illegal immigration
Biden’s U-Turn On Deporting Illegal Immigrants Will Last Only Until Election Day

BY: TODD BENSMAN
As published July 12, 2024 by The Federalist
The Biden administration knows a deportation airlift will serve the self-interest of winning reelection on Nov. 5 if done at scale.
In both my books on the border, I offer the same remedy for halting the multinational onslaught of immigrant strangers transiting the infamous “Darien Gap” between Colombia and Panama en route to the besieged southwest U.S. border.
The Darien Gap passageway is a jungled 70-mile bottleneck of wilderness and foot trails, through which an estimated 1.5 million of more than 10 million illegal immigrants from around the world have crossed the U.S. border in the past three years. An American government that really wants to shutter the passage must fund a large-scale deportation airlift from Panama, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Mexico all at once, I advised in my 2021 book, America’s Covert Border War, The Untold Story of The Nation’s Battle to Prevent Jihadist Infiltration.
“The United States should demand that these countries … install a U.S.-funded infrastructure that would fly all immigrants to origin countries anywhere in the world, on national security grounds,” I again recommended in a second 2023 book, Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.
No Republican border hawk ever took my homeland security-bolstering recommendation seriously, as I had hoped.
But to my very great surprise, the most mass-migration-friendly administration in American history, Joe Biden’s, the one that has widened the Darien Gap passage from a mere country lane into a superhighway, has now announced that it will be the one to put my deportation airlift idea into action, at least in Panama.
Not because the Democrat administration ran with my idea or that I’m some sort of policy genius, but because the administration knows a deportation airlift will serve the self-interest of winning reelection on Nov. 5 if done at scale, and because this remedy was obvious to just about anyone with a brain.
“United States Signs Arrangement with Panama to Implement Removal Flight Program,” reads the headline of the Department of Homeland Security’s July 1, 2024, announcement. Details remain scant, but the statement goes on to quote Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas saying that his new partnership with Panama will “manage the historic levels of migration” pouring over the U.S. border for three years.
The Darien Gap passage is a major contributing gusher in the worst mass migration crisis in U.S. history, funneling millions of illegal immigrants through an unlocked turnstile to find their forever homes. Whereas fewer than 20,000 economic immigrants per year ever passed through the Colombia-Panama passage before Biden policies unleashed the current mass migration on inauguration day of 2021, 250,000 passed through it in 2022, 520,000 last year, and a projected 800,000 by the end of 2024.
National Security Threat
The multinational diversity of those passing through the gap from more than 160 nations is a unique affront to U.S. national interests, as border crossers may include Islamic terrorists from Muslim-majority nations, human rights violators from Africa, and spies from adversarial nations such as Russia and China.
Terrorists, spies, and warlords are of little concern to the Biden administration. It has only ever orchestrated the conversion of the Darien Gap into the world’s most trammeled immigrant thruway under its lenient “safe, orderly, and humane” immigration policies.
So the Biden administration’s deportation airlift plan constitutes a stunning, 180-degree policy U-turn.
In 2022, for instance, Mayorkas and Secretary of State Antony Blinken pressured the Panamanian government to open a shorter sea and river route, built larger and new hospitality rest camps to accommodate the increase, and arranged for dozens of United Nations and nonprofit migrant advocacy groups to provide all manner of aid and assistance. These moves induced hundreds of thousands more border crossers per year to make the trip.
Now, the Biden administration will replace its “safe, orderly and humane” mantra of just five minutes ago with the new “safe, humane repatriation” one. Why a deportation airlift, and why now?
Election Concerns
The short answer is that the administration needs to slow the southern border flow to help it keep the White House in the Democrat Party’s hands.
The party well knows polls regularly show that voters regard Biden’s three-year-long mass migration border crisis as an apex-level problem for which they’ll punish him and reward Donald Trump in the upcoming presidential election.
