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Around 530,000 immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela will be in immigration limbo after the Joseph Biden administration announced that there will be no extension of the "humanitarian parole" program.
The announcement was made last Friday, less than a month before the presidential elections in the United States, forcing more than half a million people to face deportation if they do not find another way to remain in the country.
It was in 2022 that President Biden created the program that offered a legal way to remain in the country to thousands of Venezuelan immigrants who arrived in the United States illegally, which helped around 117,000 people from that country receive protection. By 2023, the program included Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua.
Thus, two years after the program went into effect, 530,000 immigrants are under the protection of the action according to the latest figures from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from the end of August. Of that total, some 210,000 are Haitians, 117,000 Venezuelans, 110,000 Cubans and 93,000 Nicaraguans.
“Your parole will automatically end at the end of your parole period (up to two years from the day you were paroled in the United States). If you have not applied for legal status or a period of authorized stay, you will have to leave the United States before your parole period expires, or you may be placed in removal proceedings,” reads an update on the DHS website for this program (officially known as CHNV).
"If you have not been granted legal status or a period of authorized stay, you may begin to accrue unlawful presence in the United States," the text adds.
While the program will continue to accept applications from applicants from these four countries, protections will henceforth be limited to a two-year period with no possibility of renewal.
Just this Sunday, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump once again lashed out at undocumented migrants in the country, calling them "horrible people."
"These are horrible people that we allow into our country, that are destroying our country, and it's also the most difficult problem to solve. I mean, it's a huge, tremendous problem and they could do this to our country by putting 13,000 murderers back in, many of them murdering a lot of people," the tycoon stressed.
In that sense, he said, "it is an invasion of savage criminals."
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