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 Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies as published by The Daily Mail
US law enforcement sources tell me the rumour is patently absurd
There were no signs of human life, just railroad tracks and a rough dirt road, six miles west of a small Mexican mountain town.
But this was definitely the place described to me.
On a recent trip to Mexico City’s sprawling migrant encampments, I heard again and again stories about groups of immigrants who were breaking away from these urban bases and disappearing into the vast highland wilderness outside the city.
Now, I’d gone to find them.
As my translator and I picked our way through the mountain landscape dotted with pines, prickly pear cacti and brambles 40 miles northeast of Mexico City, the high desert looked empty.
Then we spotted someone watching us from behind a cluster of rocks.
‘Not immigration!’ I shouted in Spanish. ‘Friendly journalists. Please show yourselves.’
With that, some two dozen bleary-eyed men, women and children emerged from their hidey holes.
On a recent trip to Mexico City’s sprawling migrant encampments, I heard again and again stories about groups of immigrants who were breaking away from these urban bases and disappearing into the vast highland wilderness outside the city.
They were in rough condition, having just weathered a night on bare ground, too frightened of roaming Mexican immigration officers to build fires and too cold to sleep.
They’d brought water jugs but no food, blankets or even the most rudimentary camping gear. All of them repeatedly begged me for something to eat. Unfortunately, I hadn’t brought anything.
‘We haven’t eaten since yesterday. We don’t have that much money,’ a Venezuelan man named Jesus told me.
Another young Venezuelan, who lost a leg in a motorcycle accident back home, navigated the rough terrain on crutches, an empty pant leg flapping wildly. They told me that other groups were camped in the area.
Why?
Most of the migrants I met in Mexico City said they were giving up on their plans to sneak into America. As I reported last week, these people were either returning to their home countries or settling in Mexico.
Clearly, threats from the incoming Trump administration to close the border and deport all illegals are having the desired deterrent effect.
Other migrants said they’d make up their minds before the President-elect’s January 20 inauguration, to see if the Biden administration would approve their applications for ‘humanitarian parole’.
Using the Biden-created ‘CBP One’ mobile app to lodge such claims, some 771,000 migrants have entered into the US since January 2023. Trump has said he’ll end the program on Day One.
But there is a contingent of migrants who are refusing to be turned away. These are the ones escaping from urban encampments into the woods, in a race against time to illegally cross the border before Trump’s swearing-in.
They’d brought water jugs but no food, blankets or even the most rudimentary camping gear. All of them repeatedly begged me for something to eat. Unfortunately, I hadn’t brought anything.
It’s hard not to conclude that these migrants were drawn here, in large part, by President Biden’s disastrous immigration policies, resulting in more than 10 million migrants entering the US during his term. The message that has been sent to the world the past four years is that, if you make it to the border, you’ll likely find a way to cross.
And indeed, as I soon learned, this group had been convinced by a particularly delusional rumor sweeping Mexico City’s migrant camps.
It’s their firm belief that on Wednesday, December 18, the US and Mexican governments are going to withdraw all troops and border guards, giving tens of thousands of migrants one last chance to cross the border before the coming Trump crackdown.
December 18 is ‘International Migrants Day’, declared by the United Nations in 2000, as a time to recognize the plight of migrants worldwide.
‘On International Migrant’s Day, they’re going to open the border gates,’ a young Ecuadorian man named Jason confidently explained to me.
Six men sitting around him nodded in agreement.
My US law enforcement sources tell me this is patently absurd, suggesting that Mexican cartels had concocted the rumor as a way to wring migrants for cash one last time before the era of Biden’s mass migration ends.
Nonetheless, I embedded myself for the day with this group of true believers – hailing from Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guatemala and Honduras – as they waited at a junction in the middle of the desert, where trains are known to stop for five to 10 minutes as the tracks are switched.
My US law enforcement sources tell me this is patently absurd, suggesting that Mexican cartels had concocted the rumor as a way to wring migrants for cash one last time before the era of Biden’s mass migration ends. (Above) Mexican immigration on patrol
The migrants’ plan was to hitch a ride on top of a freight train for a dangerous three or four-day trip north. The ultimate destination: The border crossing at Eagle Pass, Texas.
Word was the next train was due at noon.
There were three mothers with six young children among the group of 25; only one of the kids was accompanied by a father.
The rest were single young men in their 20s, including several who admitted they’d illegally crossed the border before and made their way to Denver and Houston, only to be deported after serving time for crimes.
One of these men refused to allow me to record him on either audio or video. Another told me he had been arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol during his time in Denver.
Everyone was on edge – and for good reason.
Trump has threatened Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, with 25 percent trade tariffs if she does not do what she can to halt illegal migration.
In response, she has enhanced tough nationwide immigration enforcement operations. Mexican National Guard and immigration officers are patrolling rail lines with orders to capture every immigrant and ship them a thousand miles south to Mexican cities on the border with Guatemala.
The migrants fear that and more.
‘Mexican immigration takes your money away, whatever you have, they take it away,’ said Alexander, a 30-something Colombian. ‘We’re running away from them.’
Two young men anointed themselves lookouts to warn the others when strange vehicles approached. They asked me to hide my rental car in the brush.
