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The Biden administration plans to resume the practice of flying Central American families arrested after entering the country illegally to places along the border that may facilitate their deportation to Mexico, according to government documents obtained by BuzzFeed News.
The effort indicates that Mexico is ready to welcome families in parts of the border that have been returned by U.S. border officials under a Trump-era policy. As part of the process, families from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras – also known as the Northern Triangle – are sent from one location on the border to areas like San Diego or El Paso where authorities can dismiss up to 100 people per day. in Mexico.
The resumption of flights for Northern Triangle families comes months after immigrant advocates said the process added to the trauma of deportations to Mexico as families believed they were allowed to stay in the United States for to be returned to a part of Mexico from which they had not crossed. In May, CBS News reported that the Department of Homeland Security had suspended the use of so-called lateral flights.
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Biden administration is increasingly concerned about the high volumes of immigrants crossing the border and issues in the ability to process them as it deals with the rapid spread of the Delta variant in the United States. Senior DHS official David Shahoulian told a federal court judge this week that the Department of Homeland Security was “likely to have encountered around 210,000 people in July” – the highest monthly number since 2000. “The month of July also probably featured a record number of encounters with unaccompanied children… and the second highest number of encounters with family units,” added Shahoulian.
The surge in numbers was felt severely in the Rio Grande Valley, where Shahoulian said the ability to contain people had been strained. The filing is part of the administration’s reasoning to continue the policy of the Trump era, which led to the deportation of tens of thousands of immigrants to the southern border, including those who fled their home countries and seek protection.
Since March 2020, border officials have used a section of the public health code known as Title 42 to immediately turn back immigrants to the border in order to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Previously, immigrants had the option of claiming fear of being returned to their country of origin, which is not available when deported under Title 42.
“Overcrowding challenges DHS’s ability to effectively carry out many of its key public health mitigation and countermeasures activities. Additionally, higher rates of COVID-19 transmission at a DHS facility could quickly hamper the department’s ability to use that facility’s maximum capacity, further reducing overall processing and storage capacity along the southern border. -west, ”Shahoulian said this week.
The United States has also started sending those deported under Title 42 to southern Mexico, DHS officials said, in an effort to tackle people crossing the border repeatedly. Reuters first reported the news on Thursday.
The number of families crossing the southern border and allowed to stay in the United States has increased after Mexican authorities passed a law prohibiting undocumented immigrant children from being held in their detention centers. Having no space to keep the families in American facilities and Mexico refusing to take them back, they began to be released in the border towns of Texas.
In April, Biden said he was negotiating with the President of Mexico to resolve the issue.
“I think we’ll see that that can change,” he said, adding that the families “should all return” and that only unaccompanied children would be the exception.
The ACLU had been in negotiations with the US government for several months to block the use of Title 42 against families. The ACLU represents six families who fled their country and sought safety in the United States. Those negotiations collapsed this week and the trial is expected to resume.
Before politics, the group argues, families would have been able to seek asylum at the border. Instead, under Title 42 policy, immigrants and families at the border must “affirm” that they fear being tortured in their country of origin in order to have the chance to be examined. to obtain protections.
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