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The Biden-Harris Version of Trump’s ‘Cruel’ Mass Deportation of Immigrant Families – with No Media Freakout

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2 days ago

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ICE forces immigrant families to board a deportation flight in McAllen, Texas. November 2021 photo by Todd Bensman

From The Center for Immigration Studies

By Todd Bensman 

The profound hypocrisy of the outrage machine now ginning up against Trump’s coming deportation machine

Democratic Party oppositionists, immigrant advocates, and their U.S. media allies are mobilized and dug in with sharpened staves for all-out political war against one of President-elect Donald Trump’s signature plans: “the greatest mass deportation in American history,” as he has put it.

In harbingers of the kind of framing to come, opponents of immigration law are choosing metaphoric language harkening to the Nazi holocaust machine and the Bosnian civil war.

“Immigration Lawyers Prepare to Battle Trump in Court Again,” reads one typical recent New York Times headline over a story calling the Trump plans “harsh” and describing how battalions of immigration lawyers and civil liberties groups are mobilizing to wage total legal and political war to stop them.

“We literally have a blueprint of what they are planning to do, and so we had months and months to figure out how to protect people,” the paper quoted Becca Heller, founder of the International Refugee Assistance Project, saying. “Trump has told us what to expect – hate and persecution and concentration camps.”

“Ethnic cleansing,” Los Angeles Times reporter Ronald Brownstein called the plan in an X post when Tom Homan, the former head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement just appointed to spearhead the initiative, told a visibly offended 60 Minutes interviewer that whole families will be deported together to avoid “family separation.”

The liberal Mother Jones magazine expressed outrage, falsely claiming that Homan said U.S. citizen children would be deported. The New Republic screamed that the mass deportation policy proposal confirmed that real action would back every “hateful word spewed” at Trump’s “fascist” rallies.

But in his 60 Minutes interview, one of Homan’s potentially most illuminating comments went unexplored.

“We’ve done it before,” Homan told the interviewer about deporting families together in large numbers.

In that, Homan was exactly right. It wasn’t, however, Donald Trump or Homan who did it but the Biden-Harris administration, secretively and never covered by major media and continuing to this day.

In 2021 and 2022, the Biden-Harris administration launched an ICE air operation that has mass-deported by air as many as 550,000 often Central American immigrants to date – keeping together whole families that included babes in mother’s arms. I know this because I remain perhaps the only American writer who witnessed, videotaped, and reported the massive airlift while it happened at unmarked hangers by plain-clothed ICE agents driving unmarked vehicles putting them onto unmarked ICE-contracted jets in small, out-of-the-way U.S. airports.

I wrote video and print dispatches for the Center for Immigration Studies website and dedicated most of an entire chapter to the operation in my 2023 book, OVERRUN: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.

While these are considerably smaller than what the incoming Trump administration envisions, recounting these 2021-present Biden-Harris operations today serves two important purposes in the new context of a second Trump presidency and the coming all-out information war offensive against it in the coming year.

For starters, the fact that Biden-Harris carried out family deportation flights spotlights the profound dual-standard hypocrisy of today’s emerging crop of political warfighters and their media supporters because Donald Trump is doing it rather than the president they liked and wanted to politically protect.

Secondly, the Biden-Harris mass deportation airlift, although it is probably smaller in scale than what’s coming, provides an important value for the next administration – as a sound operational blueprint for those in the Trump administration who will carry it out.

The Biden-Harris mass deportation airlift for immigrant families begins

The Biden-Harris mass family deportation program was born of an internal White House conflict (well reported by the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal) between progressives who’d engineered the historic mass migration over the southern border that began on Inauguration Day 2021 and more pragmatic administration figures who only a few months later were greatly fearing heavy political losses for Democrats at the November 2022 mid-term elections. Among the latter were, for instance, White House chief of staff Ron Klain, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, and Domestic Policy Council Adviser Susan Rice among others, as I reported in detail in OVERRUN’s Chapter 15, titled “White House Rebellion.”

Initially, the White House pragmatists won permission from Biden himself to start the flights in August 2021, one month after a record-setting 213,000 July border apprehensions generated negative international headlines and, notably, low polling numbers for Democrats as a 2022 mid-term election issue. They felt like they had to drive the numbers down through the potent deterrence that removal flights provide.

At the time, the pandemic-era “Title 42” instant pushback policy was still technically in place, although the progressives on Inauguration Day had torn huge exemptions into it to let in families, unaccompanied minors, and extra-continentals from around the world, which had led to immediate historic crossing levels within two months.

The pragmatists decided to use Title 42 as the legal basis for these removal flights.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did publicly announce “expedited removal” flights would commence for “certain families who recently arrived at the southern border … and do not have a legal basis to stay in the United States.” The DHS statement hinted obliquely that the aim of the flights was to persuade migrants from Central America, among the most populous of border crossers, to stay home on grounds that “irregular migration … is especially dangerous for families and children.”

At first, they targeted Guatemalan, Honduran, Salvadoran, and Venezuelan family groups because those nationalities were the most numerous crossers, although the flights sharply escalated after the catastrophic September 2021 Del Rio bridge crisis when 15,000 Haitians poured over the Rio Grande all at once and drew even more intensive international media attention. Haitians were added to the target list as were a half dozen other high-volume nationalities over time, such as Brazilians and Ecuadorians.

But starkly unlike what is happening now with Trump’s plan, there was little to no public outrage or information-war preparation over the Biden deportations, which require detentions of families ahead of the flights and are ongoing.

While some Initial media reports back in 2021 indicated the first Biden flights ran into delays, coverage of what happened next dried up entirely as those flights have sharply escalated and remain steady even now as illegal immigration advocates and their media support networks express only outrage at the coming Trump program.

I got onto the story four months after the Biden-Harris flights began, when the flights were escalating. Eventually, I was able to personally observe and report on ICE loading up planes with detained women and children at the McAllen, Texas, international airport. (See Don’t Look Now, but ICE is Deporting Some Central American Families by Air, December 1, 2021, Center for Immigration Studies.)

The monthly flights soon doubled, and then doubled again. I kept writing, but still, no one has much publicly complained, let alone gone to war over them.

Biden’s Blueprint for Trump

At first, the Biden-Harris jets flew many of the families directly to Guatemala and Honduras tarmacs.

But the Biden-Harris State Department got the Mexican government involved in a collaboration. The flights could land in the southern Mexican cities of Tapachula and Villahermosa. The Mexican government, in a barely reported September 2021 agreement with the Biden administration, would transport the arriving deportees by bus to Honduras and El Salvador.

The flights program didn’t go completely unnoticed by pro-immigration advocacy groups, which mainly complained privately to the administration and kept the newspapers out of it. An outraged anti-deportation group called Witness at the Border had been tracking what it termed “Death Flights” under Trump and issuing solid analyses for its side of the cause.

Witness at the Border’s Thomas Cartwright, a retired banking executive and migration advocate who tracks removal flights as a volunteer, noticed that progressively declining numbers of flights during opening months of the Biden administration suddenly skyrocketed from a mere 46 removal flights in July 2021 to a “stunning” 193 in September 2021, he reported.

Some of that increase was attributable to “the massive Haiti expulsion program” (to empty the Del Rio camp), Cartwright later told me in an interview, but also to a major new expansion of the flights to Guatemala and to Tapachula and Villahermosa in southern Mexico.

By the end of Biden’s first 12 months, the administration had sent off 1,931 removal flights using five charter carriers (IAero, World Atlantic, GlobalX, Eastern Air, and OMNI). The Biden flights had eclipsed Trump’s last year of flights by 116.

And the Biden-Harris administration aggressively expanded them as the mid-term elections approached. During 2022, the Biden-Harris DHS was sending flights to 16 other countries in Latin America, the Caribbean and even as far as Sierra Leone, Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, India, and Vietnam.

The administration secretively renewed flights to Haiti long after the Del Rio camp debacle, too. (See: Biden Administration Secretively Renews Daily Air-Repatriation Flights to Haiti, CIS January 27, 2022).

By Spring of 2022, in fact, the Biden-Harris flights of one single year surpassed flights sent by Trump in all four of his years.

The Biden-Harris administration never advertised what it was doing nor released information about the flight numbers (and never responded to my requests for details and interviews.)

But assuming a conservative 100 deportees per flight (many planes had capacity for 135-150 passengers, they returned at the very least 195,000 women, children and single men by the end of that first year. The number, Cartwright told me in an interview, probably well exceeded 250,000.

In his most recent report, Cartright reports that the Biden-Harris administration has sent a total of 5,219 flights, including 1,598 in just the last 12 months.

Collectively, these amount to an estimated 575,000 immigrant air deportations since August 2021, including 175,000 just since January 2024.

There was plenty of evidence that the flights did suppress and deter targeted nationalities from coming so long as the flights continued. (See: Expanding Air Deportations Coincide with Falling Border Apprehensions, CIS February 22, 2022)

The Biden expulsion flights were “incontrovertible” evidence, Cartwright complained in a June 2022 monthly report on his group’s website, that the airlift was “a significant strategic imperative” of the Biden administration because they worked as “an impactful tool…to deter migration through the threat of immediate return.”

But clearly, the flights never reached a sufficient volume to deter the millions of migrants the administration still let in after illegal border crossings.

Presumably, this is why the incoming Trump administration sees a need to drastically increase the volumes.

The takeaway here is that the incoming administration can probably borrow parts of what the Biden-Harris administration built and expand the infrastructure and diplomatic arrangements with new receiving countries.

Double standards

Still, the absence of serious public opposition to any of the Biden-Harris program or mention of it by major media outlets currently airing criticism only of the proposed Trump program warrants consideration as fact in context not currently provided anywhere.

As the American public witnesses the wild fury of politicization over the Trump program, someone might think to ask Homan what, exactly, he meant when he told 60 Minutes that ICE already has long experience deporting immigrant families who entered the country and remain illegally.

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Great Reset

From Border Security to Big Brother: Social Media Surveillance

Published on November 13, 2024

By

 By Christina Maas

Was the entire immigration reform rhetoric just a prelude to broadening government spying?

Let’s take a closer look: immigration became a hot-button campaign issue, with plenty of talk about “welcoming” migrants, combined with a healthy dose of hand-wringing about border security. Now, however, critics are uncovering what looks like the real priority—an enhanced federal surveillance operation aimed at monitoring not just new arrivals, but American citizens too. In the name of keeping tabs on who’s coming and going, the administration sank more than $100 million into a social media surveillance system designed to keep an eye on everyone.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) first flirted with these powers under Trump’s presidency, when ICE officials began monitoring social media under the guise of protecting the homeland. The Biden-Harris administration, having previously expressed horror at Trump-era excesses, took a softer tack, but actually increased mass surveillance. They rebranded the initiative as the Visa Lifecycle Vetting Initiative (VLVI), a name that practically exudes bureaucratic charm while implying a methodical, visa-centric approach. But if it was just an immigration program, why was it scanning communications between Americans and their international friends, family, or business contacts?

According to a lawsuit from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the program evolved into something much larger than a mere visa vetting system. The scheme entailed broad surveillance of communications and social media activity, conveniently sidestepping pesky things like “probable cause” or the First Amendment. “Government officials peering through their correspondence with colleagues visiting from overseas and scrutinizing the opinions expressed in their communications and their work,” read a lawsuit that laid bare the VLVI’s invasive nature. What started as a system to vet foreigners’ eligibility to enter the U.S. quietly metastasized into an excuse to monitor anyone who dared connect across borders.

We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here.
We obtained a copy of documents batch one for you here.
We obtained a copy of documents batch two for you here.

Of course, in true Washington style, this story wouldn’t be complete without a twist of political theater. The administration’s rhetoric has leaned heavily on a supposed dedication to protecting civil rights and personal freedoms—while simultaneously doubling down on programs that do the opposite.

