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As soon as President Biden took office in January 2021, his administration was overwhelmed by a crisis it admittedly had not done enough to prepare for: unprecedented numbers of migrants coming over the southern border.
But the people pouring in now were not from the usual source countries, like Honduras. Most were fleeing Venezuela — home to the worst humanitarian disaster in modern South American history and to one the continent’s most brutal authoritarian regimes. These Venezuelans were making an especially dangerous trek: enroute to the U.S., most passed through the often deadly Darién Gap jungle between Colombia and Panama.
After almost two years of hand-wringing — and watching the immigration issue drag down Biden’s approval ratings — the administration came up with a way to alleviate the border crush: a humanitarian parole program, modeled on a similar project for Ukrainian refugees, to let desperate would-be migrants like Venezuelans come to temporarily live and work in the U.S. for two years.
They’d need a sponsor here to support them — and, most importantly, they’d need to stay at home to apply for admission and away from the U.S. border. That was the carrot; the stick involved deporting migrants who did keep coming to the border via dangerous zones like the Darién.
A year ago this week, on October 18, 2022, Venezuelans were invited to sign up as a pilot project. Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans — cohorts also escaping severe humanitarian crises and dictatorships — would be included two months later.
After months of reporting, WLRN has found that the program has been hampered by bureaucratic problems that undermine its success: Demand is higher than the Biden administration had anticipated. It's difficult if not impossible for some migrants to find sponsors and get passports. Work permits are taking months to secure.
In April, half a year after submitting an application, Meliana Burguera got approval to move to South Florida with her two small children. Her husband is still in Venezuela.
“The program is the best hope we’ve had in years," she told WLRN in Spanish, "but the waiting hurts."
Political analysts argue the program better work — and it better survive a federal court challenge — or it could prove to be a "disaster" for President Biden's border policy. In our series Waiting for America, we spend time with the people caught in the middle of it all.
Waiting for America will be published all next week on the radio and on wlrn.org. Digital stories will appear in English and Spanish, with some stories in Haitian Creole, as well.
The series will culminate next Friday in a live hourlong conversation on the South Florida Roundup.
The stakes are high for migrants desperate to escape Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela — and for President Biden's re-election campaign. In the WLRN News series Waiting for America, we take a deep look at a humanitarian parole program for people from crisis-torn countries in Latin America and the Caribbean — a key Biden administration immigration policy — one year later.
