They Thought They Came to the U.S. Legally. Now They’re at Risk for Deportation.

Over the last two years, several hundred thousand immigrants came to the U.S. under a controversial Biden administration program offering them a legal path into the country. Now President Trump is targeting them for deportation.

At the center of their dilemma is a program former President Joe Biden established at the height of the crisis at the southern border. Migrants from some of Latin America’s most troubled countries, including Venezuela and Nicaragua, were coming in such large numbers that, he reasoned, they would take up an offer to migrate legally if one existed.

So he set one up. Under the program, which is known as “humanitarian parole” after the provision of immigration law it uses, immigrants would be issued a permit to come and work legally for two years if they submitted their personal information and found an American to financially sponsor them. Many applied for asylum or other immigration programs after arriving so they could stay longer.

Republicans swiftly accused the Biden administration of creating a backdoor method to allow immigrants into the country who weren’t eligible to come—essentially hiding the extent of the border crisis, because their entries wouldn’t be recorded as illegal.

“Joe Biden didn’t just open our borders. He flew illegal aliens over them to overwhelm our schools, hospitals and communities,” Trump said of the program during a joint address to Congress earlier this month.

Trump campaigned against the program and closed it to new applicants as soon as he took office.

But his administration has taken a step further, stripping the immigrants who used the program of their status and targeting them for deportation. “President Trump was given a resounding mandate to put Americans and America First. His first and only priority is the well-being of American citizens,” said Kush Desai, a White House spokesman.

Now, these immigrants’ previous cooperation with the government has put them at risk: The details they shared with authorities to enter the U.S. are now being used to identify them as potential targets for deportation, as the administration seeks to accelerate its crackdown.

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The original idea for the program came in a desperate bid after a border incident following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In the month after the outbreak of the war, 20,000 Ukrainians flew to Mexico and approached legal border crossings on foot to ask for asylum.

To stop the spectacle, Biden administration officials created a program they called “Uniting for Ukraine.” It barred Ukrainians from asking for asylum at the land border while giving them the option to move to the U.S. if they could find a private sponsor to take them in.

Several months after it started, officials opened the same program first to Venezuelans, and later to citizens of Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua. Roughly 35,000 Nicaraguans attempted to enter the U.S. illegally in December 2022, a month before the program was expanded to them. That fell to about 8,000 the following December.

In all, some 530,000 people from the four Latin American countries, along with more than 200,000 Ukrainians, have moved to the U.S. through the program, according to data compiled by the Migration Policy Institute.

The administration has focused on Latin American immigrants but is considering cutting off the legal status for Ukrainians, too, and has already paused processing of their asylum and other applications.

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