Humanitarian Parole

On January 5, 2023, the White House announced that it was extending to Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua a process that until then existed only for Venezuela: up to 30,000 people a month from those four countries could enter the United States legally for two years, with work authorization, if they had a sponsor in the country and passed security screening. Anyone who irregularly crossed the borders of Panama, Mexico or the United States from that point on would be excluded and could be expelled to Mexico, which would accept up to 30,000 returns a month of those nationalities¹. The effect at the border was almost immediate. At the southwest border, encounters with Cubans went from 42,654 in December 2022 to 753 in February 2023². Two years later, 110,240 Cubans had arrived by plane with that permission³.

The permission was called parole: a discretionary authorization, provided for in section 212(d)(5)(A) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), to let someone in case by case for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit⁴. For Cubans it had a consequence it did not have for others: after one year in the country, parole opened the door to residence under the Cuban Adjustment Act⁵. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) put it in writing when it created the process:

"The two-year period will also enable individuals to seek humanitarian relief or other immigration benefits, including adjustment of status pursuant to the Cuban Adjustment Act [...], for which they may be eligible, and to work and contribute to the United States." Department of Homeland Security, Federal Register, January 9, 2023⁴

How It Worked

The notice for Cuba, titled "Implementation of a Parole Process for Cubans," was published in the Federal Register on January 9, 2023 (88 Fed. Reg. 1266), and was modeled on two earlier processes: Uniting for Ukraine, for Ukrainians, and the one opened for Venezuelans in October 2022⁴. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) began applying it on January 6⁶.

The first step was taken not by the migrant but by a supporter living in the United States. The supporter filed Form I-134A, Online Request to be a Supporter and Declaration of Financial Support, online, committing to support the beneficiary during their stay, and USCIS vetted the supporter before confirming them⁴. The process was free: USCIS reminded supporters that they could not charge the beneficiary for filing the form and warned against anyone who asked for money for it or for taking part in the process⁶.

If USCIS confirmed the supporter, the beneficiary received an email to open an online account, confirm their information, attest that they met the requirements and submit a live photo through the CBP One app. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) then decided whether to grant an advance travel authorization, generally valid for 90 days. With it, the beneficiary paid for their own plane ticket to an interior U.S. airport, where a CBP officer decided, case by case, whether to grant parole of up to two years. None of these decisions could be appealed. Once in the country, the beneficiary could apply for work authorization and had to get a tuberculosis test within their first 90 days⁴.

Those excluded included, among others, anyone who had received a removal order from the United States in the previous five years, anyone who irregularly crossed the border of the United States, Mexico or Panama after January 9, 2023, minors traveling without their parents or guardians and Cubans with permanent residence or dual nationality in a third country⁴. A valid passport was also required⁴. The notice stated that the number of travel authorizations under the Cuban process, combined with those under the processes for Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans, "shall not exceed 30,000 each month in the aggregate"⁴, and DHS eliminated the Venezuelan process's own cap of 24,000⁶. The set became known by the initials of the four countries: CHNV.

The notice also explained why. DHS could return almost no one to Cuba, and the Mexican government, with exceptions, refused to take back expelled Cubans. The process, it warned, would continue only as long as Mexico accepted Cubans who crossed irregularly⁴. The White House presented it as a combination of expanded legal pathways and "new consequences" for those who did not use them¹.

A Queue of Sponsors

Demand quickly exceeded the cap. Between October 2022 and June 2023, DHS adjudicated 194,683 requests from the four nationalities and approved 189,942, or 97.5%, according to data the government later submitted to a federal court⁷. Because the I-134A forms filed far exceeded the 30,000 monthly authorizations, USCIS changed its method on May 17, 2023: from then on it reviewed half of the cases each month in order of arrival and the other half chosen at random from all those pending⁶.

The sea was expressly excluded. A notice published on April 28, 2023, established that those interdicted at sea after April 27 could no longer take part in the process for Cubans. DHS justified it by the increase in departures by boat and the expectation of another record year of interdictions⁸.

