A federal court in Massachusetts delivered a sharp rebuke to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown this week, halting efforts to mass-revoke the legal status of thousands of migrants paroled into the U.S. under the Biden-era CHNV (Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela) humanitarian parole programs. But behind the legal victory for immigration advocates lies an inconvenient truth: the CHNV program is riddled with fraud—on a scale that should concern every American, regardless of political stripe.
The Department of Homeland Security under President Trump had moved swiftly to terminate the CHNV parole programs on March 25, 2025, just weeks after returning to office. DHS issued a blanket revocation of parole status for tens of thousands of migrants without individualized review, ignoring due process protections clearly outlined in federal law.
The court stepped in on April 14, issuing a nationwide class-action injunction—carefully worded to avoid that exact phrase—blocking the administration from enforcing the policy. The judge ruled DHS had likely acted unlawfully, emphasizing that immigration parole must be reviewed case-by-case, not canceled en masse.
The court didn’t just stop deportations. It also:
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Barred DHS from revoking work permits tied to the CHNV status.
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Prohibited the government from removing CHNV parolees under the March 25 directive.
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Preserved the legal pathway for affected individuals who had begun jobs, school, or asylum processes based on their parole.
In effect, the court told the Trump administration: you can’t shortcut the law, even for speed.
Yet buried beneath the court’s ruling is a disturbing report that should sound alarm bells across the political spectrum.
According to an internal review by DHS’s Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate, the CHNV program has been overrun with fraudulent applications and signs of systemic abuse. The numbers are staggering:
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51,133 applications came from just 100 IP addresses.
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One IP address in Tijuana, Mexico, submitted 1,328 applications.
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Over 10,000 applications used identical responses to screening questions.
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Deceased individuals’ Social Security Numbers were used as sponsors.
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100 physical addresses were reused on over 19,000 forms—including storage units, mobile homes, and warehouses.
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One sponsor phone number appeared on 2,000+ applications.
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2,839 forms listed fake zip codes.
This isn’t a clerical error. It’s industrial-grade fraud, and it strongly suggests that the CHNV program—originally launched as a humanitarian initiative—has been hijacked by criminal enterprises, likely including cartels, to exploit migrants and abuse the U.S. immigration system.
And while the court’s ruling maintains the legality of the process for those already paroled, it does nothing to address the structural vulnerabilities that opened the door to this abuse in the first place.
The Trump administration’s attempt to shut down CHNV in one sweep aligns with its core goal: end discretionary immigration programs that function as de facto open borders. But this ruling illustrates the legal limits of executive action—even in areas like immigration, where presidents traditionally have broad discretion.
BREAKING: A federal judge in Boston has reportedly blocked the Trump administration from revoking the legal status of over half a million migrants who flew into the U.S. via President Biden’s CHNV mass parole program. Biden admin created the program out of thin air using his… https://t.co/PY21f3vLEb
— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) April 15, 2025
However, the fraud findings offer vindication to immigration hawks who long argued that the Biden-era parole policies were not only legally shaky but dangerously naïve. It’s now clear that the program was neither properly secured nor responsibly administered. Migrants were encouraged to apply through systems that were, by any technical standard, wide open to exploitation.
