A U.S. program that let migrants apply for asylum from their home countries that was paused because of potential mass fraud may be revived by the Biden administration as soon as this week, even though thousands of suspect applications still need review, two sources told NBC News.
The Biden administration announced last month that an 18-month-old program that had let Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans apply for legal entry and temporary work authorization in the U.S. would be “temporarily paused” while the Department of Homeland Security conducted “a review of supporter applications.”
Those supporters, also called sponsors, are people legally living in the U.S. who were vouching that they could financially support migrants who wanted to come live in the U.S.
An internal DHS report reviewed by NBC News, however, found that almost 101,000 applications to sponsor migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Ukraine were filed by 3,218 so-called serial sponsors. The report, produced by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, a division of DHS, does not say how many of those applicants entered the U.S. The report was first cited publicly by the Federation for American Immigration Reform, an anti-immigration advocacy group.
The report’s authors found thousands of instances of would-be sponsors’ using