illegal immigration
Biden’s U-Turn On Deporting Illegal Immigrants Will Last Only Until Election Day

BY: TODD BENSMAN
As published July 12, 2024 by The Federalist
The Biden administration knows a deportation airlift will serve the self-interest of winning reelection on Nov. 5 if done at scale.
In both my books on the border, I offer the same remedy for halting the multinational onslaught of immigrant strangers transiting the infamous “Darien Gap” between Colombia and Panama en route to the besieged southwest U.S. border.
The Darien Gap passageway is a jungled 70-mile bottleneck of wilderness and foot trails, through which an estimated 1.5 million of more than 10 million illegal immigrants from around the world have crossed the U.S. border in the past three years. An American government that really wants to shutter the passage must fund a large-scale deportation airlift from Panama, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Mexico all at once, I advised in my 2021 book, America’s Covert Border War, The Untold Story of The Nation’s Battle to Prevent Jihadist Infiltration.
“The United States should demand that these countries … install a U.S.-funded infrastructure that would fly all immigrants to origin countries anywhere in the world, on national security grounds,” I again recommended in a second 2023 book, Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.
No Republican border hawk ever took my homeland security-bolstering recommendation seriously, as I had hoped.
But to my very great surprise, the most mass-migration-friendly administration in American history, Joe Biden’s, the one that has widened the Darien Gap passage from a mere country lane into a superhighway, has now announced that it will be the one to put my deportation airlift idea into action, at least in Panama.
Not because the Democrat administration ran with my idea or that I’m some sort of policy genius, but because the administration knows a deportation airlift will serve the self-interest of winning reelection on Nov. 5 if done at scale, and because this remedy was obvious to just about anyone with a brain.
“United States Signs Arrangement with Panama to Implement Removal Flight Program,” reads the headline of the Department of Homeland Security’s July 1, 2024, announcement. Details remain scant, but the statement goes on to quote Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas saying that his new partnership with Panama will “manage the historic levels of migration” pouring over the U.S. border for three years.
The Darien Gap passage is a major contributing gusher in the worst mass migration crisis in U.S. history, funneling millions of illegal immigrants through an unlocked turnstile to find their forever homes. Whereas fewer than 20,000 economic immigrants per year ever passed through the Colombia-Panama passage before Biden policies unleashed the current mass migration on inauguration day of 2021, 250,000 passed through it in 2022, 520,000 last year, and a projected 800,000 by the end of 2024.
National Security Threat
The multinational diversity of those passing through the gap from more than 160 nations is a unique affront to U.S. national interests, as border crossers may include Islamic terrorists from Muslim-majority nations, human rights violators from Africa, and spies from adversarial nations such as Russia and China.
Terrorists, spies, and warlords are of little concern to the Biden administration. It has only ever orchestrated the conversion of the Darien Gap into the world’s most trammeled immigrant thruway under its lenient “safe, orderly, and humane” immigration policies.
So the Biden administration’s deportation airlift plan constitutes a stunning, 180-degree policy U-turn.
In 2022, for instance, Mayorkas and Secretary of State Antony Blinken pressured the Panamanian government to open a shorter sea and river route, built larger and new hospitality rest camps to accommodate the increase, and arranged for dozens of United Nations and nonprofit migrant advocacy groups to provide all manner of aid and assistance. These moves induced hundreds of thousands more border crossers per year to make the trip.
Now, the Biden administration will replace its “safe, orderly and humane” mantra of just five minutes ago with the new “safe, humane repatriation” one. Why a deportation airlift, and why now?
Election Concerns
The short answer is that the administration needs to slow the southern border flow to help it keep the White House in the Democrat Party’s hands.
The party well knows polls regularly show that voters regard Biden’s three-year-long mass migration border crisis as an apex-level problem for which they’ll punish him and reward Donald Trump in the upcoming presidential election.
The campaign wants controls in place to reduce anticipated desperate last-chance border rushes as Election Day approaches — immigrants will want to reach the American border before a possibly victorious Donald Trump slams the gates shut.
Panama’s New Approach
And just when it needed a solution most, the administration lucked into a most unexpected damage-control opportunity: Panama elected President Jose Raul Mulino on his keynote promise to “close” the Darien Gap and to get the U.S. to help pay for repatriation flights.
“The border of the United States, instead of being in Texas, moved to Panama,” said Mulino, who served as security minister under former president Ricardo Martinelli. “We’re going to repatriate all those people.”
