The Department of Homeland Security confirmed that the Biden administration will not renew some 530,000 temporary visas issues to under a specially designed program to relieve pressure on the Mexican border (go here.) It is not clear how these persons will be removed from the United States. The current visas are valid for two years. That this will create some havoc is an understatement.

It is hard to avoid concluding that this decision, made a month before the presidential election, was driven by politics. JD Vance has referred to these persons are “illegal” on the grounds that the program, faced with a lawsuit, was illegally created. Trump is sure to cancel the program if he is elected. Within a global context, Biden is trimming back inclusive immigration policies, as Canada and Australia have in the past six months.

I have posted here about the Biden administration’s humanitarian parole program for Venezuela, begun in 2022, and in 2023 for Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua – the so-called semi-privatized CHNV program. By this program, persons could enter the U.S. at their own cost of air flights and with a financial guarantor.

According to Customs and Border Protection, Through the end of August 2024, nearly 530,000 CHNV citizens arrived: more than 110,000 Cubans, more than 210,000 Haitians, nearly 93,000 Nicaraguans, and nearly 117,000 Venezuelans arrived lawfully and were granted parole.

Since DHS has implemented these safe, orderly and lawful processes, encounters of CHNV nationals in between by land formal ports of entry are down by 99%. This shows how the program was designed to relieve pressure at the Mexican border.