While most of the debate over immigration focuses on the U.S.-Mexico border, one of President Joe Bidens most effective policies so far has occurred elsewhere at airports.

For a little over a year, Biden has used whats called parole authority to collectively allow up to 30,000 vetted Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans per month into the country, mostly via air travel, for a temporary two-year window.

The program is based on the authority held by the federal government under the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act to grant temporary admission to foreigners on a on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit. And, the Biden administration touts, it has been accompanied by drops in the number of nationals from each of these countries whove crossed the U.S.-Mexico border on foot.

But to hear some right-wingers talk about it, the CHNV parole program the name an acronym for the nationalities it encompasses is a secret, treasonous endeavor that utilizes government-funded charter flights to transport illegal migrants into the United States. None of that is true, but that doesnt seem to be the point.

I dont know of anyone in Congress who knew this! exclaimed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on a podcast episode, just 14 months after Biden himself announced the CHNV parole program during a public press briefing and despite regular publications of data on the program by the Department of Homeland Security.

The false accusations of secret taxpayer-funded charter flights ferrying unvetted migrants to new lives in the United States plays into Republican attempts to cast immigration issues as a major crisis and one on which Democrats are failing ahead of the 2024 election.

Former President Donald Trump and others in the Republican Party have been playing up immigration rhetoric that echoes the white nationalist great replacement conspiracy theory, claiming Bidens immigration policies are really an effort to replace white Americans with other voters more willing to vote for the left or as Trump called it Saturday , a conspiracy to overthrow the United States of America.

At the same time, Republicans earlier this year scuttled a bipartisan deal on immigration despite it being full of GOP priorities, following pressure from Trump, the likely Republican nominee for president, to not give Biden a victory to point to ahead of Novembers election.

In reality, presidents of both parties have used the parole power for decades, a review from the libertarian Cato Institute found. The first large-scale use of parole came in 1954, when Ellis Island and other immigration detention centers closed and the detainees there were paroled into the United States. Later presidents used parole to allow entry for the refugees of the Vietnam War, targeted minority groups and Cubans under the wet foot/dry foot policy . Biden himself has used parole to ease the entry of Afghans in 2021 and Ukrainian refugees in 2022.

The precedent to the CHNV parole program was introduced in October 2022, when the Department of Homeland Security created a parole program for Venezuelans that was modeled on the Ukrainian program, requiring applicants to have a U.S.-based sponsor whos financially able to support them and to pass vetting and background checks. In January 2023, the White House announced the program would expand to include Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua.

Individuals from those four counties who meet the requirements and havent attempted to cross the U.S.-Mexico border between ports of entry are allowed to fly from their home countries into the United States rather than appearing in person at land border crossings.

Since January 2023, more than 386,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans arrived lawfully and were granted parole under the parole processes, U.S. Customs and Border Protection wrote in a February 2024 update .

Theres no doubt that the CHNV program is by far the largest-scale parole program that any administration has done in decades, said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council, a research and legal advocacy organization.

And data supports the administrations claim that the parole program, as part of a larger package, has helped discourage irregular migration.

As the Cato Institute reported in September, illegal entries by Venezuelans fell 66% from September 2022 to July 2023 and from December 2022 to July 2023, illegal entries fell 77% for Haitians, 98% for Cubans and 99% for Nicaraguans. Compared with peaks in CHNV numbers in 2021 and 2022, the report added, July 2023 arrests for those four nationalities were down 90%.

There has not been a single month where unlawful entries of the four countries combined has been above the level it was in December 2022, Reichlin-Melnick said.

The White House announced the policy as part of a package explicitly meant to increase security at the border and reduce the number of individuals crossing unlawfully between ports of entry. The Biden administration grouped the program with others meant to encourage legal pathways into the United States such as increased refugee admissions and asylum opportunities in other countries and alongside harsher border enforcement for migrants who broke the rules.

Naree Ketudat, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, told HuffPost in a statement that the CHNV parole process was part of a strategy to combine expanded lawful pathways with stronger consequences to reduce irregular migration, and [has] kept hundreds of thousands of people from migrating irregularly.

And yet many on the right have misrepresented or simply lied about what the parole program is, playing on anxieties about race and national identity to paint it as part of a supposed scheme by Democrats to overwhelm the country with new residents or somehow displace American citizens.

Joe Biden greenlit the secret flight program that transported over 320,000 migrants into our communities, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) wrote in a March 24 social media post. He wants these illegals in our nation.

Contrary to Blackburns post, the program isnt a secret, and participants havent broken any laws. Reached for comment on those inaccuracies, Blackburns press secretary, Savannah Newhouse, doubled down, saying parole beneficiaries had been secretly flown into the United States.

And Cruz, in a podcast taping last month, repeatedly referred to illegal immigrants being secretly flown into the United States by the Biden administration, which he said had booked and paid for secretive flights of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants all of which is completely false. Cruzs office didnt respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.), who last month proposed an unsuccessful amendment to limit the parole authority, falsely described the status quo as using taxpayer dollars to charter planes that move and import thousands of illegal aliens into your states.

The senators press secretary, Audrey Traynor, continued to call parole participants illegal aliens in an email to HuffPost on Monday. She also referred to the parole program as taxpayer funded, even though beneficiaries pay for their own expenses.

And Republicans Senate campaign arm referred to parole participants as illegal and falsely said they were being resettled in the United States.

Elon Musk, the worlds richest man, had to take things a step further in a post on X, the social media platform he owns that had been called Twitter.

Parole beneficiaries are vetted with biometrics and background checks, and they are not able to vote. The X platform sent an automated message back in response to HuffPosts request for comment.

Where The Narrative Started

This whole thing exploded a month ago, said Reichlin-Melnick, who has closely tracked lies about the parole program.

Even though the CHNV parole program has been running for more than a year, the recent wave of interest from Republicans seems to have started with a lawsuit over a public records request from the Center for Immigration Studies, a right-wing, anti-immigration think tank.

The group filed a public records request in March 2023 for information about the parole program, including the specific departure and arrival airports of parole beneficiaries. DHS regularly updates data on the nationalities of CHNV parole beneficiaries, and the U.S. government plays no part in arranging the flights, but CIS argues that airport data would provide a fuller picture of parolees movements within the United States: Currently, the center says , Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) has received the blame for influxes of migrants in various cities across the country because of his program of busing migrants around the country, which has so far cost taxpayers roughly $150 million . CIS eventually sued the federal government for the information.

In late February 2024, the Biden administration argued in a court filing that it should not have to release airport data, saying revealing information about specific departure or arrival airports of parole beneficiaries could reveal operational vulnerabilities that could be exploited. CIS Senior National Security Fellow Todd Bensman wrote about that statement on the centers website on March 4, calling parole beneficiaries flights secretive and the parole program legally dubious.

Bensman had written about the CHNV program for months; in an interview last year with Steve Bannon, Trumps former White House strategist, he referred to it as an airlift. But his post about secretive flights took off, making noise around the world.

That same day, the Daily Mail cited the CIS post in an article that blared, falsely, that the Biden administration was arranging beneficiaries travel and secretly flying them into the United States.

The following day, Trump referenced the CIS report, without directly naming it, in a Super Tuesday speech at his Mar-a-Lago private club and residence in Florida.

Today it was announced that 325,000 people were flown in from parts unknown, migrants were flown in. Airplanes, not going through borders, not going through that great Texas barrier, Trump said. They flew 325,000 migrants, flew them in, over the borders, into our country.