Immigrants who took advantage of a Biden-era program to enter the U.S. are now being targeted by the Trump administration, including people who fled the Russia-Ukraine war. WSJ’s Michelle Hackman explains how the program came to be and how Trump cancelled it. Further Reading: - They Thought They Came to the U.S. Legally. Now They’re at Risk for Deportation. - What Green Card and Visa Holders Need to Know About Recent Deportations Further Listening: - Trump's Immigration Overhaul Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What was Trump's initial promise on immigration?
When President Trump was on the campaign trail, he made a lofty promise. He said he was going to deport millions of illegal immigrants.
And on day one, we will begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.
And specifically, he said he was going to deport immigrants who had committed crimes.
We are going to crack down on the gangs, the drug dealers, human traffickers, and criminal cartels.
And I think the way that it was portrayed was, we're going to go after people who knowingly came here illegally, knowingly broke our laws. And so I think a lot of people were led to believe that that is what the crackdown was going to look like. And now it looks really different.
That's our colleague Michelle Hackman, who covers immigration. And she says that since Trump took office, the mass deportations have not yet been as mass as he promised.
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Chapter 2: How is Trump's deportation strategy evolving?
His mass deportation isn't going so well so far, and that's a huge source of frustration for Trump, for people in his administration. Deportations actually aren't that much higher than they were under Biden.
So to increase the number of deportations, the Trump administration is targeting a new group of people, people who came to the United States legally under certain programs.
They're broadening the aperture of who we would think of as deportable. So it's a whole new scale that we're seeing.
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen. It's Wednesday, March 19th. Coming up on the show, a new phase in Trump's immigration fight. In recent weeks, the Trump administration has been turning up the heat on deportations. Over the weekend, his administration deported hundreds of Venezuelans without giving them hearings, citing an 18th century law.
Chapter 3: What is humanitarian parole and how has it been used?
He's also been expanding the list of who is deportable by going after people with a variety of legal statuses, including some with green cards or visas. As part of that expansion, the administration is targeting an obscure program known as humanitarian parole. Humanitarian parole is a part of immigration law that's historically been used for special situations when someone can't get a visa.
And so the government says, okay, this is an extraordinary circumstance. We're going to, for humanitarian reasons, let you into the country temporarily on this thing called parole.
So the idea is kind of like the U.S. will let in some people under certain circumstances out of the kindness of America's heart. But it's only supposed to be temporary.
The idea is it's supposed to be temporary, but it does, I want to emphasize, really give the government very broad authority to let people in as long as they can say that there's some kind of either humanitarian or public benefit reason to let someone in.
Humanitarian parole has also been used during emergency evacuations, like after the Vietnam War and after the U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan. But humanitarian parole really expanded under the Biden administration, specifically after Russia invaded Ukraine.
So when Russia invaded Ukraine, there was a really interesting incident that happened where people were obviously fleeing Ukraine. They were spreading all over Europe. But a certain number, about 20,000 people, started coming to Mexico and hoping to cross the border to come to America.
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Chapter 4: How did the Russia-Ukraine war affect U.S. immigration policy?
And we had this incident where in one month, 20,000 Ukrainians all flew to the Mexican city Tijuana and came up to this one border crossing across from San Diego and were all asking for a sign.
The refugee crisis created by the war in Ukraine has come to America's doorstep. Hundreds of Ukrainians are gathering in Mexico near the U.S.-Mexico border.
And so the Biden administration was processing those people, letting them into the country. But it said we can't just let everyone in the world think if you come to Mexico and then walk up to our border, we're just going to let you in.
So the Biden administration decided to expand the use of humanitarian parole and use it as the basis of a program called Uniting for Ukraine.
And the deal was if you apply in advance, so, you know, the government has a chance to vet you and you find an American to sort of financially sponsor you, take you in, be your guarantor in some way, then the government would give you travel permission to fly to the U.S. and live here for a grant of two years.
Now, the Biden administration has promised to welcome 100,000 Ukrainian refugees into this country.
Ultimately, more than 200,000 Ukrainian refugees moved to the U.S. via this program.
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Chapter 5: How did Biden's administration expand humanitarian parole?
As a border gamut, it worked. I mean, literally the day that they announced this program, no one flew to Mexico from there.
It would solve the Ukrainian immigration issue. Exactly. The program worked so well to get Ukrainians off the U.S. southern border that Biden decided to expand it to other countries in Latin America.
Biden was having a crisis at the border. I mean, there were hundreds of thousands of people coming at the height of it, about 250,000 people crossed illegally in one month. And he had this example of this program sort of fixing a border problem with the Ukrainians.
And so people in his administration said, wait a second, you know, there are certain countries in Latin America where the situation is basically, you know, it's different, but it's just as bad as Ukraine. You know, Haiti, the government, basically the president was assassinated. You know, in Cuba and Venezuela, there was sort of widespread issues with starvation.
So Biden decided to offer humanitarian parole to people in Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
And so Biden said, these people are not going to stop coming basically no matter what we do. And so he made this bet where he said... If we let these people in legally, you know, we make them find a sponsor, we have them pay for their own plane tickets, we give them a work permit, they're probably gonna choose that overcoming illegally.
Once these immigrants had this status and got into the U.S., they're only supposed to be here for two years. What's the next step? Is it just two years and goodbye? Or was there something else that the immigrants could do once they're here to gain more long-term status?
Yeah, so the immigrants, once they got here, you know, were eligible to apply for anything else. So many applied for asylum. A smaller number, you know, probably found other paths.
More than half a million people entered the U.S. from Latin American countries under the program. And Biden's decision to do this was very controversial.
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Chapter 6: What challenges do immigrants face after entering under humanitarian parole?
Exactly. Exactly. The Republicans in particular have argued that this program is illegal because Congress sets limits on immigration. You know, we have visa categories. If you don't fit into one, people strongly feel, well, then you have no right to be in the country. You shouldn't be here.
And a president shouldn't have the authority to just decide to let a large group of people in who Congress hasn't authorized.
When Trump took office, he immediately ended the parole program for Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. And no new applicants are being considered. And immigrants who came to the U.S. under the program from Ukraine are now left in limbo.
It's not like I don't want to go to Ukraine, but I want to leave. I want to feel safe. And right now, my country can't give me that.
We'll be right back. Katarina Kirilova grew up in Mariupol, a city in southern Ukraine.
It was my hometown. It was close to the sea. I spent a lot of time at the beach. I had friends there. All my life was there.
In February 2022, her hometown came under siege as part of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Like every 10 minutes, something was just burning down. And yeah, of course it was scary. It was really scary. I had a grandma, but she died during the war. Her house was bombed. I had my apartment in Mariupol, but it also was bombed and burned down.
Katarina says she was an orphan and that her grandmother was the only family she was close to. So she had to find a new place to go. She eventually found the Uniting for Ukraine program and was accepted. What did you bring to the U.S. when you left Ukraine?
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