Gov. Kay Ivey is leading a letter with 24 other governors to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
The governors are expressing concern over the Biden-Harris Administration’s Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV) asylum program. The leaders are demanding details of location and status of those granted asylum under the program.
“The impact of this ‘parole’ program has been the sudden influx of foreign nationals throughout our states and communities,” write the governors in the letter.
"The unexplainable lack of any communication from your Administration over arrival times, duration of residency, legal status, and location of these ‘parolees’ has created considerable confusion and alarm among local officials and the general public. In the absence of direction from DHS, law enforcement and municipal leaders have often been left to rely upon news reports and social media posts to determine size and location of incoming migrant populations in order to assess what impact they may have on already limited government services including local public schools.”
The letter continues, “As chief executives of our states directly responsible for the safety of our citizens and those who reside within our borders, we require a full accounting from the Biden-Harris Administration and DHS of the location and legal status of the parolee populations in our states. We further require information about the ‘robust security vetting’ DHS claims to have undertaken on each parolee, and we ask for the names and locations of the sponsors who have been granted guardianship over parolees. We also ask what system DHS has in place to monitor migrants and their sponsors and what assistance DHS is providing migrants.”
This comes as Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his running mate began promoting debunked misinformation about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, causing crime and “eating pets."
Amid this mounting tension, a bipartisan group of local religious leaders, law enforcement officials and residents across Alabama have been taking steps to help integrate the state's Haitian population in the small cities where they live.
As political turmoil and violence intensify in Haiti, Haitian migrants have embraced a program established by President Joe Biden in 2023 that allows the U.S. to accept up to 30,000 people a month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela for two years and offers work authorization. The Biden administration recently announced the program could allow an estimated 300,000 Haitians to remain in the U.S. at least through February 2026.
In 2023, there were 2,370 people of Haitian ancestry in Alabama, according to census data. There is no official count of the increase in the Haitian population in Alabama since the program was implemented.
Read more about the Haitian populations in Alabama here.