The campaign wants controls in place to reduce anticipated desperate last-chance border rushes as Election Day approaches — immigrants will want to reach the American border before a possibly victorious Donald Trump slams the gates shut.
Panama’s New Approach
And just when it needed a solution most, the administration lucked into a most unexpected damage-control opportunity: Panama elected President Jose Raul Mulino on his keynote promise to “close” the Darien Gap and to get the U.S. to help pay for repatriation flights.
“The border of the United States, instead of being in Texas, moved to Panama,” said Mulino, who served as security minister under former president Ricardo Martinelli. “We’re going to repatriate all those people.”
That’s a major U-turn for Panama. For years, the Panamanian government employed “controlled flow” policy bus trips that transported immigrants exiting the Darien Gap toward the American border.
“I won’t allow Panama to be an open path for thousands of people who enter our country illegally, supported by an international organization [the United Nations] related to drug trafficking and human trafficking,” Mulino said at his July 1 swearing-in, attended by Mayorkas. He appears to be serious. For the first time, Panama is already stringing barbed wire to block the major trails, NBC News reports.
Mayorkas jumped at the opportunity to help Mulino — at least during the period of anticipated surges just before the election.
The number of illegal crossings along the southern border will surely drop sharply if the U.S.-Panama deal works out, an almost certain boon to the Biden campaign that they will repeatedly claim as an achievement — until Nov. 5.
This isn’t the Biden campaign’s first such move to suppress expected preelection surges and to claim the positive result to diminish those terrible polling numbers on illegal immigration for immediate political advantage.
Mexico Acts
After record crossings last fall (all-time records of 10,000-14,000 per day) produced terrible polls, Biden paid an official state visit to Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez-Obrador in Mexico City to discuss the torrential immigration flows. Mayorkas and Blinken followed up after Christmas.
Almost immediately, as I was the first and only one to report for many months, on Jan. 17, Lopez-Obrador deployed 35,000 regular army troops, who began rounding up tens of thousands of illegal immigrants in relentless sweeps of northern border towns. The Mexicans forced them onto planes and buses. They were shipped 1,500 miles south and entrapped in southern provinces behind militarized roadblocks and bureaucracy. Crossings fell by as much as 80 percent initially.
That wasn’t all the Mexicans did, but the resulting illegal crossings slowdown became as immediately apparent as the Biden administration’s ability to have had Mexico do this at any time during the three-year mass migration cataclysm.
President Biden and his deputies have been emphasizing the decline ever since, including during the otherwise disastrous televised debate with Trump.
Look for much more noisy political messaging about even more declines if the Darien Gap closure further reduces the flow at the U.S. border, as it very well might.
A Biden Reelection Would Revert to Lack of Enforcement
But all of this is a paper tiger. No one should expect the Biden administration, should it win the election, to sustain the Mexico or Darien Gap crackdowns beyond Nov. 5. Their leftist wing engineered the whole crisis from the beginning because they believe in unimpeded migration and disdain enforcement, as I explain elaborately in Overrun.
If the Democrats win the White House, look for them to develop new diplomatic “beefs” with President Mulino, ala Hungary’s Viktor Orban, as an excuse to shutter U.S. funding for any deportation airlift.
But there’s a silver lining for border hawks here. If Trump wins, he can build mightily on the preparations that Biden’s campaign managers are beginning now.
illegal immigration
Trump border czar dismisses Pope’s attack on immigration policy

From LifeSiteNews
By Michael Haynes, Snr. Vatican Correspondent
Despite Pope Francis’ critique of Trump’s plans to secure the U.S. border, the Vatican City State recently enacted stringent border laws of its own… the new laws state that those who break into the Vatican City State territory unlawfully shall be handed a jail term of between one and five years, and a fine of €10,000 to €25,000.
President Donald Trump’s border czar Tom Homan robustly rejected Pope Francis’ criticism of the administration’s border policies, saying the Pope “ought to fix the Catholic Church and concentrate on his work and leave border enforcement to us.”
