Biden administration may soon restart immigration program that was paused for possible fraud

A program that let migrants apply for U.S. entry from their home countries that was paused because of potential mass fraud may be revived by the Biden administration as soon as this week, even though thousands of suspect applications still need review, two sources told NBC News.

The Biden administration announced last month that an 18-month-old program that had let Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans apply for legal entry and temporary work authorization in the U.S. would be “temporarily paused” while the Department of Homeland Security conducted “a review of supporter applications.”

Those supporters, also called sponsors, are people legally living in the U.S. who make the initial applications for the migrants who want to enter the U.S. The sponsors vouch that they can financially support the migrants once they arrive, and the migrants then follow up with an additional request for entry before federal authorities say yes or no.

An internal DHS report reviewed by NBC News, however, found that almost 101,000 sponsor applications for migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Ukraine were filed by 3,218 so-called serial sponsors. The report, produced by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, a division of DHS, does not say how many of those applicants entered the U.S. The report was first cited publicly by the Federation for American Immigration Reform, an anti-immigration advocacy group.

The report’s authors found thousands of instances of would-be sponsors’ using the same street addresses, internet protocol addresses or phone numbers. Almost 600 applications were flagged, for example, because they all appeared to use the address of the same commercial warehouse in Orlando, Florida. The authors also