The Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela program will resume immediately after being paused in July due to an audit by the DHS Office of Inspector General that found migrant applicants had used repetitive and false information to secure admission into the country despite the Biden administration’s claims that all approved applicants were screened and vetted.

“As part of an internal review of the Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela parole processes, DHS has incorporated additional vetting of U.S.-based supporters to strengthen the integrity of the processes,” the DHS said in a statement Thursday afternoon.

“With these updated procedures in place, DHS is resuming the issuance of new Advance Travel Authorizations and will closely monitor how this new process is operating moving forward,” the DHS said.

The Citizenship and Immigration Services’s Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate, as well as Customs and Border Protection’s National Targeting Center, have worked together over the past two months to implement tougher vetting protocols.

The DHS suspended the CHNV program following a report by the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which found that an internal government audit documented a large number of fraudulent applications as the U.S. admitted nearly half a million migrants from four countries.

The enhanced vetting now includes “further scrutiny” of supporters’ financial records and criminal backgrounds and looks at potential fraudulent supporter profiles since applicants must have someone in the U.S. willing to sponsor them. It also includes new review methods to detect “serial filing trends.”

The DHS said those who were found to have committed fraud prior to July would be referred to law enforcement for possible prosecution but did not state if anyone had been referred for prosecution or how such rampant fraud was allowed to unfold in the first place.

“Out of an abundance of caution, 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,” a DHS spokesperson told the Washington Examiner earlier this month.

The report by FAIR, a nonprofit group that calls for restricting immigration levels, said the Social Security numbers of deceased sponsors in the U.S. and fake phone numbers were used on applications.

Address fraud was also found to be widespread. Roughly 100 street addresses were listed on 19,000 applications and were often traced back to buildings that included a warehouse or storage unit.

In another example, 100 IP addresses used to access the internet, in other words, the connection from a particular phone, tablet, or computer, were used to apply in more than 51,133 instances.

The revelation came after Republicans, including House Homeland Security Chairman Mark Green (R-TN), had warned since the program’s inception 19 months ago that the process circumvented the legal immigration process by mass-paroling hundreds of thousands of people rather than admitting them on a discretionary basis.

“This is exactly what happens when you create an unlawful mass-parole program in order to spare your administration the political embarrassment and bad optics of overrun borders,” Green said in a statement. “The Biden-Harris administration should terminate the CHNV program immediately.”

As of late June, more than 494,000 immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela have been admitted, roughly 30,000 per month.

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The CHNV program was created by the Biden administration and fully implemented in January 2023 for migrants from the four countries to request an interview while outside the U.S. to be admitted.

The DHS vowed that the country’s immigrants who had a sponsor in the U.S. could pass “robust security vetting,” and compensation for their commercial flight into the country would be approved.