Parole program CHNV recipients will need to find alternative benefits, or leave the country: DHS
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(WASHINGTON) — The Biden administration is saying those whose parole is expiring from the Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans (CHNV) program will need to seek another immigration benefits and if they don’t find one, depart the country.
CHNV was implemented by the Biden administration with the intention to reduce irregular migration of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans, and to allow qualifying individuals to lawfully enter the United States in a safe and orderly manner on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.
The program was briefly paused for fraud concerns but has been reimplemented with better safeguards.
These processes were set up as temporary in nature, a source told ABC News, to allow the beneficiaries to work and provide them the time and opportunity to pursue avenues for immigration benefits or humanitarian relief if eligible such as, for example, asylum or Temporary Protected Status (TPS).
“As initially stated in the Federal Register notices, a grant of parole under these processes was for a temporary period of up to two years,” a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told ABC News. “This two-year period was intended to enable individuals to seek humanitarian relief or other immigration benefits for which they may be eligible, and to work and contribute to the United States.”
The Department said those who do not have pending immigration benefits or who have not been granted an immigration benefit during their two-year parole period will need to depart the United States before the expiration of their authorized parole period or may be placed in removal proceedings after the period of parole expires.
CHNV parolees may be eligible to apply for humanitarian relief or certain immigration benefits with USCIS, the Department said.
DHS points to the CHNV process as an example of a southwest border encounter reducer.
(WASHINGTON) — President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday called for a halt in confirming judges until he takes office, accusing Democrats of “trying to stack the courts.”
“The Democrats are trying to stack the Courts with Radical Left Judges on their way out the door,” Trump wrote on his social media platform, urging Republican senators to “show up and hold the line.”
“No more Judges confirmed before Inauguration Day!” Trump wrote.
The directive from the president-elect comes as Senate Democrats are expected to dedicate hours of floor time in the coming weeks as part of a last-minute effort to confirm as many of President Joe Biden’s nominees to the federal judiciary before Trump takes over in January. Senate Republicans thwarted their efforts late Monday night, a plan from their soon-to-be leader Sen. John Thune and a reversal from his previous stance on blocking confirmations of qualified judicial nominees.
Senate Republicans rebelled late Monday night, dragging out the floor process by forcing Democrats to hold time-consuming votes on procedural motions that are usually routine and otherwise mundane. Actions that should have taken minutes on the floor instead took hours.
Thune, who takes over as Republican leader of the Senate in January, took credit for the rebellion saying in a statement that Republicans would not “roll over” to appoint Biden’s nominees to the federal bench in the “final weeks of the Democrat majority.”
“If Sen. Schumer thought Senate Republicans would just roll over and allow him to quickly confirm multiple Biden-appointed judges to lifetime jobs in the final weeks of the Democrat majority, he thought wrong,” Thune said in a statement to ABC News.
Thune’s statement vowing to obstruct the judicial confirmation process in the final hours of the Biden presidency is a departure from comments he made just a few years ago toward the end of Trump’s administration. At the time, Thune touted the importance of confirming judges to the bench, saying it was “one of our most important responsibilities as senators” and one of the main reasons he ran for the Senate.
“Mr. President, confirming good judges is one of our most important responsibilities as senators. And it’s a responsibility I take very seriously,” Thune said during a floor speech on Nov. 18 2020 — after Biden won the election.
“After George W. Bush’s election, Democrats decided that the president’s judicial nominees might not deliver the results Democrats wanted. And so, they decided to adopt a new strategy — blocking judicial nominees on a regular basis,” Thune said during his remarks in 2020. “I was one of the many Americans upset by the blockade of talented, well-qualified nominees. And it was one of the main reasons I ran for the Senate. I promised South Dakotans that if they elected me, I would help put outstanding judges on the bench.”
“In fact, one of the main reasons I was first elected to the Senate was to make sure outstanding judicial nominees were confirmed to the federal bench. It’s hard to imagine now, but confirming judges used to be a pretty bipartisan affair,” Thune said at the time.
