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.
From the Center for Immigration Studies
By Todd Bensman
UN/NGO ‘mall’ under construction in southern Mexico shows they expect continued illegal flow to the U.S.
A 75,000-square-foot mega-mall, built to enable industrial-scale illegal immigration to the U.S. southern border, is almost online here in this key entry city in southern Mexico just across the border from Guatemala.
Scheduled to open in December, the mall suggests that powerful global agencies, the United Nations key among them, are bullish on a long-term future of continued heavy U.S.-bound illegal migrant traffic through Mexico – no matter the outcome of the November 5 American presidential election.
Those bullish investors are the dozens of migration-oriented UN agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that have already plowed hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money into constructing a permanent network of way stations for thousands of miles along the migration routes from South America to the U.S. border during the four years of the Biden-Harris administration.
A Nicaraguan on his way to the U.S. showed his UN cash card in Monterrey, Mexico. January 2023 photo by Todd Bensman.
The record hundreds of millions of dollars in aid is distributed at the way station network in the form of cash cards, cash in envelopes, food, vouchers for onward travel and lodging, medical treatment, pharmaceuticals, legal counseling, and much more. (See: “UN Budgets Millions for U.S.-Bound Migrants in 2024”.) This aid has without doubt helped the UN and its growing constellation of NGOs keep the masses moving north through Tapachula in record numbers toward irresistible Biden border policies that have welcomed across arrivals in historic millions. (See: “Biden Admin. Sends Millions to Religious Nonprofits Facilitating Mass Illegal Migration”.)
The UN and NGOs are betting on a busy future in Mexico. Going forward, the purpose of this one strategically located facility is to “respond comprehensively to the needs of people who arrive in Mexico … migrant refugees who travel together from all continents, and arrive in Tapachula in need of a response or attention”, Giovanni Lepri, the Mexico representative for the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR), told reporters when Mexico’s foreign ministry announced it in April 2024.
But the Tapachula mall represents a far more expansive billion-dollar migration-route safety net constructed during the Biden-Harris years using record-breaking U.S. taxpayer contributions.
It plugs into two other big one-stop-migration malls erected in the northern Mexico cities of Monterrey and Tijuana. These gleaming new Mexican facilities, and plenty of other UN and NGO substations in Mexican towns and cities, form the final terminus of the trails to the United States lined with pots of U.S. taxpayer money. And they are representative of what’s happening throughout Latin America.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which received $1.9 billion in U.S. taxpayer funds in 2024 and $2.1 billion in 2023 (compared to $377 million in 2019) for migration assistance throughout Latin America, started building the Tapachula facility on land donated by Chiapas State as part of the deal with Mexico to run it.
The UNHCR, UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM), UNICEF, and dozens of private, often religion-based, NGOs scattered around Tapachula will work alongside one another under one massive roof here — evidently planning a years-long collaboration.
None of the UN/NGO pots of gold are exactly a secret but are relatively hard to find for the uninitiated. And harder to grasp as connected to domestic American policies or as a legitimate point of political debate.
The UN’s 2024 update to the “Regional Refugee and Migrant Response Plan” (RMRP for short), a UNHCR and IOM planning and budget document, lays out in detail that it planned to hand out nearly $1.6 billion in 17 Latin America countries using its network of 248 different NGOs. (For the complete list of involved groups, see p. 268, here, and explore their activities further with this interactive tool).
That was on top of the 2023-2024 RMRP plan, which called for 228 NGOs (all listed on p. 268 of the list of involved groups) to spend $1.72 billion on trailside assistance to mass migration that all know will illegally pass through many countries and, finally, breach the U.S. border.
Hundreds of millions of dollars for all of this comes straight from U.S. taxpayers in the form of sharply increased US State Department bequeathals, USAID grants, and flexible spending contributions to the UNHCR and IOM.
Too Far for Average Americans to See
Necocli, Columbia to Acandi, Panama
For an idea of how U.S. tax money is spent to flood the American border, the far northwest Colombian town of Necocli provides a window. This is a major staging town for migrants preparing to boat across the Gulf of Uraba for smuggler-guided backpack trips through the so-called “Darien Gap” jungle passage that leads into Panama and eventually Mexico.
