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 the same street addresses, internet protocol addresses or phone numbers. Almost 600 applications were flagged, for example, because they all appeared to use the address of the same commercial warehouse in Orlando, Florida. The authors also found repeated uses of the same Social Security numbers, including numbers belonging to dead people.
Small numbers of sponsors for large groups of people have raised concerns about potential human trafficking for immigration programs in the past, though it is not known whether DHS is reviewing those cases for potential human trafficking, the sources said.
A U.S government official told NBC News that when the program resumes, applications for sponsors will be manually vetted in small batches with enhanced procedures for vetting. And any sponsor believed to be involved in fraud will be referred for further investigation.
The administration is eager to turn the program back on as quickly as possible because it is believed to be deterring migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela crossing the border illegally, a source familiar with the decision said.
The report, released internally in May, spurred DHS to suspend travel authorization for migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela and Nicaragua who had applied under the program.
Sources familiar with the review of the nearly 101,000 sponsor applications said that employees at USCIS’ Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate had reviewed more than two-thirds of the suspect applications as of last week and that they had about 30,000 left to review and would most likely not finish before the program is reinstated.
So far, six sponsor applications have been turned over to investigators at Homeland Security Investigations, a division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement assigned through an agreement between USCIS and ICE to investigate potential criminal immigration fraud, the sources familiar with the review said.
More than 2.6 million migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela have applied for entry through the program, known as CHNV, and a similar program for Ukrainians, according to the internal report.
As of July, over 530,000 migrants had been authorized to travel to the U.S. under CHNV, according to data from DHS. It is unclear from the report how many of those successful applicants were brought into the U.S. with the help of the 3,200 “serial sponsors.” It is also unclear whether the 101,000 applications that were flagged for review were from people who have now entered the U.S. or people whose applications were rejected or a mixture. The number of migrants who applied under the program for Ukrainians is not specified.
Migrants applying for CHNV apply online from one of the four countries and list both their own identifying information and that of sponsors in the U.S. who agree to support them. The sponsors are also asked to enter Alien Registration numbers and/or Social Security numbers that the government can verify, according to an application form viewed by NBC News. Once migrants have approval, they can fly to the U.S.
Within weeks of CHNV’s beginning in January 2023, concerns were raised in an Associated Press article about potential sponsors’ advertising online that they would be willing to sell their services as sponsors to migrants in Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. It is unknown whether any sponsors have been found to have sold their services.
In a statement, a DHS spokesperson said the agency has not identified issues of concern related to the screening and vetting of the immigrants themselves.
“DHS has review mechanisms in place to detect and prevent fraud and abuse in our immigration processes. DHS takes any abuse of its processes very seriously. Where fraud is identified, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will investigate and litigate applicable cases in immigration court and make criminal referrals to the Department of Justice,” the spokesperson said.
Red flags raised
An internal fraud detection unit in USCIS launched a “filing trend analysis” on April 17 to see whether there were any red flags in the program.
Less than a month later, the unit produced the report reviewed by NBC News, finding a troubling set of indicators that thousands of applications were potentially fraudulent.
The report does not indicate how many of the original applications that were potentially fraudulent were ultimately approved, but it raises a series of red flags.
The authors found examples of suspicious use of Social Security numbers, with the same number used in 20 or more applications. The authors labeled those repeat sponsors as “serial sponsors” and noted that 100,948 forms used 3,218 serial sponsors’ Social Security numbers. At least 24 of the most-used Social Security numbers were numbers tied to dead people, according to the report.
The report’s authors also found problems with 3,355 duplicate phone numbers used on more than 110,000 forms.
Physical addresses provided by sponsors also raised questions. Multiple sponsors repeatedly used the same physical addresses for more than 19,000 applications. Almost 130 applications appear to have used the address for a single-family home in rural Pennsylvania with less than 900 square feet. There were 596 applications that appeared to use the address for a commercial warehouse in Orlando, and more than 500 applications used an address that matches a storage unit facility in Pompano Beach, Florida.
The report also analyzed the IP addresses associated with the applications and found more than 1,300 applications were tied to an IP address in Tijuana, Mexico.
The report noted a “concerning trend” — for nine IP addresses, many more women were being potentially sponsored than men. For example, one IP address was linked to applications to sponsor 18 females, 14 of them under age 18.