His comments from 2020 are a notable reversal from his comments this week, as Senate Republicans look to obstruct Democrats as they attempt to do the same for Biden.
Schumer though, doubled down on his efforts Tuesday, and said he expects the Senate to work late into the night again this Wednesday to get the nominees through. Senate Democrats are hoping to confirm as many judges to lifetime appointments as they can while Biden is still president.
“Members should be prepared for another late night on Wednesday to vote on the nominations I filed last night,” Schumer warned.
“Voting on the president’s judicial nominees is a core function of the Senate. It’s one of our basic responsibilities, and we’re going to carry out that responsibility as long as this majority continues. I’m very proud of the judges we’ve confirmed over the past four years under this administration, they have all been highly qualified individuals, and together, they represent a wide range of experiences and areas of expertise.”
Schumer touted the quality of judges the Senate has passed under his leadership, noting their many backgrounds and cultures and identities. He said under his watch, the Senate has confirmed a record number of women and people of color to the federal bench.
Republicans have Democrats’ record on judicial confirmations beat.
Republicans confirmed 234 of Trump’s nominees to the federal courts during his four years in office, and so far the Democrat-controlled Senate has confirmed 216 under Biden’s administration.
“We’re not done,” Schumer said on the floor Tuesday. “There are more judges to consider and confirm.”
Schumer vowed to spend the rest of the week — and the year — confirming more judges. Every judge confirmed in this lame-duck session of Congress is one fewer vacancy Trump can fill come January.
(WASHINGTON) — After losing the 2020 election, then-President Donald Trump broke with two traditions that demonstrate American democracy’s peaceful transfer of power.
First, he declined to invite then-President-elect Joe Biden to the White House in the weeks after the race while contending he hadn’t lost. Later, he skipped Biden’s inauguration, instead leaving Washington mere hours before the ceremony began.
But those customs will return as Trump and Biden are set to meet on Wednesday in the Oval Office.
It will mark Trump’s first time back in the White House since ending his presidency under a cloud of election denialism four years ago. A week before his departure, he was impeached by the House for a second time as lawmakers charged him with “incitement of insurrection” after his supporters violently stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Trump vowed to return and his comeback was made complete last week. He swept all seven swing states, clinching 312 electoral votes to Vice President Kamala Harris’ 226 votes, and is on track to win the popular vote.
Biden spoke with Trump on Nov. 6 to congratulate him and to extend a political olive branch with an invitation to the White House.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Tuesday that Biden did so because “he believes in the norms.”
“It is important not just because it’s important to him, but it’s important to the American people,” Jean-Pierre said. “The American people deserve this. They deserve a peaceful transfer of power. They deserve a smooth transition. And that’s what you’re going to see.”
Last month, before Election Day, the White House said Biden would attend the inauguration no matter who won.
Biden made preserving democracy a key message of his 2020 campaign and his 2024 reelection effort before dropping out, repeatedly blasting Trump as a threat to the institution over Jan. 6.
“He wants to show the American people that the system works,” Jean-Pierre said.
Asked by ABC News White House Correspondent Karen Travers what was on the agenda for their meeting, Jean-Pierre said the conversation would be private but that reporters will be allowed in the room to capture the start of their sit-down.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan said this past weekend, though, that Biden and Trump would go through both domestic and foreign policy issues.
Vice President Harris will not attend the meeting, Jean-Pierre said.
Melania Trump will also not be in attendance, her office confirmed on Wednesday. First lady Jill Biden’s office confirmed that a joint invitation was extended to the Trumps to meet at the White House.
“Her husband’s return to the Oval Office to commence the transition process is encouraging, and she wishes him great success,” Melania Trump’s office said in a statement.
In 2016, Michelle Obama hosted Melania Trump at the White House when then-President Barack Obama invited Trump just days after the election. The two men met for 90 minutes, and Obama called the conversation “excellent.”
