WASHINGTON, D.C. –– The House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability Chairman Josh Brecheen (R-OK) and Subcommittee on Border Security and Enforcement Chairman Michael Guest (R-MS) delivered the following opening statements in a hearing to examine the aftermath of the Biden-Harris administration’s mass-parole schemes, which led to the release of more than 1.5 million inadmissible aliens into the interior in just four years.

Watch Chairman Brecheen’s opening statement.

As prepared for delivery: 

Good afternoon and welcome to the Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability and the Subcommittee on Border Security and Enforcement’s joint hearing on returning immigration parole to its proper, statutory purpose.

First, I would like to thank our witnesses for being here today. This hearing was originally planned for April 8^th; however, due to last minute, unforeseen circumstances, it had to be postponed to today. We appreciate your understanding; and we are grateful you can be here today to talk about this important matter.  

Second, I would like to welcome the gentleman from Louisiana, Mr. Carter, who will serve on the Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability subcommittee for the 119th Congress. I look forward to working with you.

We are here today because Congress must find a legislative answer to prevent the future abuse of parole, whether that means changing the standard for parole, expediting removal of parolees, or eliminating parolee access to welfare benefits. We must act so that another administration cannot just repeat, or even worse, expand, the Biden-Harris parole programs.

From February 2021 to February 2025, under the Biden-Harris administration, U.S. Customs and Border Protection encountered more than 11 million illegal aliens nationwide. 

According to our witness today, nearly 3 million individuals who had no legal reason to be in the United States, were allowed in through unlawful mass-parole programs, or simply just paroled in by an overwhelmed Border Patrol. 

However, we don’t know how many people actually entered through these various unlawful mass-parole programs because the Biden-Harris administration refused to give us numbers and data. That’s even after Chairman Green issued a subpoena for the data. 

Why were they hiding the numbers? Because parole was out of control, and it would be a political disaster if the American people knew how the administration was abusing this authority in support of its open-borders agenda. 

Congress created immigration parole to provide temporary entry to small numbers of aliens on a case-by-case basis, for a significant public benefit or urgent humanitarian reason.

For example, presidents and cabinet-level officers have used parole to enable essential witnesses to cross the border and testify at criminal hearings or to allow aliens with dire medical conditions to receive aid in American hospitals. One former senior ICE official has said that he paroled just two individuals in his entire tenure. 

No administration, however, abused parole to such a degree and with such a flagrant disregard for Congressional limitations than the Biden-Harris administration. While the Biden-Harris administration and then-Secretary Mayorkas refused to provide Congress with information, their playbook was clear.

First, the Biden-Harris administration excessively expanded existing parole programs, such as the Cuban Family Reunification program, to an amount that strained DHS’s screening and vetting capabilities.

Second, the Biden-Harris administration re-introduced ineffective parole programs that the first Trump administration ended, like the Central American Minors Program. The Trump administration ended these because they served no purpose other than promoting greater illegal immigration and encouraging the exploitation of unaccompanied minors.

Third, the Biden-Harris administration just…invented new parole programs to release individuals from Afghanistan, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Colombia, and Haiti into the interior. Slapping “parole” on an inadmissible alien’s file and releasing him into the interior doesn’t magically make him any less inadmissible—it just means you are not following the law as intended. 

The parolee vetting was so inadequate that one DHS Inspector General report found that three Afghan parolees had derogatory information related to felonies in the United States, and at least one had an indication of terrorism-related activity. 

An additional Afghan national, who received parole through Operation Allies Welcome, was arrested in Oklahoma City for plotting an election day terrorist attack for ISIS. 

While Republican members of this Committee, and millions nationwide, recognized the national security threat of providing parole to poorly vetted immigrants, the Biden-Harris administration surged along by making it even easier for individuals to apply for parole through the CBP One application.

We even found out during the administration that the cartels had hijacked the CBP One app to create appointments for would-be parolees, all for a fee, of course—so the administration’s parole program was helping the cartels pocket more dollars from desperate individuals.

The Biden-Harris administration also erased the legal requirements for granting parole – allowing entry to individuals if they could simply find a sponsor who could financially support them once within the United States, even though the law requires parole be granted only on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit. 

Even when an internal DHS report indicated that thousands of potential parole sponsors were filling out fraudulent applications and supporting their financial statements with illegal income, the Biden-Harris administration continued accepting applications after just a month-long pause to review the program.

If all of this wasn’t bad enough, the DHS Inspector General published a report this month stating that during the Biden-Harris administration, DHS did not have a process to address parole expiration. Furthermore, DHS did not prioritize taking enforcement action for parolees who remained in the United States after their parole had expired. 

The report concluded that DHS had no assurance that parolees were lawfully present in the United States after their parole expired. When you apply these findings to the estimated millions of parolees let into the country during the Biden-Harris administration, it is troubling.

