After DNC Platform Was Printed, The Program It Touts As Top Border Success Was Shut Down For Fraud

The Democratic Party’s 2024 platform cites as its top plan for “expanding legal immigration & deterring illegal immigration” a program that, just after the platform was finalized, was revealed by an internal audit to be ridden with fraud and shut down.

“The Biden-Harris Administration established a humanitarian parole process for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV), which allows people from these four countries who have a sponsor in the U.S. and who pass a background check to come to the U.S. for a period of two years to live and work lawfully,” the platform, the centerpiece of this week’s Democratic convention, says.

On August 2, news broke that the Department of Homeland Security had pulled the plug on that program in mid-July after an audit found that large numbers of “sponsors” were lying about their connection to immigrants seeking residency.

“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 said. “DHS will restart application processing as quickly as possible, with appropriate safeguards.”

The admission that the program is fraud-ridden seems to have occurred sometime after the Democratic platform was finalized, but before it was rolled out at this week’s convention.

The program continued for nearly 18 months after the Associated Press reported that many sponsors were posing as friends and relatives to exploit migrants, charging them for the cover story. Such arrangements were so prevalent, there were entire Facebook groups dedicated to them.

The internal audit found that 100 IP addresses, representing individual computers, were responsible for filling out 51,133 sponsor application forms. One IP address was responsible for 1,328 applications, according to the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which obtained the audit. The sponsor using that IP address, which was traced to Mexico, purported to be an American.

Nearly 5,000 of the forms included verbatim language in the section where migrants are asked to explain why they journeyed to the United States. Another 5,000 forms included the same language with just a single word changed.

Sponsors used 465 nonexistent ZIP Codes, and repeated 100 addresses were between 124 and 739 times each, suggesting that the “sponsors” were not only using fraudulent addresses, but coordinating to game the system. Sponsors also used obviously fake Social Security numbers, like 111-11-1111.

Some would-be sponsors were focused on sponsoring girls under 18.

“What worries me are the risks in terms of being trafficked and exploited,” lawyer Taylor Levy told the AP.

Nonetheless, the DNC platform’s border plank said its policies were “fighting human trafficking.” It touted President Joe Biden’s belated decision to tighten border enforcement, but underscored that there should be “exceptions for vulnerable populations including unaccompanied children and victims of trafficking.”

Department of Health and Human Services whistleblowers found that the “unaccompanied minor children” program is, in fact, encouraging and enabling human trafficking, with at least 85,000 of the children having gone missing since being delivered by the United States government to sponsors.

Though the CHNV program is listed under “expanding legal immigration & deterring illegal immigration,” it deters illegal immigration only through sleight of hand, the Center for Immigration Studies said.

“[B]ecause CHNV migrants fly directly to this country, they don’t show up in the Border Patrol’s monthly Southwest border encounter totals — the metric the media usually rely on when talking about illegal migration… That doesn’t mean CHNV parolees have any more legal right to be admitted than apprehended migrants do,” it said.

In March 2021, Biden asked Vice President Kamala Harris “to lead our diplomatic effort and work with [Latin American nations] to accept…the returnees, and enhance migration enforcement at their borders — at their borders.”

Harris immediately diminished the role, saying she would “address root causes for the migration that we’ve been seeing” from the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.

Children from Guatemala now make up about 70% of the “unaccompanied minors” coming into the United States. Guatemalan human traffickers frequently exploit the unaccompanied minors program to smuggle people into the country, The Daily Wire reported.