After securing the Southern border in less than two months, President Donald Trump and his team are gearing up for an even tougher challenge: unraveling the mess of Joe Biden’s programs and regulations that enable foreign nationals to take up permanent residence in the U.S.

The process is exposing how immigration programs have been misused to allow unchecked mass migration into the country.

The Trump White House recently announced that it would revoke the parole  of hundreds of thousands of migrants from Latin America and Haiti that came here during the Biden administration’s Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela (CHNV) program. Launched in 2022 to allegedly reduce chaotic illegal border crossings and provide legal paths for migration, CHNV is perhaps the most outrageous Biden program to violate American sovereignty.

The program allowed up to 30,000 citizens of the specified countries to enter the U.S. per month on commercial flights. Homeland Security (DHS) and Customs and Border Protection data reported that roughly 532,000 migrants had entered the U.S. through the program as of last month.   

Thanks to CHNV, cities throughout the U.S. received planes full of migrants on flights arriving under cover of darkness, presumably so as not to attract attention and protests.

Why would there be protests? Maybe because Biden’s DHS was essentially dumping the migrants into unsuspecting communities with no approval from or prior notice to local officials.

Airports in the New York City region alone received about 33,000 migrants on night flights directly from foreign airports, many from safe third countries.   

But wait, there’s more.

In August 2024 the Biden White House paused CHNV after an internal audit reported widespread fraud among those sponsoring the applicants.

Among the revelations were that 100,948 program applications were completed by just over 3,000 sponsors. Twenty-four of the 1,000 most used Social Security numbers belonged to a dead person, and one sponsor phone number was submitted on more than 2,000 forms.

There were 2,839 forms with non-existent sponsor zip codes. To date, there has been no further details on the alleged fraud and no one from the Biden administration was held accountable.  

CHNV wasn’t the only program Biden’s handlers used to push a de facto amnesty. Trump also took steps to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) protection for about 350,000 Venezuelans living in the U.S. The anti-borders activists predictably responded, forum-shopping for a fellow traveler judge in San Francisco who issued a national injunction to stop the deportation of the Venezuelans.

Like several other injunctions issued by district judges against the White House immigration agenda, this will likely be resolved at the Supreme Court.

According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website, the Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS) may designate a foreign country for TPS due to conditions in the country that temporarily prevent the country’s nationals from returning safely. The key word there is “temporarily,” such as until a country has sufficiently recovered from a natural disaster or other upheaval.

Like so many other federal programs, however, the program has drifted far from its original intent.

In 1999, citizens of Nicaragua fleeing Hurricane Mitch were granted permission to come to the U.S. temporarily.

As of 2021, DHS counts 4,250 Nicaraguan nationals still living here under TPS.

Are those Nicaraguans really unable to return because of a hurricane more than two decades ago, or is TPS just a thinly veiled backdoor into the country for more foreign nationals to get on public assistance, provide cheap labor to employers and possibly vote in U.S. elections?  

“If there’s a hurricane and it devastates a part of the country, we’ll give them TPS until that country gets back on their feet,” Trump border czar and former Immigration Reform Law Institute Senior Fellow Tom Homan told Fox News. “But TPS is not meant to be decades long.”

Those who fled the storm in Nicaragua represent a small number of the more than 429,000 foreigners currently living under TPS.

Citizens of other countries here under the program include 241,699 from El Salvador, 76,737 from Honduras, and 53,558 from Haiti. As this data was taken in 2021, the current numbers are likely exponentially larger after three additional years of the Biden administration’s open-door policies.

After Biden and Kamala Harris insisted that the Southern border could only be secured with a sweeping new act of Congress, Trump showed it could be done very quickly and without new laws. The more difficult and time-consuming fight will be undoing the manipulation of immigration programs by Trump’s predecessors to fulfill agendas that go against the will of the American people.  

Brian Lonergan is director of communications at the Immigration Reform Law Institute in Washington, D.C., and co-host of IRLI’s “No Border, No Country” podcast.

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