The Biden/Harris administration has "super-charged" a "Lawful Pathways" program that has helped admit tens of thousands of people from Latin America.
The Safe Mobility Office Initiative, launched in May 2023 and given expanded capacity this spring, has worked to fly tens of thousands of people to the U.S. through the refugee resettlement process, despite those people being of nationalities that have rarely qualified for refugee status, according to a Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) analysis.
According to the report, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) personnel and United Nations have set up offices in Ecuador, Colombia, Costa Rica and Guatemala that have granted refugee status to 21,000 people from seven different Latin American countries in the first year of the program, with half of those having already arrived in the country as of May.
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The refugees are being flown to the U.S. from Haiti, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, Guatemala, Ecuador and Colombia, the report notes, though even greater numbers may have been flown in through June and July after the administration expanded the program to allow for migrants from Honduras and El Salvador.
The expansion of the program comes despite the U.S. traditionally only granting refugee status to individuals who can credibly claim that they cannot return to their home country out of a "well-founded fear" of persecution on the basis of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group, but the CIS analysis argued that many of those coming to the U.S. would more normally be classified as economic migrants.
The report cites a 2024 Mixed Migration Centre survey of program participants that found 90% indicated they wanted to travel to the U.S. for economic opportunities and higher living standards, not to flee potential persecution.
The administration has also raised the allotted slots to admit refugees from Latin America, from less than 5,000 when President Biden took office to 50,000 in 2024.
"In the refugee pathway, we aim to resettle between 35,000 and 50,000 individuals in Fiscal Year 2024, an historic and ambitious goal that would amount to an increase in refugee resettlement from the Western Hemisphere of over 450 percent from last year," Marta Youth, the principal deputy assistant secretary for the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugee and Migration, said in testimony before a congressional committee in March.
The administration has justified the expansion of the program by arguing that many of the migrants would have used dangerous migration corridors before illegally appearing at the U.S. southern border, a justification some say abuses the U.S. refugee program.
"We have a visa process so they can safely go to an embassy and safely apply for a visa and safely fly to the U.S.," Lora Ries, director of the Heritage Foundation's Border Security and Immigration Center, told Fox News Digital. "This is to completely abuse and twist the refugee process. It’s abusive and not lawful."
Ries also argued that the program does not help the source countries of the migration and could be a danger to American citizens, noting that the speed of processing applications raises questions about how well the migrants are vetted.
"If you just set high numbers and then quickly adjudicate, grant, process, and resettle, then they’re not getting fully vetted," Ries said. "It used to take about a year or a year and a half to get through the entire refugee process."
But the CIS analysis indicates that the process for some migrants can be completed in a matter of days, something Ries called "ridiculous."
"That means no vetting is happening," Ries said. "So they have no idea who they’re letting in."
The White House did not immediately respond to a Fox News Digital request for comment.
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