Speaking to reporters outside the White House last night, Homan issued succinct comments on Pope Francis’ surprise letter sent yesterday to the U.S. bishops.
“I’ve got harsh words for the Pope. The Pope ought to fix the Catholic Church,” began Homan.
“I’m saying this as a lifelong Catholic: I was baptized Catholic, [had] my first Communion as a Catholic, confirmation as a Catholic. He ought to fix the Catholic Church and concentrate on his work and leave border enforcement to us,” added Homan.
Continuing, the border czar implied the Pope was hypocritical in his denunciation of the U.S. policy, saying “he wants to attack us securing our border? He has got a wall around the Vatican, does he not? So he has a wall to protect his people and himself, but we can’t have a wall around the United States.”
“I wish he’d stick to the Catholic Church and fix that and leave border enforcement to us,” Homan closed.
Homan’s comments came hours after the Vatican published an open letter from Pope Francis to the U.S. Catholic bishops.
Francis referred to the “major crisis” of the Trump administration’s policies regarding illegal immigrants, and rejected the notion that breaking U.S. border laws makes people criminals.
“The rightly formed conscience cannot fail to make a critical judgment and express its disagreement with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality,” wrote Francis. “At the same time, one must recognize the right of a nation to defend itself and keep communities safe from those who have committed violent or serious crimes while in the country or prior to arrival.”
Francis added that deporting individuals “damages the dignity of many men and women” if they left their native country for “reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment.”
He also rejected comments made by Vice President JD Vance about the “ordo amoris,” saying instead that an “infinite dignity” of man should motivate border policies to be more permissive, and formed on love that “builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”
Following Trump’s inauguration, the new administration announced steps to tackle the “border crisis” as numbers of illegal immigrants have swelled in the nation.
Trump’s White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that “all” of the illegal immigrants arrested by U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) are criminals “because they illegally broke our nation’s laws, and therefore, they are criminals as far as this administration goes.”
Since then much of the mainstream narrative has presented Trump as enacting mass deportations and an ethnic cleansing of the U.S. in terms of his plans to remove illegal immigrants.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security stated February 3 that only 5,693 immigrants had been removed from the country since January 20. Reuters reports that since January 20, Mexico has received some 11,000 migrants back to the country and onwards to Honduras, as of February 7.
By contrast, Homeland Security data show that 4.7 million illegal immigrants were repatriated under the Biden administration’s years of 2021 through 2024. Conflicting data reports cloud the matter, with the Migration Policy Institute suggesting a lower figure, and that Biden matched Trump’s first term and deported around 1.5 million illegal migrants.
Homan’s office of U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s own 2024 report shows that enforcement and removal operations saw over 270,000 people repatriated in 2024, as ICE “removed more people without legal basis to remain in the United States than it did in any other fiscal year since 2015.”
While month-by-month data is unavailable before October 2013, total figures document that Obama saw 5.2 million deportations in his two terms, which was around half that of President George W. Bush and less than half of President Bill Clinton.
In contrast, monthly deportations under Biden far exceeded those made by Obama during his second term, suggesting that the invective directed against Trump’s deportation plans is not taking into account the historical record of his predecessors in the White House on the issue.
Somewhat little reported is that, despite Pope Francis’ critique of Trump’s plans to secure the U.S. border, the Vatican City State recently enacted stringent border laws of its own. Issued quietly late December 2024, the new laws state that those who break into the Vatican City State territory unlawfully shall be handed a jail term of between one and five years, and a fine of €10,000 to €25,000 ($10,300 to $25,800).
But if extenuating circumstances are involved and the perpetrator uses guns, vehicles, disguises, or is in a group, then the penalties are increased.
Pope Francis slated @realDonaldTrump' border policy
But in Dec the Vatican quietly made a base penalty of betw 1-4yrs in jail & €10k – €25k fine for anyone illegally entering Vatican City state.
