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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. For all the controversy around immigration in the election campaign, little noticed has been the ending of legal status by President Biden. He made the announcement last Friday, the ending of a certain legal status for a category of migrants from four countries. Haitians, obviously, very much in the news for the smear by Trump and Vance. Also Cubans, Venezuelans, and Nicaraguans, who Biden had given temporary legal status to under a system known as parole. That's a weird word for it because it has nothing to do with, you know, like having committed any crimes, the context in which we usually use the word parole. Although this program specifically granted legal status to many thousands of migrants, it was also intended to cut down on illegal border crossings, and reportedly that part of the program has largely worked. Let's try to understand what Biden gave and why he's taking it away.

We'll invite calls from anyone who has had this legal status or knows anyone who has from Haiti, Venezuela, Cuba, or Nicaragua. 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692. Our guest for this is Washington Post immigration reporter Maria Sacchetti. Her article is called, "Biden administration won't renew parole for immigrants from four countries." Maria, thanks for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Maria Sacchetti: Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Can we start with a definition? What is this parole program? A lot of our listeners probably never even heard of it.

Maria Sacchetti: Right. Actually, I'm so glad you're doing this, Brian, because there's so much confusion about what this is and what this isn't. Parole is a presidential [sound cut] [inaudible 00:01:55], really, and used to be used a bit more sparingly. [sound cut] this was an emergency, but what parole does is give people power to admit immigrants such as Haitians or Venezuelans from outside of the country. If there's a significant humanitarian need, and emergency, these folks would ordinarily not have any other ability to enter the country. They don't have visas. They don't have relatives sponsoring them. You need permission to enter, but parole lets the executive branch wave them through, and then once they're on US soil, they can apply to stay legally. It's a way of getting into the country. From the beginning, the Biden administration said, look, you can stay two years, and you have to apply for another way to stay here permanently or temporarily, and if you don't get that, then you have to leave. That was the deal from the beginning.

Brian Lehrer: I just want to acknowledge for our listeners that your phone was dropping out a little bit during that first answer. It's not your radios, people. If that continues to be a problem, we'll try to hook you up another way, but we'll continue this way for now and see if it smooths out. Is this the same as what's called temporary protected status, which gets more press, or is that something else?

Maria Sacchetti: No. One easy way to think of it is parole in this case is for people who are outside of the United States. Temporary protected status is only for people who are in the country already. Most of those folks are out of status, but it could be students who have visas that are about to expire, things like that, but it's just too dangerous for them to go home, so they need to stay temporarily.

Brian Lehrer: When and why did Biden first apply parole to certain people from these four countries, Haiti, Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua? It was after the surge of asylum seekers began, and so what was the context there?

Maria Sacchetti: Well, President Biden was trying to lessen unauthorized border crossings, which has been a huge political issue for him and humanitarian issue for him during his term. Folks from these four countries are difficult for the US government to deport. Some come from authoritarian regimes, and you can't deport somebody to another country if the country won't accept your charter flight. Haiti, as everyone knows, has been engulfed in terrible political violence and other violence, natural disasters. The President was assassinated. There's been a lot of concern, too, about sending folks there. Most of the folks have a path to legal residency. The one group that could be vulnerable to this ending of parole are Nicaraguans [sound cut].

Brian Lehrer: Are Nicaraguans?

Maria Sacchetti: Right. There are about 100,000 Nicaraguans who were granted parole. They would start to lose that next year. Venezuelans started getting parole in 2022, Nicaraguans and Cubans and Haitians in 2023. Nicaraguans had other options. They could be applying for asylum in the immigration system, which allows them to stay for years while they await a decision, and then they could potentially appeal it.

Brian Lehrer: If we accept that this is generally a good thing, it allows people who are qualified to apply for legal status in the United States from their home countries, then they come here without crossing illegally. If that has been a success in terms of also reducing the number of people who are crossing the border illegally, why did Biden announce a week ago that he's ending the program for these four countries?

