SAN DIEGO – Border Patrol arrested Gerardo Henao 14 hours after President Joe Biden suspended asylum processing at the US-Mexico border this week. But instead of being summarily deported, he was dropped off by agents the next day at a bus stop in San Diego, where he caught a train to the airport for a flight to Newark, New Jersey.
Henao, who said he abandoned his jewelry business in Medellín, Colombia, because of constant extortion attempts, had one thing going for him: the scarcity of deportation flights to that country. Lack of resources, diplomatic constraints and logistical obstacles make it difficult for the Biden administration to impose its sweeping measure on a large scale.
The politicswhich took effect on Wednesday, has an exception for “operational considerations”, official language that recognizes that the government does not have the money and authority to deport everyone subject to the measure, especially people from countries in South America, Asia, Africa and Europe that did not do so. began to appear on the border until recently.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a detailed document outlining the ban that “the demographics and nationalities encountered at the border have a significant impact” on its 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 Friday on the condition they not be identified. 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 stopped Wednesday on a dirt road near a power line in the boulder-strewn mountains east of San Diego. The agent processed release documents ordering him to appear in immigration court on October 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 dropped off four buses full of migrants over a four-hour period on Thursday afternoon. “They took my photo, my fingerprints and that was it.”
Many migrants released that day came from China, India, Colombia and Ecuador. One group included men from Mauritania, Sudan and Ethiopia.
“Hello, if you are arriving now, you have been released from immigration custody and can go to the airport,” a volunteer with a megaphone told the migrants, directing them to a light rail platform on the other side of the parking lot. “You can go for free if you don’t have money for a taxi or Uber.”
Under the measure, asylum is suspended when arrests for illegal crossings reach 2,500 per day. It ends when the average is below 1,500 for a consecutive week.
Border officials have been instructed to give the highest priority to detaining migrants who can be easily deported, followed by “hard to remove” nationalities that require at least five days to issue travel documents, and then “very difficult to remove” nationalities. to remove” whose governments do not accept Flights in the USA.
The instructions are set out in a memo to agents reported by the New York Post. The Associated Press confirmed its contents with a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity because it has not been released publicly.
Homeland Security has been clear about the obstacles, said Theresa Cardinal Brown, senior adviser for immigration and border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank.
“There is a limitation in the resources that the government has for detaining and removing people, and in particular for countries that we have difficulty removing people to because the (other) government is not cooperating,” Brown said. We will not detain them indefinitely.”
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducted 679 deportation flights from January through 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 number considering that tens of thousands of people enter these countries illegally every month.
There were only 10 deportation flights during that period to Africa, which has emerged as a major source of migration to the United States. There was only one for Chinadespite the detentions of nearly 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 3 in 10 border arrests in the government’s last fiscal year, down from 9 up from 10 in 2010. Mexico also takes in 30,000 people a month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, countries that have limited capacity or willingness to take people back.
Some countries refuse to accept flights to avoid being overwhelmed, Corey Price, then ICE’s director of enforcement and removal operations, said in an interview last year.
“We don’t drive buses in this,” said Price, who retired last month. “We don’t unilaterally decide, ‘OK, we’re sending your citizen back to you.’ No, this country still has to agree to take them back.”
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Associated Press writer Rebecca Santana in Washington contributed.