As we waited for the noon train, a motorbike carrying a man and a woman pulled up on the dirt road running parallel to the train tracks.
‘Immigration knows you are all here,’ the man warned in Spanish. ‘They’ll take all of your cell phones and money and send you to Tapachula. Hide in the landfill.’
At this, the entire group bolted over the tracks to a mammoth fenced-off garbage dump and squeezed through holes in the chain link. The pile stunk terribly. In the refuse, the children found a feral dog nursing newborn puppies in a hole she’d dug.
Here we waited for several hours until a train horn sounded in the distance. Everyone rushed back through the fence, but were quickly disappointed. This train wasn’t going to work. The cars were cylindrical oil tanks – far too hazardous to ride on top of.
At this, the entire group bolted over the tracks to a mammoth fenced-off garbage dump and squeezed through holes in the chain link. The pile stunk terribly. In the refuse, the children found a feral dog nursing newborn puppies in a hole she’d dug.
Here we waited for several hours until a train horn sounded in the distance. Everyone rushed back through the fence, but were quickly disappointed. This train wasn’t going to work. The cars were cylindrical oil tanks – far too hazardous to ride on top of.
‘There’s no way they can get on,’ one of the lookouts said. ‘It’s going to be slippery. It’s very dangerous for the children on top.’
The wait continued.
More hours later, another train horn sounded. The migrants ran for it. The legless Venezuelan man on crutches somehow managing to keep up.
I followed close behind as the train stopped and the migrants scrambled up ladders onto the roof of one car. But, again, they were foiled.
A truck of armed Mexican National Guard troops and two immigration enforcement vans approached. Everyone rushed back down, dropping their backpacks off the train in a swirl of panic.
Seconds before the immigration vans arrived, they group disappeared into the brush.
I lingered to talk to the guards, but their vehicles never slowed. Though I could see that the two vans were full of migrants, perhaps caught elsewhere along the train line.
The train chugged away without anyone on it. And, shortly after, the migrants emerged from the brush once again.
This time, they refused to speak to me, hurrying off down the road… to a likely dead end.
illegal immigration
Shocking footage shows Biden admin selling off southern border wall before Trump takes office
From LifeSiteNews
By Wade Searle
Many notable GOP figures are pushing back on the Biden-Harris White House for an apparent attempt to greatly hinder the incoming Trump administration’s plan to finish the southern border wall.
The Biden administration has been caught moving away unused materials for a border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border to be auctioned off online, according to shocking footage taken by a US Customs agent, with bidding starting at just $5.00.
A border patrol agent told The Daily Wire that the material for the construction of the border wall along the southern border of the United States is being taken from multiple areas in Arizona: Nogales, Tucson, and Three Points, with the goal to “move all of it off the border before Christmas.” Footage provided by the border patrol agent shows several unused sections of border wall being taken away on flatbed trucks owned by DP Trucking LLC, a government contractor. The owner, Harold Lambeth, confirmed to Daily Wire over the phone that the border wall materials are indeed being transported away from construction sites– although he was “unable to disclose” any further information. The materials are being auctioned through GovPlanet, an online auction marketplace for surplus government equipment, with bidding for each section of wall panels beginning at just $5.00, according to the website. Materials for border wall construction were similarly sold by the Biden administration in 2023 through GovPlanet.
The Daily Wire exclusive led to widespread outrage on X, formerly known as Twitter, with many notable GOP figures pushing back on the Biden-Harris White House for an apparent attempt to greatly hinder the incoming Trump administration’s plan to finish the southern border wall. Elon Musk shared the footage in shock, writing “what!?” Texas Senator Ted Cruz said, “President Biden and Kamala Harris have successfully put illegal aliens over the safety and security of our own citizens,” in a statement posted to X on Thursday, adding, “Never forget why the American people rejected them.” Missouri Representative Eric Burlison accused the Biden administration of “intentionally sabotaging President Trump and the American people.”
Eric Schmitt, the Senator from Missouri, sent a letter on Friday to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin demanding that he “immediately cease the auctioning off of border wall materials.” Most notably, the letter contains a thorough analysis of the already completed sales of border wall material, finding that the Biden-Harris administration is recouping just 0.02% of the taxpayer money used to originally purchase the material under President Trump’s first term.
Hope may not be lost for the unused border wall material, however. In a conversation with Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Thursday, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick revealed that the state of Texas plans to purchase the border wall material up for auction and “give it to [President-Elect Donald] Trump.” Patrick told Ingraham that he has “a billion dollars in my pocket to do it,” adding that he plans to “go in and buy it all”. In a statement posted to X on Friday, the Lt. Gov wrote that “[Texas Governor Abbott] and I spoke last night about purchasing ‘wall’ material President Biden is auctioning off. The Governor had already instructed the [Texas Facilities Comission], which oversees Texas’ border wall construction, to look at what Biden was selling.” According to Patrick, the Texas Facilities Commission claims that the material for sale is mostly junk, including panels “covered in concrete and rust”.
“Rest assured, if they sell any panels that make economic sense, we will buy them and give them to President Trump when he takes office.” Lt. Gov. Patrick concluded.
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