In Necocli, the UN and NGO agencies have arrayed themselves in something like an outdoor swap meet of NGO booths and an IOM mobile bus office on a few acres next to the gulf beach, the Center for Immigration Studies observed during an August 2024 research trip to the region. The Jewish NGO Cadena was set up in a booth next to the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA).
NGO and UN workers there said they provide a variety of trail advice — and plenty of supplies to the immigrants, to include socks, underwear, backpacks, bug repellant, water filters, sunscreen, and Vaseline.
And food.
“Like things easy to carry so they can eat and be done with it,” a Cadena worker said.
ADRA provides children’s classes thrice weekly on how to avoid sexual predators among the strange men traveling the Darien Gap.
On this day, a Cadena worker said she’d given out thousands of food items such as packaged soup to more than 3,000 migrants during the previous few months, showing the last of it: a box with a handful of granola bars she hoped to hand out soon so she could go home.
What about critics who say NGOs like Cadena are helping migrants break the laws of many countries?
A Cadena NGO worker in Necocli, Colombia. August 2024 photo by Todd Bensman.
“As an organization,” the Cadena worker responded. “We’re not here to judge. We’re just here to provide a service.”
”But aren’t you helping them migrate?”
“Only by giving them the things that I mentioned, not money or fare, just certain resources for the trip,” she explained.
UNHCR workers carrying iPads interacted with groups of migrants sitting in chairs under open-air shelters, surveying them and their needs for the trail ahead. The IOM workers hand out hygiene kits to women, but had run out of the kits some days earlier.
Across the Uraba Gulf in the staging town of Acandi, the Clan del Gulfo paramilitary controls the human smuggling operations into the Darien Gap. The cartel runs two migrant camps where the migrants are brought for final journey preparations.
The center gained permission to access one of the camps, “Camp 1”. Inside, the Center found NGOs providing medical services, legal counseling, and food.
Furthermore, Colombian banks also have been allowed to set up a money-wiring service so that migrants could pay their foot guides.
All involved could not possibly be unaware that the people they are assisting intend to break the immigration laws of a half dozen countries up trail, including, ultimately, illegally breaching the American border.
A Bright Future for Mass Migration?
The UN and NGO’s migration advocacy industrial complex is now preparing its 2025-2026 plan for the trails of Latin America.
A request for input from its NGO partners suggests an ambitious coming year of providing “cash and voucher assistance”, “food security”, “humanitarian transportation”, “shelter”, and most other basic human needs.
Who will be the recipients?
Refugees and migrants in-transit (of all nationalities) who cross an international border.
From The Center for Immigration Studies
By Todd Bensman
Washington, D.C. (October 24, 2023) – Recent Center for Immigration Studies field work reveals a growing crisis in the Mexican southern state of Chiapas.
Why are thousands of migrants bottled up in this area near the Guatemala-Mexico border, and why are caravans forming but only moving within Chiapas?
On-the-ground reporting by Todd Bensman, the Center’s national security fellow, highlights the impact of the Biden-Harris administration’s December 2023 deal with Mexico and the potential consequences leading up to and following the U.S. election.
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Key findings:
Biden-Harris Agreement: In December 2023, the U.S. and Mexico reached a secretive deal to keep migrants in southern Mexico to reduce the appearance of a border crisis in the U.S. The deal has resulted in the Mexican military setting up roadblocks in the region, particularly around the border town of Tapachula, to slow the flow of migrants.
Migrants Bottled Up: Bensman visited Tapachula, where an estimated 150,000 migrants are stranded, with 500 to 1,500 more arriving daily. The city is overwhelmed, with high poverty levels and unrest.
Caravans and Military Escorts: Migrant caravans are forming, but they are not headed to the U.S. Instead, the Mexican military is escorting them to other cities within Chiapas to ease pressure on Tapachula. Bribes and mafias enable wealthier migrants to escape the blockade, but poorer migrants remain trapped.
CBP One App: The U.S. extended access to the CBP One app, previously only usable in northern Mexico, to allow migrants in southern Mexico to schedule appointments for processing into the U.S. However, delays and limited access make it difficult for most to advance quickly.
Upcoming Election Tension: Many migrants feel an urgency to reach the U.S. before a potential change in leadership. Those interviewed fear that a Trump win would mean a closed border and no benefits, while they believe a Harris win would maintain the status quo and provide access to benefits.
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