While many illegal aliens pay smugglers to guide them through harrowing jungles and ferry them across the Rio Grande, others are forking over thousands of dollars to buy into President Joe Biden’s “parole” program on the black market.
According to the Washington Times, would-be migrants from Nicaragua, one of four countries included by DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas under the CHNV program that allows illegal aliens from certain nations to bypass the border and be flown directly into the interior of the U.S., are now paying smugglers to game the system. The Times reports:
The scammers charge would-be migrants $1,000 upfront, which buys them contact with an American willing to fill out the forms promising financial support. Once the Department of Homeland Security approves the sponsor, the migrants pay the other $4,000 to the scammers and head to the U.S.
The special parole program allows up to 30,000 migrants per month from Nicaragua, Venezuela, Haiti, and Cuba to fly directly into the U.S., provided they have a U.S.-based “sponsor” who agrees to financially support them if they can’t support themselves. Migrants are then given two paroled years in the U.S. The program is a serious deviation from the intended use of the “parole” program under U.S. law, a provision meant to be used for one-off situations that allows a migrant to be admitted in the United States for “urgent” humanitarian reasons or due to a “significant public benefit,” such as a child who needs a particular medial procedure.
Instead, the Biden administration is misusing the parole provision to carve out yet another pathway - in addition to in-country asylum application programs and a smartphone app that allows migrants to bypass typical border security - for migrants to circumvent the legal immigration process and come into the United States without adding to the physical logjam at the southwest U.S. border.
But what happens if you want to be paroled into the U.S., but don’t have family or friends to support you? Turns out, you just pay a smuggler to hook you up with a random stranger - though whether they actually make good on their pledge to support you is entirely up for grabs.
Related: Rep. Matt Gaetz Suggests Naval Interdiction of Haitian Migrants
The Washington Times reports that “The Biden administration, in response to questions from The Times, said migrants are ‘not encouraged’ to strike those sorts of deals but did not say they are against the rules.”
Hm, sounds like straight-up human trafficking to me. But of course, I’m sure this pay-to-play system is never exploited by slavers, sex traffickers, or child abusers.
Not that they’d be caught even if they were - the Times reports that last year, 96% of “sponsor” applications were approved by Biden’s DHS - the same administration that lost nearly 100,000 migrant kids, and who regularly sends illegal aliens and their children into abusive homes, prostitution rings, and to be exploited as forced labor.
But hey, anything to avoid the bad optics of tens of thousands of people queued up at the border, right?