The U.S. has flown in over 400,000 migrants from a host of countries since President Joe Biden took office, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
Under the Biden administration’s CHNV program, some nationals hailing from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela can be eligible to come to the United States “in a safe and orderly way” and obtain humanitarian parole status, meaning they are here legally and can obtain work authorization. Over 400,000 migrants hailing from these nations have been flown into airports across the U.S. as of March, CBP said in a statement on Friday.
Broken down by numbers, 154,000 Haitians, 95,000 Venezuelans, 84,000 Cubans and 69,000 Nicaraguans have “arrived lawfully and were granted parole” via the CHNV program since January 2023, according to CBP. Roughly 433,000 migrants from these nations have been approved for travel.
Because these migrants fly into the U.S. under humanitarian parole status, they are not included in CBP’s total number of illegal immigrants encountered at the southern border. There were over 2 million migrant encounters at the southern border in fiscal year 2023 and almost 1 million in the first five months of fiscal year 2024.
In an ongoing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, CBP’s legal team admitted in an email to the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) in March that flying migrants directly into airports across the country could create law enforcement vulnerabilities. The Biden administration will not publicly release the list of airports migrants are being flown into because “bad actors” might take advantage of these vulnerabilities, according to CIS.
“Exception (b)(7)(E) has been applied to the identifying information for air ports of entry, which, if disclosed would reveal information about the relative number of individuals arriving, and thus resources expended at particular airports which would, either standing alone or combined with other information, reveal operational vulnerabilities that could be exploited by bad actors altering their patterns of conduct, adopting new methods of operation, and taking other countermeasures, thereby undermining CBP’s law enforcement efforts to secure the United States borders,” CBP’s legal team said in a statement to CIS.
CBP and DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