CBP One and the End of Title 42

On that same January 5, 2023, the White House announced another tool: the CBP One app would let migrants in central and northern Mexico request an appointment to present themselves at a port of entry, instead of going directly to the border to wait¹. The appointment feature launched that month³. Those who arrived with an appointment generally received a notice to appear before an immigration judge and were released with a CBP parole⁹. Through the end of September 2023, nearly 278,000 people had scheduled an appointment¹⁰; by the end of December 2024, more than 936,500. Venezuelans, Cubans and Mexicans were the three nationalities that used it most³.

On May 11, 2023, Title 42 ended, the public health order under which many migrants had been expelled since March 2020 to the last country of transit or to their country of origin¹¹. That same day a joint rule of the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice, Circumvention of Lawful Pathways, took effect; it was published in the Federal Register on May 16 (88 Fed. Reg. 31314)¹². The rule created a rebuttable presumption that anyone entering from Mexico across the southwest border without documents between May 11, 2023, and May 11, 2025, after passing through a third country that was a party to the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees or its 1967 Protocol, was ineligible for asylum. It did not apply, among others, to anyone with a travel authorization under a DHS-approved parole process, to anyone who presented at a port of entry with a prior appointment or to anyone who had sought asylum in a transit country and been denied. The presumption could be rebutted, among other grounds, by a serious medical emergency or an imminent threat to life¹².

Under that system, the path of a Cuban who wanted to reach the United States was split in two. By air, the plane with a sponsor; by land, the CBP One appointment. Outside both lay return or a presumption against them when seeking asylum.

The Numbers

CBP published monthly how many beneficiaries of the process had arrived. For Cubans, the cumulative total evolved this way:

Sources: Congressional Research Service (CRS)¹³¹⁴ and monthly CBP releases¹⁰¹⁵³.

Cubans were one in five beneficiaries. The largest group was Haitians, with 211,040 arrivals at the end of 2024, followed by Venezuelans (117,330) and Nicaraguans (93,070)³. The table also shows that, from August 2024, arrivals of Cubans almost stopped.

CBP's encounter statistics also changed in nature. In fiscal year 2024 (October 2023 to September 2024), CBP recorded 217,615 encounters with Cubans, more than in fiscal year 2023². But they were no longer, for the most part, apprehensions in the desert or at the river. The Border Patrol recorded 13,253 encounters with Cubans between ports of entry at the southwest border, compared with 220,321 in fiscal year 2022. Almost all the others were recorded by CBP's Office of Field Operations (OFO) at ports of entry: 137,742 at those on the southwest border and 65,820 at those not on a land border, such as airports and seaports, most of them (55,440) in the Miami field office²¹¹. CBP counts as "inadmissibles" those who present at a port of entry and cannot be admitted, including people seeking humanitarian protection¹¹, and DHS itself described the process's beneficiaries as "inadmissible" aliens who were authorized to travel¹⁶. Arrivals with a CBP One appointment appear in these tables as encounters: in its releases, CBP calls "irregular" the encounters that do not include those who present with an appointment³. The published data do not show how many of the encounters at airports correspond to humanitarian parole beneficiaries².

Source: CBP Nationwide Encounters dataset, own calculations². The two southwest border columns add up to that border's total (220,908 in 2022, 142,352 in 2023 and 150,995 in 2024), which is the figure given in The Great Exodus.

At sea, the drop was just as sharp: the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) repatriated 749 people to Cuba in fiscal year 2024, compared with 6,618 in 2023¹⁷.

Texas Against the Program

Shortly after the announcement, 21 states led by Texas sued DHS in the federal district court for the Southern District of Texas, in Victoria. They argued that the program exceeded the authority the law gives the government to grant parole, that it should have gone through public comment and that it was arbitrary⁷. Judge Drew Tipton held a bench trial from August 23 to 25, 2023⁷.

