From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Hailey Gomez

A Venezuelan immigrant living in migrant housing in Aurora, Colorado, appeared to fight back tears while speaking to independent reporter Nick Shirley, saying she would return to her country after living in the U.S.

This week, the city of Aurora faced major pushback from Republicans after footage surfaced online of armed men inside an apartment complex in late August. Shirley was seen visiting various migrant housing units before stopping at the viral location to interview residents where the armed men had been spotted.

Shirley spoke with a Venezuelan woman who showed him the poor living conditions her family endures, stating she pays $1,200 per month for the apartment. The migrant stated that the electricity and hot water in her apartment weren’t working, telling Shirley that the landlord hadn’t accepted any payment for the “past couple of months.”

“Does your father still have to pay rent?” Shirley asked as they walked around her father’s apartment.

“The owner is no longer receiving any kind of payment, because he is also taking all this, that the gangs and the mafia are taking advantage of all of this to get us out as if we were dogs and it’s not fair,” the migrant stated, according to a translation.

Shirley asked if gangs had been charging people, to which the migrant replied, “no.” The independent reporter then asked if her life in the U.S. was what she expected after crossing the border.

WATCH:

“No, never. I would have stayed in my country. They say that here everything is different, the laws, everyone gets a good job, you get ahead, you can save money to take back to your country,” the migrant stated. “But not everything is as they say, the American dream is simply just a dream. When you get here you wake up, it’s not like they say.”

Shirley then pressed the migrant, asking in Spanish if she would take a “flight or opportunity to go back” to her home country.

“With all the love in the world I would return to my country,” the migrant said.

Republican lawmakers on Friday sent a letter criticizing the Biden-Harris administration’s “open border policies” and local “sanctuary” policies over the reported presence of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which allegedly terrorized several apartment buildings in Aurora.

Reportedly beginning as a prison gang in 2014 within the northern Venezuelan state of Aragua, Tren de Aragua has grown into one of Venezuela’s largest criminal organizations. With around 5,000 members and stretching internationally across Latin America and the U.S., the gang has allegedly been connected to several high-profile crimes within the U.S., including the kidnapping and strangling of a Florida man last year.

This week, the Aurora Police Department announced the arrest of two confirmed Tren de Aragua gang members, Jhonnarty Dejesus Pacheco-Chirinos and Jhonardy Jose Pacheco-Chirinos, following a July 28 shooting that left two men hospitalized with serious injuries.

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Jason Hopkins

The Biden-Harris administration has decided to resume a mass parole program that was sidelined due to the discovery of widespread fraud, but immigration hardliners say the vetting process remains critically flawed.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is resuming an immigration program that allows foreign nationals to apply for asylum in their home countries and fly into the U.S. at various airports upon approval, known as the CHNV program, which has allowed hundreds of thousands of migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela into the country, a spokesman confirmed to the Daily Caller News Foundation on Thursday. However, border hawks are cautioning that the program has not sufficiently updated its vetting procedures since it was placed on pause last month after the discovery of rampant fraud.

“My Committee has engaged with the department since this pause was announced, and the results were sobering,” House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green said in a Thursday statement following news of the program’s restart. “Instead of scrapping the clearly flawed program, the department is allowing it to continue without rooting out the fraud or putting adequate safeguards in place to prevent exploitation by sponsors here in the United States.”

Originally launched for Venezuelans in October 2022, the CHNV program was later expanded in January 2023 to include Cubans, Nicaraguans and Haitians. The parole initiative gives foreign nationals two-year authorization into the U.S. and work permits, provided they have not previously entered the country illegally and pass other vetting processes.

Green referred to the CHNV program as a “massive shell game” that allows 30,000 otherwise inadmissible foreign nationals to simply enter the country every month in lieu of crossing the border unlawfully.

At the beginning of August, DHS confirmed that they placed the program on hold following an internal audit. That report — first publicized by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) — identified a litany of red flags, such as 100,948 CHNV forms being completed by just 3,218 sponsors, 24 of the 1,000 most used Social Security numbers by sponsors belonging to a deceased person and an IP address located in Tijuana, Mexico, being used more than 1,300 times.

Matt O’Brien, investigation director at the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), told the DCNF that the CHNV program is inherently susceptible to fraud due to the inherent reliance on sponsors and foreign governments.

“The supposed improvements made by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) simply can’t lead to better vetting,” O’Brien said to the DCNF. “The entire structure of the program encourages fraud because it relies on a ‘sponsor’ relationship that is impossible to verify and imposes no enforceable obligations on sponsor or beneficiary.”

“Second, and perhaps more importantly, one cannot vet Cubans, Haitians, Venezuelans or Nicaraguans,” O’Brien continued. “None of these countries have reliable, functioning records systems. And none of them share information with the U.S.”

The program has so far paroled roughly half a million foreign nationals into the U.S. since it launched in January 2023, according to Customs and Border Protection. There are more than 1.6 million other foreign nationals awaiting travel authorization into the country through the CHNV program.

CHNV is being relaunched with bolstered procedures meant to address the issues that initially halted the program, such as manually vetting sponsors in smaller numbers. Sponsors suspected of engaging in fraud in the program will continue to be referred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for investigation.

However, the House Homeland Security Committee says DHS hasn’t explained what’s improved in the program now that is back up and running.

“DHS resumed issuing travel authorizations but has not provided the Committee with any additional information on how they intend on preventing fraud,” a House Homeland Committee spokesperson stated to the DCNF.

The spokesperson also noted that DHS has not satisfied the committee’s document requests for information following the allegations of mass fraud.

FAIR also noted that the program is better off being abolished.

“DHS announced it has already restarted CHNV, while offering only very vague assurances that they’ve fixed the problems,” FAIR President Dan Stein said in a statement, noting that DHS has not explained how they plan to vet each sponsor. “The American public has every reason to be very skeptical.”

“There is only one way to address the myriad problems with the Biden-Harris CHNV program,” Stein continued. “As House Speaker Mike Johnson tweeted earlier this month when FAIR exposed the rampant fraud: ‘Shut it down permanently.’”

DHS did not respond to a request for comment from the DCNF.

Featured Image: Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz