A Biden administration migrant welfare program could be handing out in excess of $1 billion in benefits to those crossing the Southern Border.
The CHNV program has allowed hundreds of thousands of nationals from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to enter the US.
It allows 30,000 migrants to apply for asylum each month and be flown to the US on the taxpayer dollar, as long as they have a sponsor who passes a background check.
The undocumented migrants are given a two-year grace period to obtain status and, in the meantime, can live and work lawfully in the country on ‘humanitarian parole.’
According to figures from Border Protection, over 520,000 migrants from the four countries were paroled into the US between January 2023 and June of this year.
This was broken down into 109,000 Cubans, 205,000 Haitians, 90,000 Nicaraguans, and 115,000 Venezuelans.
Haitians and Cubans that are involved with the program are immediately eligible for taxpayer-funded federal benefits like Medicaid, food stamps and welfare.
Analysis by DailyMail.com indicates that the Medicaid cost, which costs around $9,175 per enrollee, would cost $1.8 billion if every Haitian who entered the country received it.
SNAP benefits, more commonly known as food stamps, would cost the country $451 million, with general welfare benefits climbing to $1.2 billion.
The three figures take the overall spend on benefits only to over an eyewatering $3.4 billion.
Even if only a quarter of the Haitians are getting all the benefits they are entitled to receive, that figure would stand at $850 million.
Average costs were obtained from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Department of Health & Human Services, and a Medicaid Commission.
Court documents show that the vetting process isn’t stringent, with an approval rating of 98.3 percent for Haitian applicants from January to June of last year.
In that time frame, 78,838 Haitians had applied to the program with the Department of Homeland Security adjudicating 64,285 cases. Of those, 63,214 applications were approved.
That figure was revealed in a lawsuit filed this year by the state of Texas and other Republican-led states who sued the Biden administration to block the program.
Other states including Florida, Tennessee and Arkansas argued that the program had left them with extra costs for health care, education and law enforcement.
They also argued that the Biden administration was inviting people who otherwise would have entered the country illegally.
A federal judge would rule that the government could continue the program which was welcomed by Homeland Security secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas.
Last month, the Biden administration had to pause the program after massive fraud was uncovered.
The freeze came after an internal DHS report that revealed fraud among sponsors paying for the migrants to come to the country, sources told Fox News.
A total of 3,200 individual sponsors signed up to support roughly 101,000 migrants according to the report, prompting concerns at DHS that the system was being abused.
The report indicating fraud also shockingly found that some of the names used to fill out sponsor forms belonged to dead people.
Additionally, storage units were found to be the home address for some sponsor applications, while certain phone numbers were used on thousands of applications.
Almost 3,000 sponsors applications were filled out using fake zip codes, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) a conservative immigration nonprofit which first obtained the report, found.
At the end of last month, it was announced the program would continue after the DHS ‘incorporated additional vetting’.
The ongoing border crisis has become a pivotal talking point in the current race for the White House between Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump.
During their debate this week Trump accused Haitian migrants of ‘eating pets’ in Springfield, Ohio, an unsubstantiated claim that first appeared on social media.
‘In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats,’ the former president said. ‘They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.’
Harris could be heard muttering ‘What? This is unbelievable’ before adding ‘talk about extreme’ and laughing.
On Friday, Trump continued to disparage Haitian migrants in the Ohio town, fueling the false claims.
At a news conference in California, he said: ‘We will do large deportations from Springfield, Ohio’ adding that migrants are ‘destroying the way of life’.
On Friday, President Joe Biden said the Haitian community is ‘under attack’ right now and called for an end to Republicans’ comments.
‘It’s simply wrong. There’s no place in America,’ Biden said while speaking at a White House luncheon. ‘This has to stop, what he´s doing. It has to stop.’
