SAN DIEGO (AP) — Border Patrol arrested Gerardo Henao 14 hours after President Joe Biden suspended asylum proceedings at the U.S. border with Mexico this week. But instead of being summarily deported, the next day officers dropped him off at a bus stop in San Diego, where he took a train to the airport for a flight to Newark, New Jersey.
Henao, who said he left his jewelry store in Medellin, Colombia, due to ongoing extortion attempts, had one thing in his favor: a scarcity of deportation flights to that country. Lack of resources, diplomatic constraints and logistical hurdles make it difficult for the Biden administration to impose its sweeping measure on a large scale.
The policy, which went into effect Wednesday, has an exception for “operational considerations,” official language recognizing that the government lacks the money and authority to deport everyone covered by the measure, especially people from countries in South America, Asia, Africa and Europe that did not. Only recently have they stopped showing up at the border.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a detailed document outlining the ban that “demographics and nationalities encountered at the border have a significant impact” on the country’s ability to deport people.
Thousands of migrants have been deported under the ban so far, according to two senior Department of Homeland Security officials who briefed reporters on Friday on condition they not be named. There were 17 deportation flights, including one to Uzbekistan. The deportees include people from Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Peru and Mexico.
Henao, 59, said a Border Patrol agent told him about the ban after he was picked up Wednesday on a dirt road near a power line in the boulder-strewn mountains east of San Diego. The agent processed the release papers and ordered him to appear in New Jersey immigration court on October 23. He casually asked Henao why he had fled Colombia, but did not continue the questioning.
“It was nothing,” Henao said at a transit center in San Diego, where Border Patrol dropped off four busloads of migrants in a four-hour period Thursday afternoon. “They took my photo, my fingerprints and that was it.”
Many migrants released that day were from China, India, Colombia and Ecuador. One group consisted of men from Mauritania, Sudan and Ethiopia.
“Hello, if you arrive now, you have been released from immigration custody and can go to the airport,” a volunteer with a megaphone said to the migrants as he directed them to a light rail platform across the parking lot. “You can go for free if you don’t have money for a taxi or an Uber.”
Under the measure, asylum will be suspended when the number of arrests for illegal crossings per day reaches 2,500. It ends when the average is below 1,500 for a week.
Border officials were told to give top priority to detaining migrants who could be easily deported, followed by “difficult to remove” nationalities that require at least five days to issue travel documents and then “very difficult to remove” nationalities whose governments do not accept this. American flights.
The instructions were laid out in a memo to officers reported by the New York Post. The Associated Press confirmed its contents with a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the contents have not been publicly released.
Homeland Security has been clear about the hurdles, said Theresa Cardinal Brown, senior adviser for immigration and border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank.
“There is a limit to the resources the government has for detaining and removing people, and especially countries where we have difficulty removing people to because the (other) government is not cooperating,” Brown said. I will not hold them indefinitely.”
According to Witness at the Border, an advocacy group that analyzes flight data, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducted 679 deportation flights from January through May, nearly 60% of them to Guatemala and Honduras. There were 46 flights to Colombia, 42 to Ecuador and 12 to Peru, a relatively small number considering that tens of thousands of people enter illegally from those countries every month.
There were only ten deportation flights during that period to Africa, which has emerged as a major source of migration to the United States. Only one went to China, despite the arrests of almost 13,000 Chinese migrants.
Mexico is the easiest country for removals because it’s just a matter of driving to the nearest border crossing, but Mexicans were responsible for fewer than three in 10 border arrests in the government’s last budget year, down from nine in 10 in 2010. Mexico is also adopting these measures. up to 30,000 people per month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, countries that have limited capacity or willingness to take people back.
Some countries are refusing to accept flights to avoid becoming overwhelmed themselves, Corey Price, then director of ICE enforcement and removal operations, said in an interview last year.
“We don’t drive the bus here,” said Price, who retired last month. “We don’t decide unilaterally: ‘Okay, we’ll send your burger back to you.’ No, that country still has to agree to take them back.”
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Associated Press writer Rebecca Santana in Washington contributed.
