illegal immigration
Biden’s U-Turn On Deporting Illegal Immigrants Will Last Only Until Election Day
![](https://www.todayville.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/tvrd-bensman-darien-gap-skull-jungle-image-2024-07-12.jpg)
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.
Crime
Venezuelan Migrant Says She’d ‘Return’ To Country After Living In Housing Taken Over By Venezuelan Gang
![](https://www.todayville.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/tvrd-dc-venezuelan-gangs-take-over-appartments-denver-image-2024-09-07.jpg)
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Hailey Gomez
A Venezuelan immigrant living in migrant housing in Aurora, Colorado, appeared to fight back tears while speaking to independent reporter Nick Shirley, saying she would return to her country after living in the U.S.
This week, the city of Aurora faced major pushback from Republicans after footage surfaced online of armed men inside an apartment complex in late August. Shirley was seen visiting various migrant housing units before stopping at the viral location to interview residents where the armed men had been spotted.
Shirley spoke with a Venezuelan woman who showed him the poor living conditions her family endures, stating she pays $1,200 per month for the apartment. The migrant stated that the electricity and hot water in her apartment weren’t working, telling Shirley that the landlord hadn’t accepted any payment for the “past couple of months.”
“Does your father still have to pay rent?” Shirley asked as they walked around her father’s apartment.
“The owner is no longer receiving any kind of payment, because he is also taking all this, that the gangs and the mafia are taking advantage of all of this to get us out as if we were dogs and it’s not fair,” the migrant stated, according to a translation.
Shirley asked if gangs had been charging people, to which the migrant replied, “no.” The independent reporter then asked if her life in the U.S. was what she expected after crossing the border.
WATCH:
“No, never. I would have stayed in my country. They say that here everything is different, the laws, everyone gets a good job, you get ahead, you can save money to take back to your country,” the migrant stated. “But not everything is as they say, the American dream is simply just a dream. When you get here you wake up, it’s not like they say.”
Shirley then pressed the migrant, asking in Spanish if she would take a “flight or opportunity to go back” to her home country.
“With all the love in the world I would return to my country,” the migrant said.
Republican lawmakers on Friday sent a letter criticizing the Biden-Harris administration’s “open border policies” and local “sanctuary” policies over the reported presence of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which allegedly terrorized several apartment buildings in Aurora.
Reportedly beginning as a prison gang in 2014 within the northern Venezuelan state of Aragua, Tren de Aragua has grown into one of Venezuela’s largest criminal organizations. With around 5,000 members and stretching internationally across Latin America and the U.S., the gang has allegedly been connected to several high-profile crimes within the U.S., including the kidnapping and strangling of a Florida man last year.
This week, the Aurora Police Department announced the arrest of two confirmed Tren de Aragua gang members, Jhonnarty Dejesus Pacheco-Chirinos and Jhonardy Jose Pacheco-Chirinos, following a July 28 shooting that left two men hospitalized with serious injuries.
illegal immigration
Illegal immigrants crossing from Canada into USA in record numbers
![](https://www.todayville.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/tvrd-cs-illegal-immigrants-crossing-canada-us-border-champlain-ny-image-2024-09-02.jpg)
Illegal border crossers from Canada captured near Champlain, NY – US Border Patrol
From The Center Square
By
Apprehensions in 10 months surpass previous 13 fiscal years combined
The busiest U.S. Customs and Border Protection sector at the northern border continues to break records in apprehensions with foreign nationals coming from 85 countries to Canada to illegally enter the U.S.
In less than 10 months, Swanton Sector Border Patrol agents apprehended 15,000 foreign nationals from 85 countries who all illegally entered the U.S. through Canada, the greatest volume reported in this time period in recorded history.
By contrast, the Swanton Sector apprehended 365 illegal border crossers in all of fiscal 2021, according to CBP data.
The total number apprehended this fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, exceeds apprehensions Border Patrol agents made in 13 fiscal years combined (fiscal 2011 through fiscal 2023), Swanton Sector Chief Patrol Agent Robert Garcia said.
The 15,000 illegal border crossers is equivalent to 15 U.S. Army battalions.
Foreign nationals flew from 85 countries to eventually reach Canada and then make their way to the U.S. border, where they illegally entered the Swanton Sector. The sector includes all of Vermont, six upstate New York counties, and three New Hampshire counties.
Illegal entry by car in Alburgh, Vermont.
It spans 295 miles of international boundary with the Canadian provinces of Quebec and Ontario and is the first international land boundary east of the Great Lakes.
In fiscal 2023, Swanton Sector Border Patrol agents broke previous records by apprehending the greatest number of illegal border crossers in history of more than 6,700 foreign nationals from 76 countries, The Center Square exclusively reported.
In just one year, that number tripled and countries of origin increased to 85.
Foreign nationals illegally entering the U.S. from Canada in the Swanton Sector alone are citizens of Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Angola, Anguilla, Argentina, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Cameroon, Canada, Chad, Chile, China, Colombia, Congo, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cuba, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Guinea, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Hungry, India, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Liberia, Lithuania, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Nepal, Netherlands, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Philippines, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Sweden, Syria, Taiwan, Togo, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam and Zimbabwe, according to Swanton Sector data.
![TCS border crisis northern border sqanton sector](https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/thecentersquare.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/e/b8/eb8b6bb4-6891-11ef-aff7-7f54866cf622/66d4ba11e9184.image.jpg?resize=150%2C107 150w, https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/thecentersquare.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/e/b8/eb8b6bb4-6891-11ef-aff7-7f54866cf622/66d4ba11e9184.image.jpg?resize=200%2C143 200w, https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/thecentersquare.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/e/b8/eb8b6bb4-6891-11ef-aff7-7f54866cf622/66d4ba11e9184.image.jpg?resize=225%2C161 225w, https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/thecentersquare.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/e/b8/eb8b6bb4-6891-11ef-aff7-7f54866cf622/66d4ba11e9184.image.jpg?resize=300%2C214 300w, https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/thecentersquare.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/e/b8/eb8b6bb4-6891-11ef-aff7-7f54866cf622/66d4ba11e9184.image.jpg?resize=400%2C286 400w, https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/thecentersquare.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/e/b8/eb8b6bb4-6891-11ef-aff7-7f54866cf622/66d4ba11e9184.image.jpg?resize=540%2C386 540w, https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/thecentersquare.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/e/b8/eb8b6bb4-6891-11ef-aff7-7f54866cf622/66d4ba11e9184.image.jpg?resize=640%2C457 640w, https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/thecentersquare.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/e/b8/eb8b6bb4-6891-11ef-aff7-7f54866cf622/66d4ba11e9184.image.jpg?resize=750%2C536 750w, https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/thecentersquare.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/e/b8/eb8b6bb4-6891-11ef-aff7-7f54866cf622/66d4ba11e9184.image.jpg?resize=990%2C707 990w, https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/thecentersquare.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/e/b8/eb8b6bb4-6891-11ef-aff7-7f54866cf622/66d4ba11e9184.image.jpg?resize=1035%2C739 1035w, https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/thecentersquare.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/e/b8/eb8b6bb4-6891-11ef-aff7-7f54866cf622/66d4ba11e9184.image.jpg?resize=1200%2C857 1200w)
A border patrol agent at the northern border in the Swanton sector
The Biden-Harris administration continues to maintain U.S. borders are secure and numbers are down compared to the Trump administration, a claim fact-checked as false by The Center Square.
In one Derby, Vermont, local news report, residents described how “at all hours of the day,” illegal foreign nationals cross their backyards having come from Canada to illegally enter the U.S. They’ve shared similar experiences on a much smaller scale as those living in rural border counties of Texas, The Center Square has reported. In Texas, illegal border crossers total in the millions under the Biden-Harris administration, prompting 55 Texas counties to declare an invasion and 60 to issue disaster declarations citing the border crisis.
Like those at the southwest border, those at the northern border describe how home surveillance video captures foreign nationals trespassing on private property, next to their homes, in the middle of the night to be picked up by someone nearby. Border Patrol agents have warned residents “not to interfere because they may have weapons. They want to get through, they’re going to have nobody stopping them,” WCAX 3 News reported.
They are describing gotaways, those who illegally enter between ports of entry, don’t make asylum or immigration claims, and intentionally seek to evade capture. Many have criminal records and are armed and dangerous, authorities have told The Center Square. They total at least two million nationwide since fiscal 2021, the greatest number in recorded history, The Center Square first reported.
While the Swanton Sector has borne the brunt, the entire northern border has reported record illegal entries and apprehensions, totaling 162,865 so far this fiscal year. That’s after the greatest number of nearly 190,000 was apprehended at the northern border in U.S. history in fiscal 2023, according to CBP data.
Illegal entries continue to skyrocket at the northern border as both U.S. and Canadian officials have expressed alarm about terrorist threats, The Center Square reported.
Nearly 1,100 known or suspected terrorists attempting to enter the U.S. from Canada were apprehended at the northern border since fiscal 2021 by CBP and Border Patrol agents. Nationwide, the total number of KSTs apprehended since fiscal 2021 is over 1,700, the highest on record, The Center Square first reported.
Despite some Canadian officials telling The Center Square, “The Canada-U.S. border is the best-managed and most secure border in the world,” members of Congress, U.S. officials and some Canadian officials don’t agree.
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