On March 8, 2024, he dismissed the suit without ruling on the program's legality. The parties agreed, he wrote, that the number of nationals of those four countries entering the United States had fallen by as much as 44% since the program began; for that reason the states could not show that the program harmed them and lacked standing to sue⁷. The case was dismissed without prejudice, which allowed it to be brought again, and the judge added in a footnote that proving injury in similar cases was "not an insurmountable hurdle"⁷.

Securing the Border

On June 3, 2024, President Joe Biden signed Proclamation 10773, Securing the Border. Starting at 12:01 a.m. on June 5, it suspended and limited entry across the southern border. The suspension would be lifted 14 days after the average of encounters fell below 1,500 a day for seven consecutive days and would be triggered again if it reached 2,500. It did not apply, among others, to lawful permanent residents, unaccompanied children, victims of trafficking or those who presented at a port of entry with a prior appointment¹⁸. An interim rule published on June 7 restricted, for as long as the suspension lasted, asylum for those who crossed the southern border, except in exceptionally compelling circumstances, and tightened the initial credible fear screening at the border¹⁹.

The proclamation referred to the southern border and also exempted those with a visa or "other lawful permission to seek entry or admission into the United States"¹⁸; humanitarian parole beneficiaries arrived by plane at interior airports with a travel authorization⁴.

Pause, Fraud and the Promise Not to Renew

In the summer of 2024 the process stopped. According to the notice with which the DHS of the next administration ended the programs in 2025, they were briefly paused in July 2024 to evaluate their vulnerabilities, in response to "significant gaps in the vetting process" that, the notice says, had been publicly reported. As the source for the pause, the notice cites an August 2, 2024, article in The Washington Times whose headline spoke of "massive fraud"¹⁶. On August 29, DHS announced that, after an internal review, it was again issuing travel authorizations with new controls on sponsors: stricter review of their financial records and criminal histories, more checks to detect fraudulent profiles, methods to identify those filing forms in bulk and a requirement to provide their fingerprints⁶. In the same release, DHS asserted that in July 2024 Border Patrol encounters with nationals of the four countries between ports of entry had fallen 98% from December 2022⁶.

On October 4, 2024, the government announced that there would be no new period of parole (re-parole) when the initial two years ended. It told beneficiaries: "if you have not sought a lawful status or period of authorized stay, you will need to leave the United States before your authorized parole period expires, or you may be placed in removal proceedings after your period of parole expires"¹⁶. For Cubans, that left the path DHS had mentioned from the start: applying for residence under the Cuban Adjustment Act after one year in the country⁴.

Through January 19, 2025

In its last full monthly update before the change of administration, published on January 14, 2025, CBP reported that DHS was still processing new travel authorizations. Since the start of the process, 110,970 Cubans had been authorized to travel and 110,240 had arrived and received parole; among the four nationalities, arrivals totaled about 531,690. CBP credited the process with a 91% drop in encounters with nationals of those countries between ports of entry³.

Humanitarian parole changed the way people arrived more than the volume of arrivals. Between fiscal years 2022 and 2024, CBP recorded an average of 214,170 encounters a year with Cubans, five times more than in fiscal year 2021¹⁴. What happened to the program, to its beneficiaries and to the Cuban Adjustment Act from January 20, 2025, is told in The Present Day (2025-2026). The legal analysis of parole and of the difference from Form I-220A is in Parole and I-220A.

Notes and sources

1. The White House, "Fact Sheet: Biden-Harris Administration Announces New Border Enforcement Actions," January 5, 2023 (archived Biden administration site). https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/01/05/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-announces-new-border-enforcement-actions/ back back back

2. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, datasets "FY21 - FY24 Nationwide Encounters by Area of Responsibility" (CSV published in October 2024) and "FY22 - FY25 Nationwide Encounters by Area of Responsibility" (CSV published in November 2025), filtered by nationality "CUBA"; own calculations, accessed November 11, 2026 (copies downloaded from web.archive.org because cbp.gov blocks automated downloads). https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/2024-10/nationwide-encounters-fy21-fy24-aor.csv and https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/2025-11/nationwide-encounters-fy22-fy25-aor.csv back back back back back

3. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, "CBP Releases December 2024 Monthly Update," January 14, 2025. https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/national-media-release/cbp-releases-december-2024-monthly-update back back back back back back back

4. Department of Homeland Security, "Implementation of a Parole Process for Cubans," 88 Fed. Reg. 1266-1279 (January 9, 2023); the quotation, on p. 1268; requirements and steps, pp. 1275-1277. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2023-01-09/pdf/2023-00252.pdf back back back back back back back back back back back

5. Department of Homeland Security, "Implementation of Changes to the Cuban Family Reunification Parole Process," 88 Fed. Reg. 54639 (August 11, 2023), p. 54640, where DHS explains that Cubans who enter with CFRP parole may apply for adjustment under the Cuban Adjustment Act one year after arrival. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2023-08-11/pdf/2023-17376.pdf back

6. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, "Frequently Asked Questions About the Processes for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans," last updated October 4, 2024 (web.archive.org copy of January 4, 2025). https://web.archive.org/web/20250104043158/https://www.uscis.gov/humanitarian/frequently-asked-questions-about-the-processes-for-cubans-haitians-nicaraguans-and-venezuelans back back back back back back

7. Texas v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, No. 6:23-cv-00007, Memorandum Opinion and Order (S.D. Tex. March 8, 2024), Judge Drew B. Tipton. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-txsd-6_23-cv-00007/pdf/USCOURTS-txsd-6_23-cv-00007-5.pdf back back back back back

8. Department of Homeland Security, "Implementation of a Change to the Parole Process for Cubans," 88 Fed. Reg. 26329 (April 28, 2023). https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2023-04-28/pdf/2023-09013.pdf back

9. Congressional Research Service, "Immigration Parole," R46570, updated September 18, 2025, p. 7. https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/R/PDF/R46570/R46570.3.pdf back

10. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, "CBP Releases September 2023 Monthly Update," October 21, 2023. https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/national-media-release/cbp-releases-september-2023-monthly-update back back

11. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, "Nationwide Encounters," definitions of encounters, inadmissibles and Title 42 expulsions, accessed November 11, 2026. https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/nationwide-encounters back back back

12. Department of Homeland Security and Executive Office for Immigration Review, "Circumvention of Lawful Pathways," 88 Fed. Reg. 31314 (May 16, 2023), in effect since May 11, 2023; text of the new 8 C.F.R. § 208.33 on p. 31450. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2023-05-16/pdf/2023-10146.pdf back back

13. Congressional Research Service, "Cuba: U.S. Policy Overview," IF10045, updated August 29, 2023. https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IF/PDF/IF10045/IF10045.102.pdf back

14. Congressional Research Service, "Cuba: U.S. Policy Overview," IF10045, updated January 8, 2025. https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IF/PDF/IF10045/IF10045.104.pdf back back

15. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, "CBP Releases September 2024 Monthly Update," October 22, 2024. https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/national-media-release/cbp-releases-september-2024-monthly-update back

16. Department of Homeland Security, "Termination of Parole Processes for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans," 90 Fed. Reg. 13611 (March 25, 2025), pp. 13612, 13614 and 13616-13617; footnote 56 cites Stephen Dinan, "'Parole' program put on hold amid massive fraud," The Washington Times, August 2, 2024. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2025-03-25/pdf/2025-05128.pdf back back back

17. U.S. Coast Guard, "Coast Guard repatriates 5 aliens to Cuba," May 20, 2025. https://www.news.uscg.mil/Press-Releases/Article/4192770/coast-guard-repatriates-5-aliens-to-cuba/ back

18. Proclamation 10773, "Securing the Border," 89 Fed. Reg. 48487 (June 7, 2024), signed June 3, 2024. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2024-06-07/pdf/2024-12647.pdf back back

19. Department of Homeland Security and Executive Office for Immigration Review, "Securing the Border," interim final rule, 89 Fed. Reg. 48710 (June 7, 2024), in effect since June 5, 2024. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2024-06-07/pdf/2024-12435.pdf back