Penalties increase if offender uses guns, vehicles, disguises, or is in a group https://t.co/OFj7iHET2G pic.twitter.com/YvTZ4ceAoY
— Michael Haynes 🇻🇦 (@MLJHaynes) February 11, 2025
The Vatican City State is largely surrounded by the border wall, with the notable exception being, of course, St. Peter’s Basilica; however, even though the Basilica is readily accessible to tourists, entry is subject to security checks akin to those found at airports. Anyone attempting to bypass security at the border is swiftly ejected or taken into custody.
Business
FEMA Quietly Slid $59 Million Out The Door For Illegal Migrants To Put Their Feet Up At ‘Luxury Hotels’: Musk

From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Jason Hopkins
“That money is meant for American disaster relief and instead is being spent on high end hotels for illegals!” he continued. “A clawback demand will be made today to recoup those funds.”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) handed out $59 million to “luxury” hotels in New York City to house illegal migrants, Elon Musk said Monday.
Musk — who leads the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a temporary agency within the Trump administration tasked with weeding out frivolous spending by the federal government — said it was his DOGE team that made the discovery. The top White House official said the payment was in violation of President Donald Trump’s executive order and efforts would be made to recover the funds.
“The @DOGE team just discovered that FEMA sent $59M LAST WEEK to luxury hotels in New York City to house illegal migrants,” Musk posted on X. “Sending this money violated the law and is in gross insubordination to the President’s executive order.”
“That money is meant for American disaster relief and instead is being spent on high end hotels for illegals!” he continued. “A clawback demand will be made today to recoup those funds.”
The details around the alleged payout are not completely clear. FEMA did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation, nor did a spokesperson for DOGE.
Former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre in October denied the Biden administration was using FEMA funds for migrant accommodations, but in 2022 she suggested that the agency was assisting cities with the migrant crisis.
On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order that placed a temporary suspension on refugee resettlement into the United States. The president additionally noted how some major cities, like New York City and Chicago, have requested federal aid to help manage the massive influx of migrants entering their jurisdictions.
The president additionally signed an executive order placing a freeze on federal grants and loans as it conducts a review of the government’s spending, but that order has since been blocked by the courts.
However, New York City officials have a long history of placing illegal migrants into four-star hotels as they’ve struggled to find accommodations for the sheer number of asylum seekers flocking to the Big Apple.
New York City began housing migrants in the four-star Collective Paper Factory hotel around August 2023 after it was reorganized into a Department of Homeless Services emergency shelter. The five-story Collective Paper Factory itself is equipped with a restaurant, a gym, a bar, meeting rooms for guests and communal spaces.
The “chic” Square Hotel was converted into housing for migrants. Other “upscale” hotels in the Big Apple have also been converted into migrant housing in the past as city officials continue to deal with the migrant crisis, including The Row, which has also been described as a “four-star hotel.”
“A 4-star hotel is considered luxury lodging,” according to Kayak, a company that provides hotel booking services. “Guest rooms are noticeably more spacious, with top-quality linens, pillowtop mattresses, bathrobes, slippers, minibars, and upscale toiletries, plus equipped kitchens.”
NYC’s Department of Homeless Services was reportedly seeking a contract with local hotels to provide roughly 14,000 rooms in order to shelter migrants through 2025. City officials anticipated spending on migrants in need of housing for the current fiscal year and the past two years combined will exceed $2.3 billion, with a significant amount of these costs going toward hotel rent.
The Big Apple — a sanctuary city jurisdiction with strict laws restricting cooperation between local law enforcement and Immigration and Customs Enforcement — has become a major destination for the massive number of illegal migrants who’ve flocked into the United States. Roughly 230,000 migrants have arrived in NYC since the spring of 2022, according to data provided by the mayor’s office.
FEMA underwent an internal investigation in November after it was uncovered that a supervisor reportedly instructed disaster relief workers deployed in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton to avoid houses with Trump signs.
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