Maria Sacchetti: There's what the administration says and then there's criticism of that. Some critics of the Biden administration who say he should not have had this program are saying, he did this in a very close race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, where immigration is a central issue, that he did this to make the administration look tough on immigration, that they're not providing these statuses. It really isn't going to have a big impact.

At least, in the broad strokes of the immigration system, people have options to stay once they're on US soil. They're difficult to deport. Ending parole doesn't mean they're ending their work permits. Some people who didn't apply for asylum or who didn't apply for temporary protected status or some other benefit could be at risk, but they knew that from the beginning.

Brian Lehrer: Guillermo in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hello, Guillermo.

Guillermo: Hey, Brian, how are you? Thanks for taking my call. No, that was kind of be my question. Well, one serious comment, I think that they wouldn't be doing this, in my opinion, I'm Venezuelan-American, if Florida was not such a swing state. I think that doing this right before the election shows the Venezuelans don't really matter politically in the US yet. Then my question was, if they cannot be deported, what's the work permit? I guess your guests already answered this because we're going to have a lot of Venezuelans who are going to be in a political limbo because they're not going to be able to be sent back. Third countries don't want to take them so that was a little bit more. I wanted to hear more about the details of what happens to those folks that have no longer parole but also are not being deported.

Brian Lehrer: We'll ask our guests that in a minute. Let me ask you one quick follow-up question, Guillermo. As a Venezuelan-American, I realize you can only speak for yourself, not the entire community, but does it surprise you at all that the Republicans are so much against this immigration of Venezuelans who are fleeing the leftist Maduro dictatorship? Historically, Republicans were fairly welcoming to people from Cuba, for example, and a lot of those people became Republicans in past generations. A big Republican voting bloc in the Miami area, Cubans who fled Castro. The same could be said, potentially, of people fleeing Maduro from Venezuela. What's your take on why Republicans are so against this?

Guillermo: My take is that they've done a political calculation, and they know that we do not have enough voting power yet. I think that eventually we'll have serious voting power in a decade from now once we start having second generation and people getting naturalized. I think that they're using us, and I've said this before, as a punching bag, because they know that we cannot punch back. That's my take. I think that they see more gains from being anti-immigration and being welcoming to people that are fleeing a leftist socialist debacle like Venezuela.

Brian Lehrer: Guillermo, thank you very much. Please call us again. Maria, just to expand that thought, and then I'll ask you to answer Guillermo's specific question about what happens to some of the people who are going to lose this status. Three out of the four countries, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, again, Cuba is on this list. Again, people fleeing countries run by very controversial leftist leaders. One might have thought Republicans would be more welcome to them as potential future Republican voters, but you heard Guillermo's analysis. Do you have one?

Maria Sacchetti: It's difficult to say. I think, in some ways, the better question is for the immigrants themselves. Cubans, for example, have the most straightforward path of this group. Under the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, they can apply for green cards, which is extraordinary. That's a path to citizenship. You talk to folks, and they're grateful that the Biden administration let them into the country, but there are other issues that they feel strongly about, like abortion or other kinds of political issues that will perhaps make them identify more with the Republican Party. These are complex questions.

Brian Lehrer: Did you get Guillermo's question to you?

Maria Sacchetti: Oh, sorry. I did not know.

Brian Lehrer: He wants to know what's going to happen to some of the people who lose their status but maybe still have work authorization. I hope I'm paraphrasing this correctly, who might seem to be in limbo.

Maria Sacchetti: What's confusing about this program is parole. Let them come in for two years and give them the ability to get work permits, but then once they were here, the Biden administration said hundreds of thousands of those folks can also apply for temporary protected status, or asylum, which can make you put you on a path to citizenship so you can stay forever.

