Reuters

The newspaper La Jornada
Friday, August 30, 2024, p. 30

Washington. The U.S. government will resume an updated version of a program to sponsor migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela that it suspended earlier this summer over fears of fraud, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said in a statement yesterday.

With these updated procedures, DHS is resuming issuance of new advance travel authorizations and will closely monitor how this new process works going forward.

The program is part of an effort by Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration to increase legal avenues of entry into the United States and thereby discourage illegal border crossings with Mexico, but has been criticized by Republicans as overly permissive.

The program allows up to 30,000 people a month to enter the United States from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela if they have sponsors and meet other conditions.

Sponsors must be legal residents of the United States and have sufficient financial resources to support the person they sponsor throughout their stay.

The revised investigative measures include increased scrutiny of sponsors’ financial records and criminal histories, research to identify profiles of fraudulent sponsors, and strengthened review methods to identify serial filing trends, the department said yesterday.

He added that sponsors will now also be required to be fingerprinted.

As of June 30, 495,000 people from those four countries had entered the United States under the program, which began for Venezuelans in 2022 and for other nationalities in 2023, DHS statistics show.

Migration across the U.S.-Mexico border is a key issue in the Nov. 5 U.S. election, in which Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris faces Republican former President Donald Trump.

That being the case, Harris promised consequences for migrants entering the United States illegally if he wins the election, during an interview on CNN. I think there should be consequences. We have laws that must be followed and enforced, that address and deal with the problem.said.