Since President Joe Biden assumed office, the United States has brought in more than 400,000 migrants from various countries, as reported by Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Under the CHNV program of the Biden administration, individuals from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela may qualify to enter the U.S. in a safe and organized manner and receive humanitarian parole status, allowing them to legally stay and work in the country. As of March, CBP stated that over 400,000 migrants from these nations have been transported to U.S. airports. Specifically, 154,000 Haitians, 95,000 Venezuelans, 84,000 Cubans, and 69,000 Nicaraguans have been lawfully admitted and granted parole through the CHNV program since January 2023.
Approximately 433,000 migrants from these countries have been authorized for travel. These migrants, arriving under humanitarian parole, are not counted among CBP’s total encounters with illegal immigrants at the southern border. In fiscal year 2023, there were more than 2 million migrant encounters at the southern border, with nearly 1 million in the first five months of fiscal year 2024.
In a recent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, CBP’s legal team acknowledged in an email to the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) that flying migrants directly to airports nationwide could pose law enforcement risks. The Biden administration has chosen not to disclose the list of airports receiving migrants to prevent potential exploitation of these vulnerabilities by malicious actors, as per 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.