While in Washington, Trump will also make a stop near the Capitol to meet with House Republicans.
House Republican leaders took an early victory lap on Tuesday as the party inches closer to a “trifecta” — or control of the White House, the Senate and the House. ABC News has not yet projected the balance of power in the House, though Republicans are three seats away from a majority.
“It is a new day in America,” Speaker Mike Johnson proclaimed. He said Republicans were ready to begin delivering on Trump’s agenda on Day 1 of his administration.
ABC News’ Justin Gomez and Kelsey Walsh contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — Since becoming President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard’s rosy posture toward Moscow has prompted some Democratic critics to suggest that she could be “compromised,” or perhaps even a “Russian asset” — claims the ex-Hawaii representative and Army officer has forcefully denied.
But former advisers to Gabbard suggest that her views on Russia and its polarizing leader, Vladimir Putin, have been shaped not by some covert intelligence recruitment as far as they know — but instead by her unorthodox media consumption habits.
Three former aides said Gabbard, who left the Democratic Party in 2022, regularly read and shared articles from the Russian news site RT — formerly known as Russia Today — which the U.S. intelligence community characterized in 2017 as “the Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet.”
While it was not clear to those former staffers whether or when she stopped frequenting the site, one former aide said Gabbard continued to circulate articles from RT “long after” she was advised that the outlet was not a credible source of information.
Doug London, a retired 34-year veteran intelligence officer, said Gabbard’s alleged penchant to rely at least in part on outlets like RT to shape her view of the world reflects poorly on her suitability to fulfill the responsibilities of a director of national intelligence.
“That Gabbard’s views mirror Russia’s narrative and disinformation themes can but suggest naïveté, collusion, or politically opportunistic sycophancy to echo whatever she believes Trump wants to hear,” London said, adding, “none of which bodes well for the president’s principal intelligence adviser responsible for enabling the [U.S. intelligence community] to inform decision-making by telling it like it is.”
Alexa Henning, a spokesperson for the Trump transition team, said in a statement to ABC News that “this is false and nothing but a few former, conveniently anonymous, disgruntled staffers.”
“Lt. Col. Gabbard’s views on foreign policy have been shaped by her military service and multiple deployments to war zones where she’s seen the cost of war and who ultimately pays the price,” Henning said.
‘The Russian playbook’
Former congressional and campaign advisers said it was unclear to what extent Gabbard’s views were shaped by what she read in RT — and they emphasized that she would consume news from a wide range of outlets, including left-wing and right-wing blogs.
But over the past decade, Gabbard’s views on Russian aggression in Europe have evolved in a particularly dramatic fashion.
In 2014, when Russian troops annexed Crimea, Gabbard — then a first-term Democratic U.S. representative from Hawaii — released a statement advocating for “meaningful American military assistance for Ukrainian forces” and for the U.S. to invoke “stiffer, more painful economic sanctions for Russia.”
“The consequences of standing idly by while Russia continues to degrade the territorial integrity of Ukraine are clear,” she wrote at the time. “We have to act in a way that takes seriously the threat of Russian aggression against its peaceful, sovereign neighbor.”
By 2017, however, her tune had changed. In a lengthy memo to campaign staff laying out her views on foreign policy, a copy of which was obtained by ABC News, Gabbard blamed the U.S. and NATO for provoking Russian aggression and bemoaned the United States’ “hostility toward Putin.”
“There certainly isn’t any guarantee to Putin that we won’t try to overthrow Russia’s government,” she wrote in the memo from May 2017, titled “fodder for fundraising emails / social media.”
“In fact, I’m pretty sure there are American politicians who would love to do that,” she wrote.
She also condemned the very sanctions she had previously supported, writing that, “historically, the U.S. has always wanted Russia to be a poor country.”
“It’s a matter of respect,” she wrote. “The Russian people are a proud people and they don’t want the U.S. and our allies trying to control them and their government.”