A Little Privacy, Please? DHS Puts American Social Media on the Watchlist
Ah, the Fourth Amendment — one of those quaint, old-timey Constitutional protections that grant Americans the basic human right not to be poked, prodded, or probed by their own government without a solid reason. It’s a promise that Washington will think twice before sifting through your life without a warrant. Yet somehow, in the age of social media, this Fourth Amendment right seems to be slipping into the hazy realm of memory, particularly when it comes to Uncle Sam’s latest pastime: keeping tabs on everyone’s online chatter under the banner of immigration vetting.

Welcome to the VLVI, a Homeland Security special that appears to have mistaken “security” for “surveillance.” This bureaucratic marvel was dreamed up as a means to monitor non-citizens and immigrants, ostensibly for national security. But according to recent lawsuits, it’s not just foreigners on the watchlist—average Americans now get to share the surveillance limelight too, all thanks to the Department of Homeland Security’s fondness for “indiscriminate monitoring” of citizen communications. And why? Because in the brave new world of VLVI, any American chatting online with an overseas connection might just be suspicious enough to keep an eye on.

A Sweeping “Security” Measure or Just Mass Surveillance?

Here’s where the Constitution starts to feel like an afterthought. Traditionally, the government can’t simply jump into your emails, texts, or online rants without a warrant backed by probable cause. The Fourth Amendment makes that pretty clear. But in the VLVI’s playbook, this notion of “probable cause” becomes something of a suggestion, more of a “nice to have” than a constitutional mandate. Instead, they’ve embraced an approach that’s less “laser-focused security effort” and more “catch-all dragnet,” casting wide nets over American citizens who happen to connect with anyone abroad—no illegal activity necessary.

Imagine you’re a US citizen messaging your friend in France about a summer trip, or maybe you’re just exchanging memes with a cousin in Pakistan. Under this initiative, that simple exchange could land you in a Homeland Security database, your innocent messages cataloged alongside the truly suspicious characters of the internet. And this is happening without any individual warrants, without specific suspicion, and in some cases, without probable cause. One might ask, exactly how does that square with the Constitution’s protections?

Privacy Protections? That’s for Other People

This is all a question of government trust and hypocrisy. The program began under a previous administration but was quickly shuttled along by the current one, despite its public stance championing privacy rights. There’s something ironic about politicians who rally for civil liberties in campaign speeches, only to maintain and expand government surveillance in office. The backlash has been predictably loud, and for good reason. Here we have a policy that effectively treats every social media user as a latent threat and a government that somehow expects people to swallow this as reasonable.

Critics have slammed this “watch-all” approach, pointing out that it doesn’t take a legal scholar to see how this might just cross a constitutional line or two. It’s not just Americans with foreign friends who are worried—it’s anyone who believes the government shouldn’t rummage through citizens’ lives without cause. “This type of program, where citizens’ digital lives are surveilled under a sweeping policy without individual warrants or specific reasons, sounds like an unreasonable search,” privacy advocates say.

The Price of a Free Society: Now With Less Freedom

Of course, VLVI supporters wave away these concerns with a dismissive “it’s for security” mantra as if that excuse covers every constitutional breach. And true, there’s little doubt that some level of monitoring is necessary to keep the truly dangerous elements out of the country. But we’re talking about ordinary people here, law-abiding citizens getting swept up in a bureaucratic machine that fails to distinguish between a casual chat and a credible threat.

When the government can tap into anyone’s social media profile because of a flimsy association, what’s left of the citizen’s “reasonable expectation of privacy”? In theory, the Fourth Amendment protects it; in practice, programs like VLVI gnaw away at it, one seemingly “harmless” violation at a time. If we keep pretending this is just another harmless tool in the security toolkit, we might as well hang up any remaining illusions about the privacy rights we’re supposedly guaranteed.

Just Another Step Toward a Surveillance State?

