“How could Biden do this to us?” Haitian migrant Sonia Piard asked reporters after being forced off a chartered plane in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. “We did not know we were going back to Haiti,” Piard continued. “Nobody told us we were going back to Haiti.”
Piard is just one of hundreds, but soon to be thousands, of Haitian migrants who will be flown back to Haiti from the United States after living throughout Central and South America for almost a decade. They are victims of a Biden administration catastrophically but characteristically out of touch with the chaos that their open-borders policies have created and dangerously desperate to restore order.
Approximately 10,000 migrants, mostly Haitians, are now living in a shantytown under the International Bridge in Del Rio, Texas. Still more are coming every day. They have traveled thousands of miles from countries including Chile, Bolivia, Peru, and Panama, responding to President Joe Biden’s irresponsible campaign suggestion to unhappy people around the world: “You should come.”
As the migrants first started to arrive in Del Rio, they were treated like other illegal border-crossers under the Biden administration. They were detained, processed, given notices to appear in immigration court, and then released to go wherever they wanted into the U.S. They know that it will take years for their asylum claims to be adjudicated in court and that even if they do eventually lose, the Biden administration has promised not to deport them. They will be free to stay as illegal immigrants until Democrats in Congress give them amnesty.
But the migrants kept coming to Del Rio faster than Customs and Border Protection agents could process them. CBP started giving numbered tickets to waiting migrants, as if our border were a full-service deli. What had been a few hundred migrants became a thousand, then a few thousand, and then ten thousand and more.
The camp has no running water and only a few portable toilets, nowhere near enough. Used diapers, chicken bones, and used food containers are scattered everywhere. Local authorities are making 20 to 40 arrests a day, a number that the local town of 35,000 is not equipped to handle.
After trying to ignore this crisis for a week, the Biden administration finally took action last Friday, announcing that some migrants would be flown back to Haiti to deter others from coming. This is a cruel and arbitrary reversal of course.
Most of these migrants have been living successfully outside Haiti for a decade. They have no desire to return to a country they fled 10 years ago and which was devastated by a massive earthquake last month.
But, after enticing them to travel thousands of miles from safe third countries with a promise not to deport them for lacking proper documentation, Biden is now breaking his word and dispatching them to the one place they don’t want to go. “For these people, Haiti is hell,” Haiti’s head of migration Jean Negot Bonheur Delva told reporters.
Biden did not set this trap intentionally. He did not begin with the idea of tricking Haitians into traveling across Central and South America and into the U.S. so he could force them back to Haiti. But he brought this on the country with culpable negligence. He ended President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, slashed Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportations, and adopted a policy of denial and flat-footedness. All these resulted in his being caught completely by surprise by the resulting humanitarian catastrophe.
Most Haitian migrants currently in Del Rio had been waiting for months in Mexico’s southern state of Chiapas. Then they were allowed north by Mexican officials during Mexico’s independence week. If Biden had just kept the “Remain in Mexico” policy, they could be waiting in Mexico still. Instead, they are back in the last place on Earth they want to be.