Gabbard’s sentiment in the 2017 memo is “basically the Russian playbook,” said Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO during the Obama administration.
“It’s dangerous,” said Daalder. “That strain of thinking is not unique to Tulsi Gabbard, but it is certainly not where you would think a major figure in any administration would like to be, intellectually.”
By 2022, at the outset of the latest Russia-Ukraine conflict, Gabbard suggested on X that Russia’s invasion was justified by Ukraine’s potential bid to join NATO, “which would mean US/NATO forces right on Russia’s border” — a narrative perpetuated by Russian propaganda channels, including RT, and denounced by the U.S. and NATO as “false.”
Gabbard’s messaging has at times aligned so closely with Kremlin talking points that at least one commentator on Kremlin state media has referred to her as “Russia’s girlfriend.”
A ‘nefarious effort’
The U.S. government first called out RT as a propaganda mouthpiece for the Kremlin in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, three years after Gabbard was elected to Congress.
This past September, the State Department wrote that it had evidence that “RT moved beyond being simply a media outlet and has been an entity with cyber capabilities.” The U.S. also issued fresh sanctions against executives at RT, including its editor-in-chief, who the U.S. accused of engaging in a “nefarious effort to covertly recruit unwitting American influencers in support of their malign influence campaign.”
The Justice Department also indicted two RT employees in September for their alleged role in what the DOJ called a scheme to pay right-wing social media influencers nearly $10 million to “disseminate content deemed favorable to the Russian government.”
In the decade since Gabbard arrived in Washington, experts say she has regularly promoted views consistent with those espoused in RT and other Russian propaganda channels.
In its 2017 assessment, for example, the U.S. intelligence community wrote that RT “has actively collaborated with WikiLeaks” and “routinely gives [WikiLeaks founder Julian] Assange sympathetic coverage and provides him a platform to denounce the United States.”
Gabbard has long been an outspoken supporter of Assange, arguing in a June 2024 appearance on “Real Time with Bill Maher” that “[Assange’s] prosecution, the charges against him, are one of the biggest attacks on freedom of the press, that we’ve seen, and freedom of speech.”
In Congress, Gabbard also co-sponsored a resolution calling on the federal government to “drop all charges against Edward Snowden,” the former contractor for the National Security Agency who supplied WikiLeaks with secret documents in order to expose what he called “horrifying” U.S. government surveillance capabilities.
RT frequently reports glowingly on Snowden, who has for more than a decade lived under asylum in Russia.
‘Undeniable facts’
But it is Gabbard’s framing of the Russian invasion of Ukraine that has most galvanized her critics in the national security sphere.
In March 2022, Gabbard posted a video to Twitter — now X — sharing what she said were “undeniable facts” about U.S.-funded biolabs in the war-torn country, claiming that “even in the best of circumstances” they “could easily be compromised” — a debunked theory regularly promoted by RT and other Kremlin propaganda channels.
Experts say RT and other Russian state-controlled news agencies have frequently capitalized on Gabbard’s public comments to support the biolab conspiracy theory and other disinformation, recirculating clips in which she repeats the Kremlin propaganda as evidence backing the false claims — effectively engineering an echo-chamber to magnify their propaganda machine.
Even so, Brian O’Neill, a former senior intelligence official with experience in senior policymaker briefing, expressed confidence that career intelligence officials can support Gabbard with “a constant barrage of new information” that will help shape her understanding of emerging world events.
“New appointees in such roles always bring preconceptions, but like her predecessors, she will be subject to comprehensive briefings grounded in solid evidence provided by individuals of high integrity and expertise,” O’Neill said.
“That said,” O’Neill cautioned, “Trump’s well-documented hostility and skepticism toward the [intelligence community] will shape the environment she steps into. If she adopts a similar posture, there’s a risk she might deprioritize intelligence community input or dismiss inconvenient truths presented to her.”
ABC News’ Shannon Kingston contributed to this report.