For Americans, it’s a chilling reminder that a swipe on Instagram or a chat on Facebook can mean more than just casual social interaction. For the DHS, it seems the message is clear: treat everyone as a suspect first, and figure out the legalities later. What happens to the expectation of privacy for ordinary Americans? It’s probably time we all start looking over our digital shoulders, because in the world of VLVI, “reasonableness” is a government privilege, not a citizen’s right.

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Daily Caller

Democrat Governors, City Leaders Pledge To Shield Illegal Immigrants From Trump’s Agenda

Published on November 11, 2024

By

From the Daily Caller News Foundation 

By Jason Hopkins

Democratic governors and other liberal elected officials have lined up to declare that they will fight back against President-elect Donald Trump’s hardline immigration agenda.

Trump, who won the election on Tuesday in an electoral landslide, has promised to conduct mass deportations across the country and withhold federal funding from sanctuary cities, along with a slate of other hawkish enforcement proposals. However, Democratic governors in Massachusetts, California and Illinois — all of whom have been speculated as potential 2028 presidential contenders — and other elected leaders have said they will use their authority to push back against the upcoming administration’s agenda.

“I think that the key here is that every tool in the toolbox has gotta be used to protect our citizens, to protect our residents and protect our states, and certainly to hold the line on democracy and the rule of law as a basic principle,” Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey said to MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell after Trump’s victory. Healey confirmed that Massachusetts State Police would “absolutely not” be helping the Trump administration deportation plans.

The entire state of Massachusetts is already described as a “sanctuary” haven by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), a Washington, D.C.-based group that tracks sanctuary laws and policies across. Healey’s reluctance to help the incoming administration’s enforcement efforts follows her state’s struggles with the ongoing immigration crisis, having publicly asked illegal immigrants to not go to her state and offered plane tickets for them to leave.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday called for a special session of the state legislature in order to “protect California values” from the incoming Trump administration.

“The special session will focus on bolstering California legal resources to protect civil rights, reproductive freedom, climate action, and immigrant families,” a statement from the governor’s office reads. “On immigrant protection, California has advanced policies that support immigrant families and is investing in their protection.

Like Massachusetts, the entire state of California is also deemed a “sanctuary” jurisdiction for statewide policies that forbid cooperation between local law enforcement officials and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Newsom’s office told The Associated Press that the upcoming special session for lawmakers will help “Trump-proof” the state’s laws.

In addition to conducting the “largest deportation program in American history,” Trump has also said he would end birthright citizenship for those born on American soil by illegal migrant parents, bring back the Remain in Mexico program, hire more Border Patrol agents and establish a compensation fund for victims of migrant crime.

The president-elect announced late Sunday he was picking former ICE acting director Tom Homan to be the border czar in the new administration, making clear the upcoming administration will be adopting a tough stance on enforcement.

“To anyone who intends to come take away the freedom and opportunity and dignity of Illinoisans, I would remind you that a happy warrior is still a warrior,” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker said during a press conference after Trump’s victory. “You come for my people, you come through me.”

Pritzker said that Illinois will remain a sanctuary state and vowed to take the Trump administration to court if it attempts to withhold federal funds over the issue. The president-elect has pledged to force sanctuary cities to cooperate with immigration authorities by stripping them of federal public safety grants.

Numerous local Democratic elected officials have also signaled that they will do what they can to stymie the president-elect’s immigration agenda, with several members of the Los Angeles City Council saying that they will fast-track the passage of a sanctuary city ordinance, according to the LA Times. The legislation, which is still under review by city attorneys, would prohibit federal immigration enforcement officials from accessing Los Angeles’ databases.

A spokesperson for Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass did not immediately respond to a request for comment when asked by the Daily Caller News Foundation if she would support the bill.

Many liberal organizations have also declared they are ready and waiting to fight the Trump administration tooth and nail, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which has filed over 400 legal actions against Trump and his previous administration since 2016, with a large portion of them targeting immigration directives from Trump’s first term.

“Starting on day one, we’re ready to fight for our civil liberties and civil rights in the courts, in Congress, and in our communities,” the organization stated after Trump’s election victory. “We did it during his first term — filing 434 legal actions against Trump while he was in office — and we’ll do it again.”

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