The Biden-Harris administration’s flagrant abuse of its limited parole authority had serious consequences for the American public.

While illegal immigration itself is a huge financial strain on the American taxpayer, parolees are especially expensive because they are eventually eligible for many federal welfare benefits.

One analysis found that beginning in January 2026, the Biden-Harris parole calamity will cost about three billion dollars a year in welfare benefits per one million parolees. Three billion dollars a year. Even if they pay some limited taxes, the burdens they impose on our resources always outweigh their contributions. 

That’s just the quantifiable cost. American citizens face serious national security and public safety costs from the lack of screening and vetting of these parolees. 

The stories are becoming too many to count, but parolees have been charged and convicted of serious crimes including terrorism, murder, rape, and sexual assault of children. 

Thankfully, the Trump administration has made it clear that inadmissible aliens hiding behind the fig leaf of parole can no longer hide under the protection of temporary parole to remain in the country.

On March 21, President Trump announced that his administration would revoke parole status for 532,000 individuals who received parole through the Parole Programs for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans, more commonly known as the CHNV program.  

By returning parole to its proper purpose, the Trump administration can announce to the world, and to prospective immigrants that parole status cannot be gifted so cheaply.

But more needs to be done. We are here today to determine how we can begin to undo the devastating impacts that illegally paroling untold numbers of inadmissible aliens into America has had on our states and local communities. We must protect the American people, their sovereignty, and their hard-earned tax dollars. 

We need to further limit and clarify the executive’s parole authority to prevent future abuses. 
 

Watch Chairman Guest’s opening statement.

As prepared for delivery:

This afternoon, our hearing will provide a critical opportunity to investigate how the Biden-Harris administration systematically weakened our national border security and at the same time, intentionally facilitated the influx of millions of inadmissible aliens in the United States through the unlawful use of mass parole.

As members of the legislative branch, it is our duty to determine how and why the Biden-Harris administration abused this authority to grant parole meant to be applied only on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reads or significant public benefit to justify the mass release of between two and three million inadmissible aliens into our country.

However, the Biden-Harris mass parole programs, though stopped by the Trump administration, continued to impose significant financial costs on the American public and generate increased public safety threats. During his time in office, former President Biden’s open policies incentivized illegal immigration, signaling to the world that our borders were open. In response, people from around the world flooded across our borders and overran our communities. This resulted in historic never-before-seen apprehension numbers.

To combat the bad optics of the growing border crisis and to try to cover up the true scale of illegal immigrants entering the United States, the Biden-Harris administration created multiple mass parole programs to hide the truth from the American people and to quickly release individuals into the interior. These programs were deliberately designed to conceal and downplay the true scope of our border crisis.

One of the ways the former administration misled the public was through the conversion of a little-known program originally designed to schedule cargo inspections into the one of the most abused programs in our nation’s history. The CBP One app was used in a manner never authorized by Congress to create a fast-track pathway for parole into the interior of the country. The implementation of the CBP One mass parole program resulted in nearly one million illegal aliens entering this country.

This committee found that the individuals who applied for entry into the U.S. using the CBP One app were only released into the interior at least 95% of the time. Additionally, more than half a million other inadmissible aliens were granted parole under the Mass Parole Program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans.

The Trump administration has wisely ended both of these programs by executive order, but the fallout remains. Earlier this year, DHS Office of Inspector General released a review of specific Biden-Harris administration parole programs, confirming that the previous administration had no plan to remove aliens whose parole had expired. That meant that there are potentially hundreds of thousands of inadmissible aliens who may still be at large in a country long after their parole has expired. To make matters worse, many of these aliens and those who sponsored their entry were not properly vetted.

Both the CHNV program and the CBP One appointments had to be paused due to suspected rampant fraud. The consequences of these reckless and unlawful parole programs have been devastating and the American public has paid the price.

One horrifying example is the brutal murder of 22 year old Laken Riley, an Augusta University student, at the hands of an illegal alien from Venezuela who was paroled into the country by the Biden-Harris administration.

More recently, an Afghan national who was paroled into the United States in 2021 was arrested for plotting an attack in the name of ISIS on Election Day 2024. This arrest and Laken’s tragic death should be a wake-up call to lawmakers, that we must be serious about preventing future abuse of our immigration law.

In closing, Congress has a responsibility to examine what steps should be taken to mitigate the ongoing financial and public safety threats enabled by the previous administration’s abuse of parole.

There’s no scenario in which paroling millions of inadmissible aliens in the country is consistent with current law. We must never allow this to happen again. We must work together to ensure that future administrations can never again jeopardize our nation’s safety and sovereignty. We must implement legislative solutions that will guarantee American security for generations to come. I look forward to hearing from our witnesses today and with that I yield back.

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