Trump Cruelly Terminates Program for Legal Migrants Fleeing Communist Tyranny, and Seeks to Deport them

Yesterday, the Trump Administration terminated legal “parole” status for some 530,000 legal migrants who entered the United States under the CHNV program, which allowed residents of four Latin American countries – Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela – to live and work in the US for up to two years if they passed a background check and had a US-resident sponsor willing to provide financial support. These people will be subject to deportation, as of April 24.

The termination of CHNV parole is a further expansion of Trump’s cruel campaign against legal immigration. In this case, it targets for deportation hundreds of thousands of people who fled horrific communist tyranny in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and now risk being deported back to it. There was a time when American conservatives saw themselves as opponents of socialism and welcomed those fleeing it. No longer.

The revocation of parole will also needlessly deprive the US economy of tens of thousands valuable workers and entrepreneurs. Hispanic immigrants, like those from other countries, disproportionately contribute to various types of innovations and businesses startups. Given the horrors that await them in their countries of origin, I expect many of the CHNV migrants will try to remain in the US illegally rather than “self-deport.” If so, they will be less productive than before (as they could only work black market jobs). And the administration’s policy will actually increase the number of illegal migrants, rather than reducing it.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt claims “[t]hese are the 530,000 illegal immigrants that Joe Biden flew to the United States on the taxpayers dime.” Every word of this is false. There were no flights “on the taxpayers dime.” The migrants either paid for their own transportation or did so with the help of their sponsors. 

And the CHNV program was entirely legal. I summarized the reasons why in a 2023 article criticizing a lawsuit filed against it by a group of GOP-led state governments:

The legal basis for these private sponsorship programs is the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, which, as later modified, gives the Department of Homeland Security the power to use “parole” to grant foreign citizens temporary residency rights in the United States “on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.” Here, we have both “urgent humanitarian reasons” and “significant public benefit.”

The humanitarian need is undeniable. Three of the four nations included in the program — Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela — are ruled by oppressive socialist dictators, whose policies have created horrific conditions. Few have put it better than Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), whose state is one of the plaintiffs in the present case.

As he said last year, Venezuela’s socialist president Nicolas Maduro is a “murderous tyrant” who “is responsible for countless atrocities and has driven Venezuela into the ground.” Venezuelan oppression and socialist economic policies have created the biggest refugee crisis in the history of the Western hemisphere, with some 7 million people fleeing. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), whose state is spearheading the lawsuit, has also noted the severe economic crisis in Venezuela, which he (rightly) blames on socialism.

In 2021, DeSantis rightly described Cuba’s communist regime as responsible for “poverty, starvation, migration, systemic lethal violence, and suppression of speech.” Cuba’s government continues to be highly repressive,  including recent brutal suppression of protests in July 2021.

Nicaragua, under the increasingly authoritarian socialist rule of Daniel Ortega, is a similar story. That’s why many Nicaraguans have sought to flee. As one Nicaraguan human rights activist puts it, conditions are so bad that migrants fleeing the country say  “[t]hey’d rather die than return to Nicaragua…”

Haiti has long been one of the poorest and most dysfunctional societies in the world. Over the last year, conditions have gotten even worse, with intensifying violence and shortages of basic necessities.

If conservatives mean what they say about the evils of socialism, they cannot simultaneously deny that people fleeing communist tyranny have “urgent humanitarian reasons” for seeking freedom elsewhere. When we deport victims of communism back to the tyrannies they fled, we become complicit in that oppression and lose credibility in condemning it. The situation in Haiti is also indisputably dire, albeit for somewhat different reasons.

In the article, I also explain how the program created the “significant public benefit” of reducing pressure on the border. It could have done so to an even greater extent if not for the arbitrary 30,000 per month numerical cap imposed by the Biden Administration. I went over the legal issues in greater detail in an amicus brief I filed in the case on behalf of myself, the Cato Institute, and MedGlobal. Ultimately, a conservative Trump-appointed federal judged handpicked by the plaintiff states dismissed the case because he concluded the states’ lacked “standing” for reasons that undercut their substantive arguments, as well.

Trump’s revocation of CHNV parole is a dark day for victims of communism – and for America. The administration’s cruel actions victimize people fleeing the sort of tyranny conservatives most claim to oppose, tarnishes America’s image in the war of ideas against authoritarian states, and damages the US economy – all for no good reason.

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