President Joe Biden has denied that his administration was considering a massive deportation operation that would entail returning to Mexico immigrants who illegally crossed the southern border.
In an interview with Spanish media during his visit to Florida on Thursday, Biden told Telemundo that a Washington Post story in which administration officials alleged the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was negotiating with the Mexican government to take back immigrants was “completely wrong.”
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Such an undertaking has never been done to this extent and was rumored as the potential plan for how to handle the anticipated surge of immigrants at the border once pandemic policy Title 42 ends and immigrants are no longer eligible to be pushed back across the border rather than being taken into custody, potentially as soon as this spring.
“To be clear, you are not considering and would not consider mass deporting non-Mexican immigrants to Mexico,” Telemundo’s Julio Vaqueiro asked.
“I’m saying we haven’t done that,” Biden said.
“But would you consider it in the future once Title 42 is lifted?” asked the reporter.
“I don’t think we have to do that; we don’t have to consider that,” said Biden.
Biden pointed to a more recent move by his administration to bar illegal immigrants from four countries from being released into the United States. Instead, the DHS had rolled out a phone app in which immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela can apply from outside the U.S. to be paroled into the country if they have a U.S. sponsor. Approximately 120,000 immigrants from those four countries may be paroled into the country each month.
“Immigration, the number of people coming in, has been reduced by more than 90% because there is a regular way to do it now,” Biden said about the number of illegal immigrant arrests of people from those four countries since early January. However, because the procedure was created through means other than Congress, it has already been legally challenged by Republican-run states who claimed it was an overreach of executive power.
The Washington Post report stated that the Biden administration planned to return to a pre-existing procedure called expedited removal, allowing the government to fly immigrants to Mexico swiftly. Expedited removal allows the Border Patrol not to detain immigrants for days and has been used by previous administrations.
U.S. border officials continue to see increases in the number of noncitizens encountered at the southern border. In December 2022, federal law enforcement encountered more than 300,000 people who attempted to enter the country without permission.
In December 2022, the Biden administration expelled 20% of illegal immigrants at the southern border under Title 42 compared to December 2020, when former President Donald Trump’s DHS expelled 80% of illegal immigrants.
Frustrated House Republicans have weighed opening an impeachment inquiry into DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, concerned that the Biden administration does not have an adequate plan in place for how to handle the anticipated surge once a pandemic policy ends, potentially as soon as this spring.
During a House Committee on Oversight and Accountability hearing earlier this week, Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX) asked one of the Border Patrol witnesses if repatriation flights that returned immigrants to their countries of origin from the border were something that “worked” to deter more illegal immigration.
“Yes, sir. They do work for us,” said Gloria Chavez, chief patrol agent for the Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley region in Texas.
“Damn right they do,” said Gonzales. “A repatriation flight is when, when someone who does not qualify for asylum gets put on a plane. They don’t, they don’t get flown to New York or Chicago or Washington, D.C. They get flown to Haiti or El Salvador, or Guatemala. They absolutely work. When there were 15,000 Haitians under a bridge in Del Rio, what stopped that was literally around 2,000 — it wasn’t the whole 15,000, it was about 2,000 — people that were flown back to Haiti and all of a sudden [the illegal crossings] stopped.”
A DHS spokeswoman denied earlier this week that the U.S. was seeking a deal with Mexico to allow the mass deportation flights.
“Reports that we are considering mass deportations of non-Mexicans to Mexico are false,” said DHS spokeswoman Marsha Catron in a Twitter post Thursday. “We’re continuing to work closely with govt of Mexico to implement our successful border enforcement plan which has already resulted in lowest encounter numbers between ports of entry in 2yrs.”
At the conclusion of the interview, Biden was asked how he was doing learning Spanish.
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“Terrible,” Biden said, adding that his wife, Jill, was working on hers.
Biden also said he planned to eat guacamole while he watches the Super Bowl Sunday.
