Staff Reports
The Border Patrol arrested a man named Gerardo Henao 14 hours after President Joe Biden stopped processing asylum requests at the U.S. border with Mexico this week. Instead of sending him back right away, they let him go to a bus stop in San Diego the next day. Henao said he left his jewelry business in Colombia because people kept trying to extort money from him. The Biden administration can't deport everyone because it costs too much money, and they don't have the power to do it, especially people from countries in South America, Asia, Africa, and Europe who have only recently started coming to the border.
The Department of Homeland Security said that the types of people they encounter at the border make it hard for them to send everyone back. So far, thousands of migrants have been sent back, including people from Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Peru, and Mexico. Henao, 59, was told about the asylum stop when he was caught by the Border Patrol. They let him go and told him to come back to court in October in New Jersey.
Some nationalities escape Biden’s sweeping asylum ban because deportation flights are scarce | AP
DHS memo says “demographics and nationalities encountered at the border significantly impact its ability to deport people”https://t.co/fMudgEmKsg
— Kim “filterless” Wexler MA JD (@KimWexlerMAJD) June 10, 2024
There were a lot of other migrants let go that day, too, including people from China, India, Colombia, and Ecuador, as well as others from Mauritania, Sudan, and Ethiopia. President Biden's rule to stop asylum starts when there are 2,500 arrests a day and ends when the average number of arrests goes below 1,500 for a week. They told border officials to catch and keep people who can be sent back easily first, then people from countries that need more time to get travel papers, and then people from countries that are very hard to send back.
Theresa Cardinal Brown, who is an advisor for immigration and border policy, said that the government doesn't have enough resources to keep and send back everyone, especially people from countries that won't take their citizens back. From January to May, the U.S. sent almost 700 flights to deport people, with most of them going to Guatemala and Honduras. Only ten flights went to Africa, and just one went to China, even though there were a lot of Chinese people who were arrested.
Mexico is the easiest country to send people back to, but not as many Mexicans are being arrested as before.
Not all countries want to take back their citizens, even when the U.S. wants to send them back. So, it's hard for the U.S. to deport everyone they catch at the border.