They had a lot of options, and people who got married can become citizens. There are a lot of things going on. What I'm hearing is that when Venezuelans hit the two-year mark, most of them are already covered by temporary protected status. If you lose your work permit, I think the question is, what happened with your temporary protected status? Did you not apply for it or did you not apply for asylum?

Brian Lehrer: In fact, in your Washington Post article, you wrote, "An official familiar with the program said it is likely that only a small number of people are at imminent risk of losing their parole after two years to be referred to deportation proceedings." Then the next line says, "The program will continue to admit up to 30,000 new applicants each month," citing officials, so 30,000 a month, is that from each of the four countries new additional folks going forward? That's a lot of people, 120,000 people a month. That's close to a million in a half a year.

Maria Sacchetti: No, no, it's 30,000 from the four groups-

Brian Lehrer: Combined.

Maria Sacchetti: -but it's 60,000 a year. Yes, it's a lot of people. This Congressional Budget Office has said that that influx has actually been beneficial to the economy as we in the United States recovered from COVID. There's a lot of criticism of that because these are folks who otherwise would have no legal footing to come to this country. The Congressional Budget Office, which is supposed to be bipartisan and just serve Congress, the influx is something the United States really needed to rebound from the pandemic.

Brian Lehrer: 212-433-WNYC. I also am curious if we're talking about some of the people, the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, and particularly who, just to be journalistically honest about it, Donald Trump and JD Vance have been lying about by saying they're here illegally, so many of them are here legally. Are they largely in Springfield here under this program or some other status?

Maria Sacchetti: The fact is, Brian, I'm so glad you asked that, because nobody really knows. Unless you do a census, immigration records are secret. One really overlooked fact in this entire debate is the vast majority of Haitians are US citizens. They've been coming to the United States for decades. Most live in Florida, Massachusetts, New York. They're doctors, lawyers, scholars. The Trump campaign has focused on some folks who may or may not be new arrivals.

The sourcing is focusing on people who are new arrivals, but I haven't seen any broad data to show whether they are or they aren't. Some certainly are, and they may have come in through the southern border and are facing deportation proceedings, or they may have come in through this parole program, which in the past couple of years, past year or so has been much more likely. The number of Haitians arriving at the southern border has plunged. They started this parole program, and folks are coming in legally through airports.

Brian Lehrer: One listener writes in a text message, "You're being very generous in thinking that Americans understand the difference between different types of immigration programs." Actually, no, I say to that listener. We don't think they, by and large, understand the difference between the different immigration programs and immigration status categories, which is exactly why we're doing this show, to try to explain some of those differences.

Another listener text, "What about Hondurans fleeing the government that overthrew an elected president with American support? Whether we want to ding the Americans on that in this question or not, the four countries we're talking about, those aren't the only ones that have been sending a lot of asylum seekers recently because of conditions there. Honduras, obviously, another big one. Also, Guatemala.

Maria Sacchetti: Well, and that's a great point. Just looking at temporary protected status, you have to be in this country to apply for it. Take Honduras. Some Hondurans have temporary protected status, but to be eligible for it, they had to abandon the country by December 1998, which is a really long time ago. There's maybe 55,000 of them who have it. Anyone who arrived afterward is ineligible.

Venezuelans, though, they're covered if they arrived, if they were here by July 31, 2023. You can see, they're covered well into 2025, and anyone who arrived through parole after that date, their parole won't expire for a long time. The real question is whether immigrants once they're here, get the help and guidance they need to understand their options, and that has been an issue. A lot of people don't. That's why programs like this are valuable to explain to everyone what the different programs are. It can be very confusing.

Brian Lehrer: We leave it there explaining and discussing and taking your calls and texts about President Biden ending for people who've been on it, the so called parole program allowing legal entry into the country for thousands of Nicaraguans, Haitians, Venezuelans, and Cubans who have been here, though continuing to open it up to some others from those countries. We thank Maria Sacchetti, immigration reporter from The Washington Post. Thanks a lot, Maria.

Maria Sacchetti: Thank you.

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