In January 2023, the Biden administration announced a new advanced parole program for refugees from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela (known together formally as CHNV). This program, which aims to create a formal pathway to legal status for some asylum seekers at the southern border, enables CHNV nationals to immigrate legally to the United States for up to two years if friends or family members agree to sponsor them financially. Given the influx of refugees at the border and their increased vulnerability to violence and death, the program does represent a valiant effort to clear some of the backlog. It has not, however, been able to live up to its promises. Most importantly, advanced parole has not substantially improved conditions for the thousands of migrants still crowded at the southern border. To truly meet the needs of displaced individuals, the border is in need of a more imaginative prescription.
The humanitarian crisis at the border is caused by a massive influx of refugees fleeing violence, famine, poverty, and death. These people cannot stay in the United States legally, but have few other options. Formal pathways to immigration typically come in the form of a family petition or a work visa, but most migrants do not meet the requirements of either option. Therefore, many refugees choose to apply for asylum instead–but the overwhelmed asylum adjudication system cannot process the current number of applicants with its small staff of judges. Even the deportation system is fraught with complications, especially as more and more migrants come from uncooperative authoritarian governments who refuse to take back their own nationals. This has left a staggering number of refugees stuck in limbo at the border, at the crossroads of settlement and deportation, and full of desperation and anxiety.
In January 2023, CHNV nationals accounted for 35,807 of the 186,808 total encounters migrants had with US Customs and Border Protection at the US border. In light of this outsized proportion, President Biden’s new advanced parole program specifically addresses this particularly vulnerable population. The program is entirely free and able to be completed online. It grants parole status to up to 30,000 migrants every month and provides a pathway to employment authorization status. The last figures shared by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) in July 2023 reported that nearly 160,000 CHNV nationals had arrived in the United States lawfully under parole processes in the first six months.
While the program has indeed begun to address the need for pathways to legal residence for this population, CHNV nationals are not out of harm’s way. CHNV immigrants made up 98,631 of the total 302,392 migrant encounters in December 2023—a similar proportion to January 2023. This signals that countless CHNV refugees are being failed by the advanced parole program. Indeed, Haitian migrants are still dying in over-capacitated boat voyages, October 2023 marked the first month ever during which Venezuelans were the most commonly arrested nationality at the border, and thousands of refugees were left stranded in Nicaragua while trying to make their way into the United States. For every 30,000 migrants let in every month, there are millions of applications submitted and pending. USCIS does not publish program wait times or include it in their public database for immigration records. As one Cuban migrant aptly explains, “Anyone who (can apply for the sponsorship program) waits for it. But if they can’t, they go through Nicaragua.” It seems that everyone, immigration services and the immigrants themselves, understands the limitations of this program’s performance.
The Advanced Parole Process for CHNV nationals can be implemented more successfully, as evidenced by the remarkable progress of a similar program–the 2022 “Unite for Ukraine” visa. “Unite for Ukraine” granted fast-tracked temporary immigration to Ukrainian war refugees. Twenty thousand Ukranians a month were paroled and immediately granted employment authorization. The program was largely effective: the number of Ukrainians arriving at the Southern border with no documentation significantly decreased.
If the Unite for Ukraine parole program was successful, then the Advanced Parole Process for CHNV nationals could be as well. One commonsense improvement would be allowing advanced parole recipients to immediately receive Employment Authorization Cards, instead of being forced to apply separately and wait for many months. Migrants without employment authorization but in need of money will turn to underground businesses that pay cheaply for their labor and grossly abuse their workers. Granting immediate employment authorization to advanced parolees would stimulate their involvement in the licit economy and decrease the backlog that is plaguing USCIS—a win-win situation for everyone. Moreover, USCIS needs more manpower and resources if it is going to decrease unimaginable asylum wait times and sort through more than a minuscule fraction of the applications it receives every month. The physical flow of migrants will not cease on its own, and we cannot look away after slapping a simple band-aid onto a deep wound.
There must be no rest until migrants at the Southern border are returned to safe, stable homes. There are hundreds of thousands of children and families currently existing in limbo, without food, without their family members, and without a place to call their own. There are migrants from a plethora of countries beyond Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela that need support. And there are tens of thousands of parolees here in the United States stunted by their inability to work. It is a moral imperative to extend the security and comfort we as Americans enjoy to our less fortunate neighbors.