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

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.
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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