Not all illegal aliens are entering the U.S. along the southern or northern border, according to the Center for Immigration Studies.
Over the past year, “more than 200,000 people from four countries” used a direct-flight parole program to enter the country illegally, says Todd Bensman, senior national security fellow at the think tank devoted to researching immigration issues.
Through a Freedom of Information Act request, or FOIA, Bensman learned of the government’s “CBP One” mobile application parole program, which “permits inadmissible aliens to make an appointment to fly directly to airports in the interior of the United States, bypassing the border altogether.”
The Biden administration introduced the CBP One mobile app to illegal aliens as a way to schedule an appoints at a port of entry and be paroled into the interior of the United States.
President Joe Biden said the program was part of an effort to form “lawful pathways” for illegal aliens to enter the country and seek asylum. Illegal border crossings between ports of entry at the southern border appeared to decline in June as more illegal aliens presented themselves at a port of entry.
But, according to Bensman’s findings, migrants also are presenting themselves at ports within the interior of the country.
One of the “least noticed, mysterious, and potentially the most controversial of the new rechanneling programs that use the CBP One app allows migrants to take commercial passenger flights from foreign countries straight to their American cities of choice, flying right over the border—and even over Mexico,” Bensman said.
Through the CBP One app, “Cubans, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, Haitians, and Colombians … [can] request ‘advance travel authorizations,’” Bensman said, and fly “directly into U.S. airports, where U.S. Customs officers parole them into the nation, sight unseen, and in numbers publicly unknown.”
The documents obtained by the Center for Immigration Studies, he said, show that “between late October 2022 and mid-September 2023, the administration approved a total of 221,456 Venezuelans, Haitians, Cubans, and Nicaraguans for ‘travel mode: air’ into still-unspecified interior U.S. ports.”
The illegal aliens are required to pay for their own flight into the U.S.
Details of the Biden administration’s flight program for illegal aliens come as U.S. Customs and Border Protection encounters with illegal limmigrants along the U.S. border with Mexico are nearing record highs and the administration is granting Venezuelan illegal aliens “temporary protected status.”
The change protects hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who were in America before July 31 from deportation, and makes it easier for them to gain U.S. work permits.
“Temporary protected status provides individuals already present in the United States with protection from removal when the conditions in their home country prevent their safe return,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said Wednesday in a written statement.
The Biden administration is “granting them the protection that the law provides,” Mayorkas said. “However, it is critical that Venezuelans understand that those who have arrived here after July 31, 2023, are not eligible for such protection, and instead will be removed when they are found to not have a legal basis to stay.”
U.S. Customs and Border Protection has encountered more than 460,000 Venezuelan illegal aliens on America’s borders since the start of the Biden administration.
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