From May 2022 through September 2024, USCIS granted parole to approximately 774,000 individuals under these initiatives. However, the programs received thousands of fraudulent applications, exposing systemic weaknesses in fraud detection and internal controls.
The GAO identified several critical issues:
Applicants submitted irrelevant or absurd evidence, including stock landscape photos and images of the U.S. flag, as supporting documentation.
The application systems lacked automated mechanisms to flag potential fraud, relying heavily on manual reviews that proved insufficient.
USCIS acknowledged gaps in vetting processes, which prioritized rapid processing over robust verification.
Critics, including immigration experts, described the design flaws as either malfeasant or inexcusably incompetent, noting that the scale of parole usage under the Biden administration far exceeded prior administrations' practices.
A USCIS spokesman defended the policies, stating they prioritized processing while maintaining security checks, but conceded the findings confirmed risks to public safety from fraudsters and criminals. The GAO recommended that USCIS develop comprehensive internal control plans to assess and mitigate fraud risks whenever launching new programs or modifying existing ones, including enhanced automation for detecting anomalies.
The report underscores ongoing challenges in balancing humanitarian relief with immigration system integrity, particularly amid record border encounters. It reveals how policy innovations intended to manage migration flows inadvertently created exploitable loopholes, allowing fraudulent claims to proliferate.
While parole grants provided temporary legal status and work authorization to hundreds of thousands, the influx of bogus applications eroded program credibility and strained resources.
This GAO assessment, released in late 2025, adds to longstanding congressional oversight of immigration benefit fraud, echoing prior reports on vulnerabilities in application processing and verification.
Editorial comments expressed in this column are the sole opinion of the writer.