That’s a major U-turn for Panama. For years, the Panamanian government employed “controlled flow” policy bus trips that transported immigrants exiting the Darien Gap toward the American border.
“I won’t allow Panama to be an open path for thousands of people who enter our country illegally, supported by an international organization [the United Nations] related to drug trafficking and human trafficking,” Mulino said at his July 1 swearing-in, attended by Mayorkas. He appears to be serious. For the first time, Panama is already stringing barbed wire to block the major trails, NBC News reports.
Mayorkas jumped at the opportunity to help Mulino — at least during the period of anticipated surges just before the election.
The number of illegal crossings along the southern border will surely drop sharply if the U.S.-Panama deal works out, an almost certain boon to the Biden campaign that they will repeatedly claim as an achievement — until Nov. 5.
This isn’t the Biden campaign’s first such move to suppress expected preelection surges and to claim the positive result to diminish those terrible polling numbers on illegal immigration for immediate political advantage.
Mexico Acts
After record crossings last fall (all-time records of 10,000-14,000 per day) produced terrible polls, Biden paid an official state visit to Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez-Obrador in Mexico City to discuss the torrential immigration flows. Mayorkas and Blinken followed up after Christmas.
Almost immediately, as I was the first and only one to report for many months, on Jan. 17, Lopez-Obrador deployed 35,000 regular army troops, who began rounding up tens of thousands of illegal immigrants in relentless sweeps of northern border towns. The Mexicans forced them onto planes and buses. They were shipped 1,500 miles south and entrapped in southern provinces behind militarized roadblocks and bureaucracy. Crossings fell by as much as 80 percent initially.
That wasn’t all the Mexicans did, but the resulting illegal crossings slowdown became as immediately apparent as the Biden administration’s ability to have had Mexico do this at any time during the three-year mass migration cataclysm.
President Biden and his deputies have been emphasizing the decline ever since, including during the otherwise disastrous televised debate with Trump.
Look for much more noisy political messaging about even more declines if the Darien Gap closure further reduces the flow at the U.S. border, as it very well might.
A Biden Reelection Would Revert to Lack of Enforcement
But all of this is a paper tiger. No one should expect the Biden administration, should it win the election, to sustain the Mexico or Darien Gap crackdowns beyond Nov. 5. Their leftist wing engineered the whole crisis from the beginning because they believe in unimpeded migration and disdain enforcement, as I explain elaborately in Overrun.
If the Democrats win the White House, look for them to develop new diplomatic “beefs” with President Mulino, ala Hungary’s Viktor Orban, as an excuse to shutter U.S. funding for any deportation airlift.
But there’s a silver lining for border hawks here. If Trump wins, he can build mightily on the preparations that Biden’s campaign managers are beginning now.
Daily Caller
DOJ Releases Dossier Of Deported Maryland Man’s Alleged MS-13 Gang Ties

From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Katelynn Richardson
The Department of Justice (DOJ) released documents Wednesday demonstrating Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia’s membership in the MS-13 gang.
Abrego Garcia’s police interview, immigration court rulings and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) deportable/inadmissible alien record highlighting his membership in the gang, which he has disputed in court, are included in the release.
In a December 2019 decision, the Board of Immigration Appeals dismissed Abrego Garcia’s challenge to an immigration judge’s factual finding that he is “a verified member of MS-13.”
The board found the immigration judge “appropriately considered allegations of gang affiliation against the respondent in determining that he has not demonstrated that he is not a danger to property or persons.”
Officers found Abrego Garcia loitering in a Home Depot parking lot on March 28, 2019, wearing “a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie with rolls of money covering the eyes, ears and mouth of the presidents on the separate denominations,” the initial Prince George’s County Police Department Gang Field Interview Sheet states.
“Wearing the Chicago Bulls hat represents that they are a member in good standing with the MS-13,” the document states. “Officers contacted a past proven and reliable source of information, who advised Kilmar Armando ABREGO-GARCIA is an active member of MS-13 with the Westerns clique. The confidential source further advised that he is the rank of ‘Chequeo’ with the moniker of ‘Chele.’”
The administration became embroiled in a legal dispute after Abrego Garcia, who entered the country illegally in 2011, was deported in March to El Salvador as a result of an error. In court records, they argued Abrego Garcia could not “relitigate the finding that he is a danger to the community.”
A lower court ordered his return, but the Supreme Court required it to clarify the order and directed the administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) indicated Wednesday that it would appeal the amended order Judge Paula Xinis issued which directed the government to “take all available steps to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia to the United States as soon as possible.”
During a Monday meeting with President Donald Trump, El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele said he would not “smuggle” a terrorist into the U.S.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) also released court filings Wednesday showing Abrego Garcia’s wife requested a domestic violence restraining order against him.
illegal immigration
Despite court rulings, the Trump Administration shows no interest in helping Abrego Garcia return to the U.S.

By Greg Collard
With research assistance from James Rushmore
Timeline: The Case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia
With President Trump sitting next to him, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday that no, he is not going to release Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia from his country’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), despite a Justice Department lawyer admitting in a court filing that Abrego Garcia’s deportation last month was an “administrative error.”
No matter, Bukele said when asked if would return him to the U.S.:
Bukele: Of course I’m not going to do it. The question is preposterous. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States. I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.
Reporter: But you could release him inside El Salvador.
Bukele: Yeah, but I’m not releasing, I mean I’m not very fond of releasing terrorists into our country. We just turned the murder capital of the world into the safest country in the Western hemisphere, and you want us to go back into releasing criminals so we can go back to being the murder capital of the world? That’s not going to happen.
Not that there was any doubt what Bukele would say. Attorney General Pam Bondi set the tone early on in the meeting. She explained what the Supreme Court meant last week when it said a lower court ruling “properly requires the government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador.”
The Supreme Court ruled, president, that if El Salvador wants to return him … we would facilitate it, meaning provide a plane.
It brings to mind President Clinton’s infamous grand jury testimony when he said: “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”
Abrego-Garcia left El Salvador and illegally entered the U.S. in 2011. His status as an illegal immigrant changed after he was arrested in 2019 and the Department of Homeland Security accused him of being a member of the MS-13 gang. Abrego Garcia fought the accusation and applied for asylum. Instead, an immigration judge granted him “withholding of removal” status.
A federal judge wrote in an April 6 opinion that in El Salvador “the Barrio 18 gang had been targeting him and threatening him with death because of his family’s pupusa business.”
The Justice Department argues its hands are tied. It doesn’t matter that the U.S. is paying El Salvador $6 million a year to house U.S. deportees at CECOT.
“The United States does not have control over Abrego Garcia. Or the sovereign nation of El Salvador,” says one court filing.
Below is a timeline of the case since Abrego Garcia was arrested last month, leading up to Monday’s Oval Office meeting with Bukele.
March 12-15, 2025
ICE agents stop Abrego Garcia and tell him that he is no longer under “withholding of removal” status. The Trump administration says he is a member of the MS-13 gang, which the president has designated a foreign terrorist organization.
Abrego Garcia, who denies he is part of MS-13, is sent to an ICE detention facility in La Villa, Texas, and from there he is deported to El Salvador on March 15 along with 260 others, primarily Venezuelan nationals. He is being held in CECOT, a prison that has a capacity of 40,000 inmates.
March 24, 2025
Abrego Garcia and his wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, file a lawsuit that notes Abrego Garcia has been in the U.S. legally since 2019 under withholding of removal status, and that the designation was never lifted.
They also accuse the government of sending Abrego Garcia to El Salvador despite “knowing that he would be immediately incarcerated and tortured in that country’s most notorious prison; indeed, Defendants have paid the government of El Salvador millions of dollars to do exactly that. Such conduct shocks the conscience and cries out for immediate judicial relief.”
The lawsuit requests the court order the U.S. government to tell the government of El Salvador to release and deliver Abrego Garcia to the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador.
March 31, 2025
The Justice Department acknowledges in a court filing that “although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error.”
Still, the Justice Department argues the motion should be denied because the court “has no power” over El Salvador. Justice Department attorneys argue:
Under their (plaintiffs) logic, this Court may assume jurisdiction to decide whether the order is legal, but if the order were determined legal, then jurisdiction would disappear again.
The government also says there’s no proof that Abrego Garcia will be tortured or killed in CECOT:
Plaintiffs point to little evidence about conditions in CECOT itself (focusing primarily on its capacity for detainees), instead extrapolating from allegations about conditions in different Salvadoran prisons. While there may be allegations of abuses in other Salvadoran prisons—very few in relation to the large number of detainees—there is no clear showing that Abrego Garcia himself is likely to be tortured or killed in CECOT. More fundamentally, this Court should defer to the government’s determination that Abrego Garcia will not likely be tortured or killed in El Salvador.
