The Department of Homeland Security has temporarily shut down its most prominent “parole” program that allows unauthorized migrants to skip the border and fly directly to U.S. airports after revelations of massive fraud.

The department revealed the shutdown after a watchdog group, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, released portions of an internal government report showing the extent of the fraud, including the use of dead people’s Social Security numbers and the same addresses used on thousands of applications.

“DHS has temporarily paused the issuance of advanced travel authorizations for new beneficiaries while it undertakes a review of supporter applications. DHS will restart application processing as quickly as possible, with appropriate safeguards,” the department said in a statement Friday.

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The program applies to people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. It offers them “parole” into the United States even though they no legal visa to enter, as long as they schedule their arrival in advance and get an affidavit from some entity in the U.S. promising to support them.

Those affidavits are full of fraud, according to FAIR.

The same 100 IP addresses were used on more than 51,000 applications. One address in Tijuana, Mexico, was used 1,328 times.

Looking at individual sponsors, some 3,200 names were responsible for more than 100,000 applications. That works out to each of those people sponsoring more than 30 migrants each.

Of the most common sponsors, 24 of them used a Social Security number belonging to a dead person.

FAIR called the bungles “astounding.”

The program, known in the government by the acronym CHNV, is one of several paroles established by the Biden administration. They are acting as a presidentially fabricated immigration system, working around the limits set by Congress.

Other programs include one for Afghans, one for Ukrainians and one for migrants who schedule their arrival at the border ahead of time. President Biden has also announced a new, slightly different type of parole to allow immigrants already in the U.S. illegally to avoid deportation if they have been here for at least 10 years and are married to a U.S. citizen.

The Department of Homeland Security has justified the external parole programs as a way to ease the chaos at the border.

Republicans on Capitol Hill have long suspected the programs were inviting fraud, pointing to the high rate of approvals of applications within CHNV and the border program, known as CBP One App.

There’s also been anecdotal evidence of malfeasance.

In some high-profile cases of people who came through the CHNV program, they were found to be living in government-run shelters, which experts said would seem to violate the point of having a sponsor.

One of those is a Haitian man who has been charged with raping a disabled 15-year-old girl at the shelter in Rockland, Massachusetts.

CHNV accepts roughly 1,000 arrivals a day.

From the time CHNV started in October 2022, when it was confined to Venezuelans, to this past March, nearly 500,000 people won parole through the program.

Responsibility for CHNV is split between two DHS agencies. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services was charged with approving the financial affidavits while Customs and Border Protection is supposed to vet the migrants themselves.

The financial sponsorship form can be filled out online.

It asks potential sponsors questions about their current sources of income and assets. The form prods sponsors to describe the resources they plan to use to help house and settle the migrants they are vouching for.

The Washington Times reported earlier this year that smugglers were selling financial support affidavits for $5,000 each.

The administration said paying for sponsorships was “not encouraged” but did not say it was against the rules.

USCIS did tell The Times, though, that it was able to screen out bad applications.

“The agency carefully vets every prospective supporter through a series of fraud- and security-based screening measures before confirming a properly submitted [financial support form],” the agency said in March.

Experts say that fraud is a growing problem in the U.S. immigration system.

Marriage visas, asylum petitions and victim visas have been targets of fraud in recent years. Those operations sell bogus access to the U.S. for tens of thousands of dollars.