MCALLEN, Texas — At this city’s main airport and others in South Texas, President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security is carrying out secretive and escalating air deportations of tens of thousands of migrant border-crossers, a high percentage of them evidently Central American women and children who were supposed to be protected from deportation and, more recently, Haitians.
The air deportation operations to distant home countries, a tactic that has proven highly effective at deterring follow-on illegal migration, appear to have ferried home significant numbers of migrants who recently crossed the southern border illegally — probably well in excess of 65,000 from August through October and thousands more in November, a Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) analysis of aircraft flight data, direct observation at the McAllen airport, a pilot interview, and other public information indicate.
That may represent a relatively small percentage of the roughly 565,000 total border encounters during this time frame, but merely a decent probability of air deportation flights home has long proven to hold real power to persuade migrants to stay home and especially not to risk fortunes in smuggling money on journeys that go nowhere. The flights, which began in August and have continued at a daily pace through November, happen to coincide with a third consecutive monthly decline in migrant border encounters in October (by a significant 30,000 drop from the September number) after skyrocketing every month from Biden’s election until the flights began.
The August through November flights seem likely to have contributed to those three monthly declines, though the question warrants more exploration. But U.S. Customs and Border Protection data shows that the nationalities with the biggest numerical declines were those who ended up on home country tarmacs messaging about their misfortune on social media: Haitians, Hondurans, and Guatemalans, a review of CBP data by nationality shows.
Beyond their impact on migrant decisions to avoid losing smuggling fee fortunes on trips that might end up back at square one, the fact that tens of thousands of non-Haitian migrant families are being deported aboard the flights holds implications for the ongoing national discussion about how to handle the mass migration crisis of 2021.
Many Americans — and Central Americans, too — might have believed the Biden administration was still legally paroling into the United States almost all migrant families who showed up at the border with at least one child. That was largely the case for the administration’s first six months, a political indulgence that rapidly drove the encounter numbers into historically high territory (1.7 million during fiscal year 2021) as families back home saw hundreds of thousands of predecessors quickly gain U.S. entry and felt emboldened to bet their own smuggling fees. The catch-and-release practice continues even now at a significant level.
