The Department of Homeland Security allowed reporters to watch a deportation flight Friday as the department ramps up its get-tough messaging ahead of an expected border surge next week.
The flight left southern Texas bound for Guatemala with 133 people aboard — 45 women and 88 men. They were all being expelled under the Title 42 pandemic expulsion authority, officials told journalists.
Title 42 expires along with much of the rest of the government’s pandemic emergency powers, leaving DHS without the most important tool it has had over the past three years to try to limit illegal border activity.
Analysts are bracing for encounters with illegal immigrants to surge from roughly 6,000 a day in March to perhaps twice that number once Title 42 is gone. Homeland Security is trying to adopt a tough posture ahead of the end of Title 42, with the access to a deportation flight coming as part of that campaign.
The flight was operated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Migrants were brought to the airplane in shackles and an official said they remain shackled on the flight. The restraints will be removed once they are in Guatemala, where local authorities take over, an ICE official said.
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Flights run to South America and Central America daily and to the Caribbean weekly, the official said.
If the flights have about the same number of people as Friday’s flight, that works out to just a small fraction of the 6,000-a-day illegal entries.
The Biden administration is catching and releasing most of the others — particularly those from countries that don’t have such extensive cooperation with the U.S. on taking back their deportees.
Once migrants are released, it can take years before they face their first court hearing, much less a final verdict on their immigration cases.
A new inspector general’s report said ICE is having to invest so much effort at the border that it’s cut into the agency’s ability to arrest criminals inside the U.S.
ICE’s deportation force made 92,108 arrests of migrants with criminal convictions in fiscal 2019, during a border surge under then-President Donald Trump. By contrast, ICE’s deportation force logged just 18,173 criminal arrests in the first seven months of fiscal 2022.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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