The federal government’s top watchdog confirmed Monday what border hawks had been warning for years: the Biden administration released roughly 2 million illegal immigrants into the United States on parole and then quietly lost track of most of them.
The Government Accountability Office released a new audit finding that Immigration and Customs Enforcement relied on what it called the “honor system” to monitor the migrants CBP had released at the southwest border. Migrants were supposed to voluntarily appear at ICE field offices.
“ERO relies on the ‘honor system’ to ensure noncitizens report to field offices as directed. However, ERO officials told us that not all paroled noncitizens report as required,” the GAO audit stated.
The numbers are stark. In 2024 alone, more than 612,000 migrants were paroled at the southwest border. ICE enrolled only 179,000 people total in its alternatives to detention program that year, a number that included ICE’s own releases and not just CBP parolees. By GAO’s rough estimate, ICE lost track of at least 70 percent of migrants paroled into the country.
The accountability breakdown goes further than missed check-ins. ICE doesn’t even know how many CBP parolees are currently in its files. CBP collects that data but doesn’t share it with ICE, leaving the two agencies essentially operating in separate silos. GAO found that ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations branch “is not conducting its required monitoring of all noncitizens CBP paroled at the southwest border and placed into removal proceedings.”
Parole is a legal tool intended for narrow, exceptional circumstances. Federal law limits its use to cases of urgent humanitarian need or significant public benefit, such as when a migrant is needed as a witness in a federal case. The Biden administration transformed it into a mass entry mechanism, processing arrivals through its CBP One smartphone app and granting parole at a 97 percent approval rate to those who pre-scheduled their arrivals.
GAO found that the border interviews used to vet those applicants were “streamlined” and fell short of confirming whether migrants had credible asylum claims. In many cases, CBP officers did not collect sworn statements before releasing migrants into the country.
CBP also acknowledged it knowingly paroled some migrants who had prior criminal records, characterizing those offenses as “non-violent and minor.” Officials admitted that migrants may have had criminal histories in their home countries that U.S. authorities had no way to access.
DHS offered a measured response to GAO’s findings. “DHS remains committed to ensuring the overall safety, security and well-being of our nation by both securing U.S. borders as well as ensuring paroled noncitizens are adhering to the conditions of their release,” said Jeffrey Bobich, DHS’s director of financial management.
The audit comes as the Trump administration works to locate and remove many of the estimated millions of illegal immigrants released under Biden’s border programs.
