Immigrants are one thing, but opening the floodgates to 20 million non-citizens by abusing an asylum law meant to grant relief to tens or hundreds was a huge problem.
'Annual reports of immigration statistics for FY1995 through FY2003 published by the former
INS and then DHS contained “Parolee” sections with data on parole grants.88 DHS’s 2003
Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, the last to include such data, contained annual data for
FY1998 through FY2003 on several categories of parolees.89 During this six-year period, the
annual total number of persons paroled into the United States ranged from about 235,000 to about
300,000, with port-of-entry parolees accounting for more than half of each annual total.90
Only limited data on DHS’s use of parole since then are publicly available. Among the available
data are statistics covering FY2022 and FY2023 that were published by DHS in response to
congressional mandates.91 The DHS reports for FY202292 and FY202393 included quarterly data
on parole grants by CBP, the DHS component responsible for determining whether or not to grant
parole in the majority of cases. The FY2023 reports also included parole grant data for ICE and USCIS as well as data on parole requests received and approved by ICE and USCIS. As DHS
explained in its FY2023 report for the fourth quarter with respect to ICE and USCIS parole data,
requests, approvals, and grants each represent a “stage in the parole process,” with requests being
“the number of applications and petitions for parole submitted,” approvals being “the number of
parole requests authorized,” and grants being “the number of paroles given.”94
The parole grant data in the FY2022 and FY2023 DHS reports reflect numbers of grants, not
unique individuals. For FY2022, DHS reported 795,561 parole grants by CBP (417,326 by OFO
and 378,235 by USBP).95 For FY2023, DHS reported 1,244,348 parole grants by CBP (940,348
by OFO and 304,000 by USBP) as well as 85,608 parole grants by ICE and 10,046 parole grants
by USCIS.
96 For both years, the quarterly OFO data were reported by what DHS termed “parole
classes of admission.”
97
In addition, from October 2022 to November 2024, DHS’s Office of Homeland Security Statistics
(OHSS) published monthly tables on CHNV parole. It reported a total of 532,110 parole grants
during the October 2022-November 2024 period.98'