April 4, 2025
U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis orders the Trump Administration to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. by 11:59 p.m., April 7. She writes:
Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits because Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador In violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act…and without any legal process; his continued presence in El Salvador, for obvious reasons, constitutes irreparable harm; the balance of equities and the public interest weigh in favor of returning him to the United States; and issuance of a preliminary injunction without further delay is necessary to restore him to the status quo and to avoid ongoing irreparable harm resulting from Abrego Garcia’s unlawful removal.
April 5, 2025
The Justice Department appeals the order, calling it “indefensible” that “a federal district judge ordered the United States to force El Salvador to send one of its citizens—a member of MS-13, no less—back to the United States by midnight on Monday. If there was ever a case for an emergency stay pending appeal, this would be it.”
More from the appellate motion:
Foremost, [the order] commands Defendants to do something they have no independent authority to do: Make El Salvador release Abrego Garcia, and send him to America. That is why Plaintiffs did not even ask the district court for an order directing Abrego Garcia’s return. As Plaintiffs themselves acknowledged, a federal court “has no jurisdiction over the Government of El Salvador and cannot force that sovereign nation to release Plaintiff Abrego Garcia from its prison.” That concession is all that is needed to order a stay here. No federal court has the power to command the Executive to engage in a certain act of foreign relations; that is the exclusive prerogative of Article II, immune from superintendence by Article III.
April 6, 2025
Judge Xinis issues a follow-up memorandum opinion to her April 4 order:
Although the legal basis for the mass removal of hundreds of individuals to El Salvador remains disturbingly unclear, Abrego Garcia’s case is categorically different—there were no legal grounds whatsoever for his arrest, detention, or removal. Nor does any evidence suggest that Abrego Garcia is being held in CECOT at the behest of Salvadoran authorities to answer for crimes in that country. Rather, his detention appears wholly lawless.
The judge also writes that in 2019, Homeland Security “relied principally on a singular unsubstantiated allegation that Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13.”
April 7, 2025
A three-judge panel of Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously denies the government’s motion for a stay of Xinis’ order that say Abrego Garcia must be returned to the U.S. by 11:59 p.m. Judge Stephanie Thacker writes:
The United States Government has no legal authority to snatch a person who is lawfully present in the United States off the street and remove him from the country without due process. The Government’s contention otherwise, and its argument that the federal courts are powerless to intervene, are unconscionable.
The Trump Administration appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court, and Chief Justice John Roberts grants an administrative stay to give justices time to consider the case.
Following the stay, Bondi accuses Abrego Garcia of being a “violent gang member”:
We will continue to fight for the safety of Americans and get these people out of our country to make America safe.
April 10, 2025
The Supreme Court rules against the Trump administration but directs Judge Xinis to “clarify” a portion of her ruling. From the Supreme Court’s decision:
The order properly requires the Government to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador. The intended scope of the term “effectuate” in the District Court’s order is, however, unclear, and may exceed the District Court’s authority. The District Court should clarify its directive, with due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs. For its part, the Government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.
April 11, 2025
If the Supreme Court said, ‘Bring somebody back,’ I would do that. I respect the Supreme Court.
President Trump says that aboard Air Force One a day after the Supreme Court upholds a lower court ruling and says the government should “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S.
Meanwhile, Judge Xinis issues a new order that directs the government to “take all available steps to facilitate the return” of Abrego Garcia. In a hearing, she also makes clear her frustration with the Justice Department.
“The record, as it stands, is, despite this court’s clear directive, your clients have done nothing to facilitate the return of Mr. Abrego Garcia,” she says.
Xinis also orders the administration to provide daily updates on the status of Abrego Garcia’s return. She also criticizes Justice Department attorneys in her order:
During the hearing, the Court posed straightforward questions, including: Where is Abrego Garcia right now? What steps had Defendants taken to facilitate his return while the Court’s initial order on injunctive relief was in effect…? Defendants’ counsel responded that he could not answer these questions, and at times suggested that Defendants had withheld such information from him. As a result, counsel could not confirm, and thus did not advance any evidence, that Defendants had done anything to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return. This remained Defendants’ position even after this Court reminded them that the Supreme Court of the United States expressly affirmed this Court’s authority to require the Government “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return. From this Court’s perspective, Defendants’ contention that they could not answer these basic questions absent some nonspecific “vetting” that has yet to take place, provides no basis for their lack of compliance.
April 12, 2025
A State Department official reports to the court that Abrego Garcia is “alive and secure” at CECOT. “He is detained pursuant to the sovereign, domestic authority of El Salvador,” the State Department’s Michael Kozak says in a filing.
However, he does not give an update on the status of Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S.
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