The Biden-Harris administration is pausing a scheme that allows up to 30,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans per month — none of whom have any legal right to be admitted — to fly into the United States with access to work authorization, known as “CHNV Parole.”

Turns out the program was rife with fraud.

But that’s no surprise, because CHNV was created with fraud in mind — and the first marks in this con were American voters.

Congress never authorized this massive parole, and President Biden’s legal right to implement it is questionable.

Moreover, it was designed not to limit illegal immigration, but to hide the true extent of the border crisis.

Customs and Border Protection describes both aliens denied admission at the border and those apprehended entering illegally as “encounters.” The law treats them exactly the same, and mandates they all be removed unless they are eligible for some immigration benefit.

But because CHNV migrants fly directly to this country, they don’t show up in the Border Patrol’s monthly Southwest border encounter totals — the metric the media usually rely on when talking about illegal migration.

So 360,000 people enter the country per year — and probably more — without being added to the millions being encountered at the border.

That doesn’t mean CHNV parolees have any more legal right to be admitted than apprehended migrants do, or that they aren’t imposing costs on American communities.

Cities like New York haven’t been dealing with migrant crises in the past three years solely because Border Patrol agents have apprehended nearly 7 million illegal entrants at the Southwest border since February 2021.

Instead, those municipal emergencies stem from the administration’s policy of releasing nearly every encountered migrant and allowing them to remain here indefinitely.

Understand: There were border surges under both the Obama and the Trump administrations, but they weren’t allowed to fester. Each recognized the problem and ramped up deterrence.

This administration, however, has largely refused to deter would-be migrants from coming here illegally.

So in lieu of deterring migrants from coming illegally, the administration is buying them off and hiding the transaction using schemes like CHNV parole.

The White House calls this program a “legal pathway to the United States,” but DHS’s own statistics prove otherwise.

CHNV beneficiaries are inadmissible because they lack proper admission documents, even if DHS paroles them.

As such, each is a port “encounter” — a figure that jumped from fewer than 76,000 in FY 2021 to nearly 460,000 in just the first nine months of FY 2024 alone as these administration schemes have proliferated.

Regardless of whether they’re apprehended and released or stopped at the ports and paroled, all still need food, housing, medical care and services.

CHNV is being paused because thousands of sponsors who promised support were fraudulent.

US taxpayers will be left picking up the difference, but it won’t be the first time they’ve been rolled by the Biden-Harris administration.

The final insult to this injury? After uncovering massive fraud, a Department of Homeland Security spokesman said, “DHS will restart application processing as quickly as possible, with appropriate safeguards.”

As quickly as possible. Why? Why is the Biden-Harris administration so desperate to let in hundreds of thousands of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans no matter the cost?

Andrew Arthur is the fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies.