In late 2022 and early 2023, the Biden-Harris administration launched and expanded a special parole program that allowed tens of thousands of migrants per month from four specific nations -- Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela -- to enter the U.S. legally under certain conditions, including having an eligible U.S. citizen sponsor to financially support them.

That controversial program was reportedly paused in July by the Department of Homeland Security after an internal watchdog report exposed massive fraud impacting hundreds of thousands of sponsorship applications, according to PJ Media.

Yet, even as the administration has acknowledged the rampant fraud on the sponsorship side of the CHNV parole program, it insisted there was no fraud whatsoever on the migrant side and indicated that the program, which has been lambasted as a major abuse of limited congressional authorization, would be relaunched as soon as possible.

Massive fraud uncovered in migrant parole program

In October 2022, ostensibly to relieve pressure from illegal immigration at the southern border, DHS announced a special parole program that would allow tens of thousands of Venezuelans to directly enter the U.S. and receive a work permit if they had an eligible sponsor -- a program that was then expanded in January 2023 to include tens of thousands of Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans.

However, according to the conservative Federation for American Immigration Reform, the CHNV parole program has now been temporarily paused after an internal investigation uncovered substantial fraud among the more than 2.6 million applications submitted by prospective sponsors.

The watchdog probe found that more than 51,000 applications were submitted online by around 100 of the same IP addresses, that more than 100,000 were filed using the same roughly 3,200 Social Security Numbers -- including 24 filed using the SSN of a deceased individual -- and that thousands of forms contained the same few hundred email addresses and phone numbers, as well as thousands of instances of repetitive verbatim responses to questions.

The investigators also discovered thousands of applications that included false or fraudulent area codes, immigrant file numbers, phone numbers, SSNs, and zip codes, as well as thousands that were submitted from a handful of around a hundred suspicious addresses that included apartment buildings, commercial businesses, mobile home parks, storage units, and warehouses.

DHS insists fraud only discovered among sponsors, not migrants

Fox News reported that the internal investigation was conducted by the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is part of DHS.

"DHS has review mechanisms in place to detect and prevent fraud and abuse in our immigration processes. DHS takes any abuse of its processes very seriously," a spokesperson for DHS told the outlet. "Where fraud is identified, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will investigate and litigate applicable cases in immigration court and make criminal referrals to the Department of Justice."

"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," they continued. "DHS will restart application processing as quickly as possible, with appropriate safeguards."

The spokesperson went on to insist that the uncovered fraud was solely related to sponsorship applications and had nothing to go with the "thoroughly screened and vetted" migrants from the four nations that are part of the special parole program.

"The multi-layered screening and vetting for advanced travel authorizations is separate from the screening of U.S.-based supporters," the spokesperson added. "DHS has not identified issues of concern relating to the screening and vetting of beneficiaries."

Are the migrants in the program "legal" or "illegal"?

A spokesperson for FAIR, Ira Mehlman, told Fox News, "This is an indication that the administration was willing to cut every corner and endanger public safety in order to bring in as many illegal aliens as they could."

However, as PJ Media pointed out, technically the migrants in the CHNV parole program were not "illegal" as they'd been approved and fast-tracked by the administration as part of a dubious and massively expanded provision authorized by Congress that allows parole to be extended to some migrants for certain humanitarian reasons.