The Biden administration has allowed relatives of Cuba’s prime minister, senior political figures and even a former military colonel who helped shoot down humanitarian airplanes to enter the U.S. under its special “parole” program, according to the Cuban American community.
As senior members of the adversarial regime, the Cubans would have been denied entry if they had tried to come through the usual immigration system, said Emilio Gonzalez, a former Homeland Security Department agency leader. They have been allowed to settle in the U.S. under President Biden’s secondary immigration system, which uses parole to grant iffy legal status to otherwise illegal immigrants.
Cuban Americans have been spotting the newcomers out and about and reporting them to one another.
Among them is Luis Raul Gonzalez-Pardo, a retired Cuban air force colonel who was part of a flight of military jets that pursued a squad of planes from Brothers to the Rescue, the dissident group, over the Florida Straits in 1996.
Two dissident planes were downed, killing four aid workers, though the airplane Mr. Gonzalez-Pardo was pursuing escaped, activists said.
Mr. Gonzalez-Pardo now lives in Jacksonville, Florida, under Mr. Biden’s grant of parole, according to reporting by Periodico Cubano.
“Shameful,” said Mr. Gonzalez, who served as director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in the Bush administration and who pointed out that Cuba is still listed by the U.S. as a state sponsor of terrorism and is run by a communist government.
The parole program, known inside the government as CHNV — for Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, the countries it applies to — allows people who lack a legal visa to enter the U.S. on the say-so of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Parole carries a tentative legal status — permission to enter and a work permit — but is not in itself a legal status. Republicans say Mr. Mayorkas has stretched the idea beyond its breaking point by turning it into a de facto secondary immigration system.
Mr. Mayorkas’ goal was to take pressure off the southern border by giving would-be illegal immigrants a way to reach the U.S. without trying to evade the overwhelmed Border Patrol.
The idea has proved wildly popular.
Nearly 200,000 unauthorized Cubans have been detected trying to enter the U.S. so far in fiscal 2024, which ends Sept. 30, as have more than 280,000 unauthorized Venezuelans, more than 205,000 Haitians and 87,000 Nicaraguans.
In the final months of the Trump administration, those four countries accounted for fewer than 4,000 people each month.
To qualify for CHNV, a migrant must have a U.S.-based sponsor promise to support the newcomer financially.
That process has been plagued with fraud, The Washington Times reported this month. Dead people and gang members were being approved as sponsors.
It is not clear who sponsored Mr. Gonzalez-Pardo.
Some migrants who entered on parole have been implicated in crimes.
Homeland Security insists it tries to vet the migrants who come, but that process has significant problems. Chief among them is the lack of access to criminal records in countries such as Cuba and Venezuela, where adversarial governments don’t cooperate on information sharing.
If the U.S. government doesn’t care to dig deeper, it’s a recipe for disaster, Mr. Gonzalez said.
“If you’re not paying attention, if all you’re doing is looking at files to make sure people check the box, it’s almost a purposeful mendacity. You’re going through the motions of pretending there’s a vetting process when in fact there’s not,” he told The Washington Times.
The Times has reached out to Homeland Security for comment.
The Cubans have come to light as those in the Cuban American community spot them.
Mr. Gonzalez said in addition to Mr. Gonzalez-Pardo, they have identified a Cuban judge, a regional Communist Party secretary and a retired colonel who ran Cuba’s official military magazine.
Being associated with a communist party is a bar to entering the U.S. through the regular immigration system.
“If these people were North Koreans, we’d be livid,” Mr. Gonzalez said, pointing to another country run by a communist party and also designated a state sponsor of terrorism. “The fact that we allow this means there’s no accountability, there’s no vetting whatsoever. Whatever they call ‘vetting’ isn’t vetting.”
Brothers to the Rescue was a humanitarian group that flew over the Florida Straits looking for Cuban migrants trying to escape to the U.S. by raft or boat. They would alert the Coast Guard to help with rescue.
On Feb. 24, 1996, a Cuban MiG-29 shot down two of the group’s Cessna planes. Exile groups said Mr. Gonzalez-Pardo was flying another MiG that chased a third Cessna.
On that plane was Jose Basulto, the leader of Brothers to the Rescue, who managed to escape by hiding the aircraft in the clouds.
Raul Castro, brother of then-leader Fidel Castro, reportedly gave the orders to shoot down the planes.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.