3,200 mega-supporters who applied together, bringing the total to 100,000 applicants, or more than 30 per person. In short, the sponsorship application process was a joke, but that didn’t stop DHS from approving nearly half a million financial supporters and the aliens they vouched for.

By late August, DHS was ready to restart the parole program. During the brief shutdown, some adjustments were made “to better validate the identity and qualifications of the supporter(s) and to conduct additional background and security checks.” In a message announcing an “emergency review” of the online sponsorship application, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services also said it will “require supporters to submit biometric data,” presumably fingerprints, and a $30 fee.

All of this shows that the Citizenship and Immigration Service did little to validate “supporters” in the first place, and secondly, that the service knew that existing background checks were worthless.

Even with a few hasty fixes, the concept of parole sponsorship is laughable. First, according to the agency’s guidelines, “there is no requirement regarding the financial supporter’s immigration status in the United States.” This means that a paroled alien, someone seeking asylum, or someone fighting deportation can be a sponsor.

Second, “If the petitioner cannot find a financial supporter who alone has sufficient resources to support the beneficiary in the United States, the petitioner may list more than one financial supporter” – just keep adding until you win.

Third, a beneficiary can also demonstrate financial self-sufficiency, meaning the Biden administration will allow an inadmissible alien to sponsor himself to come in here and live, no matter what our laws say. There is hardly any way to lose this game.

Embarrassed by the fraud report, DHS made some symbolic changes to the parole program, which is just one lane of their open-borders superhighway. DHS can change the financial aid form as often as they want, but the fraud will continue, for two reasons.

First, many people who want to enter the United States and cannot get a visa will say anything unless the consequences of fraud are real. I have seen this with my own eyes, for over a quarter century, on four continents.

Second, there are no consequences for a fraudulent American supporter. Financial supporters can lie to DHS all they want without fear of prosecution. DHS told NBC News that “serial filers who … appear to be abusing or exploiting the process will not be confirmed.” In other words, they can’t be financial supporters. That’s it. Only those supporters who extort money from foreigners “will be referred to law enforcement for possible prosecution.” (And translate that “potentially” as “will never happen.”)

As Matt O’Brien of the Immigration Reform Law Institute told the Daily Caller, the conditional release programs for Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela “rely on a ‘sponsor’ relationship that is impossible to verify and imposes no enforceable obligations on the sponsor or beneficiary.”

If a financial supporter is “confirmed” but does not support his alien, the government will do nothing. Witness Corey Alvarez, a Haitian accused of raping a disabled girl at a Comfort Inn near Boston earlier this year. He was released on probation into the country on the basis of a sponsor in New Jersey who would not even provide him with a place to stay, let alone take responsibility for his behavior.

The Biden-Harris administration is resuming the program not because the underlying fraud problem has been solved, but because the government simply doesn’t care at this point.

To paraphrase Civil War Adm. David Farragut, it’s full speed ahead and “damn the torpedoes.” The pause in the program was a minor inconvenience that will not deter the administration from releasing, paroling and facilitating as many inadmissible aliens as possible into the United States while it can.

The border line is a weekly Daily Signal column that investigates everything from the unknown illegal immigration crisis at the border to the impact of immigration on cities and states across the country. We will also shed light on other critical border-related issues such as human trafficking, drug trafficking, terrorism and more.