MIAMI, United States. — United States government entities recognized that sponsorship requests as part of the humanitarian parole program launched at the beginning of the year have caused the processing capacity of the Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) to be overwhelmed.
Figures obtained by the chain CBS via the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) indicate that the northern country has received more than 1.5 million requests from people who aspire to sponsor citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
In the specific case of Cuba, sponsorship applications exceed 380,000, a figure higher than the number of migrants from the island that have arrived in the US since 2021.
In addition to the petitions for Cubans, only in the first four months of the year, USCIS has received 580,000 for Haitians, 120,000 for Venezuelans, and more than 20,000 for Nicaraguans.
“Migrants who are desperate, and they are desperate migrants, will wait a while before saying ‘this isn’t working and I’ll risk getting something else,’ either by smuggling in or just showing up at the border and seeing if they can be let in. ”, he declared to CBSNews Theresa Cardinal Brown, former DHS official.
The North American chain assures that USCIS officials are “overwhelmed by the avalanche” of sponsorship requests, since the number of requests received per day is around 12,000, a figure that does not correspond to the monthly limit established for the issuance of the permits, set at 30,000.
USCIS recently reported on changes in the selection process of the beneficiaries of the humanitarian parole, which contemplate the delivery of 500 paroles per day in chronological order of the date of application, and another 500 that will be selected in a lottery format regardless of the date of application, maintaining the maximum of 30,000 paroles per month .
