Billionaire businessman Elon Musk has accused the Biden-Harris administration of expeditiously bringing non-U.S. citizens into the United States with the intent of allowing them to vote for Democrats at the polls.
Musk, a billionaire businessman and ardent supporter of former President Donald Trump, claimed in a viral tweet that has received 100 million views since Sunday that the White House was covertly importing migrants to sway elections in favor of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
“Very few Americans realize that, if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election. Far from being a threat to democracy, he is the only way to save it! Let me explain: if even 1 in 20 illegals become citizens per year, something that the Democrats are expediting as fast as humanly possible, that would be about 2 million new legal voters in 4 years,” Musk wrote in a long-winded post.
“The voting margin in the swing states is often less than 20 thousand votes. That means if the ‘Democratic’ Party succeeds, there will be no more swing states!! Moreover, the Biden/Harris administration has been flying ‘asylum seekers’, who are fast-tracked to citizenship, directly into swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Arizona,” Musk continued. “It is a surefire way to win every election. America then becomes a one-party state and Democracy is over.”
Very few Americans realize that, if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election. Far from being a threat to democracy, he is the only way to save it!
Let me explain: if even 1 in 20 illegals become citizens per year, something that the Democrats are expediting as fast… https://t.co/u3HBdd5Bv0
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 29, 2024
The Washington Examiner analyzed Musk’s claims and determined that claims did not align with the reality of how illegal immigrants from the border are processed.
When asked to respond in a statement, Musk declined to comment when asked for proof to support his claim and blocked a Washington Examiner reporter from further contact.
1. The Biden administration is flying non-U.S. citizens directly into swing states
This is not accurate, according to information publicly available by the Department of Homeland Security, as well as a rebuttal by Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council in Washington.
Reichlin-Melnick said Musk’s claim that people seeking asylum were being speedily pushed through the process in order to get onto voter rolls by Nov. 5. was “just an outright lie.”
“Literally none of this true; it is pure fiction easily disproven by even a cursory glance at publicly available information,” Reichlin-Melnick wrote in a post to X. “No asylum seekers are being flown into the country. No one is on a ‘fast track’ to citizenship, especially not migrants.”
Through a Biden administration program created more than a year and a half ago, the government has allowed select migrants outside the U.S. a way to apply for admission to the country on parole. The DHS rolled out a new feature in a government phone app that allowed users to apply for parole.
Under this CHNV program, short for the four countries from which citizens could apply — Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela — migrants use U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s “CBP One” app to apply to be admitted on a two-year basis.
Those four countries were chosen because all have had a staggeringly high number of citizens trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border illegally since 2021 and are hostile nations unwilling to accept back their citizens. In an effort to reduce illegal border crossings, the Biden-Harris administration created the CHNV program.
Applicants must have an adult in the U.S. willing to sponsor them and have to pay for their own commercial airline flight into any U.S. airport where they can be inspected by CBP customs officers.
Roughly 30,000 people from the four countries are admitted each month for a total of nearly half a million thus far. However, each individual is allowed to travel anywhere in the country and there is no indication that migrants themselves are choosing to go to Democratic- or Republican-governed states, much less that the government is choosing where people settle.
Republicans and immigration hawks have decried the CHNV program as being legally indefensible given that it is the executive branch dictating and approving immigration levels — a job that they have argued is solely to be determined by Congress.
2. Immigrants are then fast-tracked for citizenship
Aside from flying into the country, more than 9 million immigrants have been encountered attempting to enter the U.S. since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021.
But even for immigrants who are apprehended crossing the southern border illegally and released into the U.S., becoming a registered voter is unachievable for years due to long-standing processes.
The White House referred the Washington Examiner to a lengthy fact sheet from DHS agency U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS), the federal agency that handles asylum and immigration claims.
If an immigrant comes over the border and immediately makes an asylum claim, the average amount of time for a claim to be heard and decided is 4.3 years, according to the National Immigration Forum.
Once approved for asylum, the immigrant would have to wait one year after that approval to apply to become a Lawful Permanent Resident, equivalent to a green card.
A green card recipient still cannot vote. After obtaining a green card, the immigrant must wait five years before applying to become a U.S. citizen.
The current average wait time for a naturalization request to be approved is five months — meaning someone who entered the country yesterday and promptly cleared each hoop would not be eligible to become a citizen — and vote in all elections — until 2035.
In other words, migrants who crossed the border early on in former President Barack Obama’s second term would now be in line to become citizens after a decade of residing in the country.
It’s possible that Musk may have conflated “fast-tracking” citizenship with the border. Two days before his viral tweet, he shared a Los Angeles Times story that touted how the federal government was speeding up the speed of citizenship application reviews. Applicants for citizenship would have had to have been in the country since at least the Obama administration.
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Musk and SpaceX declined to provide responses explaining the basis for the tweets or if it would correct the information with a Community Note on the platform.