President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) refuses to publicly identify the dozens of U.S. international airports for which it has approved direct flights from abroad for certain inadmissible aliens.
At least 386,000 migrants through February have been allowed
to fly to interior U.S. airports as part of a legally dubious admissions program the administration launched in October 2022. The rationale for the program is to “reduce the number of individuals crossing unlawfully” over the southern border — by flying them over it directly into the interior and then releasing them on parole.
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This early evidence suggests that a great many of these inadmissible alien passengers, probably a majority, initially land at international airports in Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s Florida. In fact, Florida turns out to be the top landing and U.S. customs processing zone for this direct-flights parole-and-release program, tallying at nearly 326,000 of the initial arrivals from inception through February.
Lesser numbers also are landing in the regions of Houston, New York, both northern and southern California, and the Washington, D.C., area, the data analysis reveals. But the data for Florida shows it to be heaviest for initial landings and migrant releases.
Public knowledge of where these flights deliver migrants should matter to local, state, and national leaders in cities struggling with migrant influxes, who could use the information to financially plan for their care, or petition the federal government to stop the flights. The information may also hold implications for litigation by Texas, Florida, and other states that have sued to stop the parole programs on grounds that the administration's illegal abuse of the narrow statutory parole authority has directly harmed them.
Whether those hundreds of thousands stay in those areas or fly on after their initial landing and release is not shown in this data. Many of the landing
Cubans, Venezuelans, and Haitians will obviously choose to stay in Florida, where expatriate communities are already large. But some percentage of the newly “legalized” aspiring border crossers who land there and in Texas, New York, and California likely transfer to domestic flights to their final destinations across the nation.
DHS would have that information. But this data analysis provides at least some contours of how the secretive program — sometimes referred to in government documents as the "CHNV program" or the “Advanced Travel Authorization” program — has been working.
Begun in October 2022 for Venezuelans and expanded in January 2023 to Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Colombians, the program approves flight travel authorizations for aspiring illegal border-crossers still in other countries to instead arrange commercial airline passage for themselves over the southern border and then receive temporary but easily renewable “humanitarian parole” from CBP officers at the airport. One incentive to dissuade beneficiaries from illegal border crossings is that the parole program comes with eligibility for renewable work permits.
Also during 2023, the direct-flights parole program declared that Guatemalans, El Salvadorans, Hondurans, and Ecuadorians also would be eligible, for a total of nine nationalities.
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More:
https://cis.org/Bensman/Florida-Gat...-Flights-Landing-Gov-DeSantiss-Sunshine-State
