SAN DIEGO — The Border Patrol arrested Gerardo Henao 14 hours after President Joe Biden ordered this week to suspend asylum processing on the United States border with Mexico. But instead of being summarily deported, agents dropped him off the next day at a San Diego bus stop, where he boarded a train to the airport to catch a flight to Newark, New Jersey.
Henao, who left his jewelry business in Medellín, Colombia, due to constant extortion attempts, had one thing going for him: the shortage of flights of deportation to that country. Lack of resources, diplomatic limitations and logistical obstacles make it difficult for Joe Biden’s government to impose its restriction on a large scale.
The policy, which went into effect Wednesday, has an exception for “operational considerations,” official language that acknowledges that the government lacks the money and authority to deport everyone subject to the measure, especially people from South American countries. Asia, Africa and Europe that recently arrived at the border.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a detailed document outlining the ban that “demographics and nationalities encountered at the border significantly impact” its ability to deport people.
Thousands of immigrants have been deported under the ban so far, according to two senior Department of Homeland Security officials who briefed reporters on Friday on the condition that their names not be revealed. There were 17 deportation flights, including one to Uzbekistan. Among those deported are people from Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Peru and Mexico.
Free to take flights
Henao, 59, said a Border Patrol agent told him about the ban. But the agent processed release papers ordering him to appear in immigration court on Oct. 23 in New Jersey. He casually asked Henao why he fled Colombia, but did not pursue that line of questioning.
“It was nothing,” Henao said at a San Diego transit center, where Border Patrol brought in four busloads of migrants in a four-hour span Thursday afternoon. “They took my photo, my fingerprints and that was it.”
Many of the migrants released that day came from China, India, Colombia and Ecuador. One group included men from Mauritania, Sudan and Ethiopia.
“Hello, if you just arrived, you have been released from immigration custody and can go to the airport,” a volunteer with a megaphone told the migrants, directing them to the light rail platform across the parking lot. “They can take it for free if they don’t have money for a taxi or an Uber.”
Biden’s quota
Under the measure, asylum procedures are suspended when arrests for illegal crossings reach 2,500 per day. It ends when your average is below 1,500 for a consecutive week.
Border officials were told to give top priority to detaining immigrants who can be easily deported, followed by “hard-to-remove” nationalities, which require at least five days to be issued travel documents, and then nationalities “ very difficult to expel”, whose governments do not accept flights from the United States.
The instructions are set out in a memo to agents, reported by the New York Post. A US official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because it has not been publicly disclosed, confirmed the contents of the mamorando.
The Department of Homeland Security has been clear about the obstacles, said Theresa Cardinal Brown, senior adviser on immigration and border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank.
“There is a limitation on the resources that the government has for detaining and removing people, and particularly towards countries where we find it difficult to remove people because the (other) government is not cooperating,” Brown explained. “We cannot detain them indefinitely.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) carried out 679 deportation flights between January and May, nearly 60% of them to Guatemala and Honduras, according to Witness at the Border, an advocacy group that analyzes flight data. There were 46 flights to Colombia, 42 to Ecuador and 12 to Peru, a relatively small amount considering that tens of thousands of people enter illegally from those countries every month.
African migration
During that period there were only 10 deportation flights to Africa, which has become a major source of immigration to the United States. There was only one to China, despite the arrests of almost 13,000 Chinese immigrants.
Mexico is the easiest country for deportations because it’s just a matter of driving to the nearest border crossing, but Mexicans accounted for fewer than 3 in 10 border arrests in the government’s last fiscal year, down from 9 in 10 in 2010. Mexico also receives 30,000 people a month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, countries that have limited capacity or willingness to welcome their people back.
Some countries refuse to accept flights to avoid being overwhelmed, Corey Price, then ICE’s director of enforcement and deportation operations, said in an interview last year.
“We have no control in this,” said Price, who retired last month. “We didn’t unilaterally decide, ‘OK, we’ll send your citizen back.’ No, that country has to accept them back.”
Source: With information from AP
