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.
Todd Bensman is a Texas-based senior national security fellow for the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington D.C.-based research institute, and a writing fellow for the Middle East Forum. His latest book is “Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History” (Bombardier Books). For nearly a decade, Bensman led counterterrorism-related intelligence efforts for the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division. Follow him on Twitter @BensmanTodd.
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Protests in Los Angeles continued into Thursday night as tensions died down across the West Coast ahead of thousands of anti-Trump demonstrations planned for Saturday — the “No Kings Day” event is set to take place coast-to-coast amid civil unrest nationwide.
The Los Angeles Police Department posted to X as the 8 p.m. curfew went into effect Thursday, reporting that protesters were throwing “bricks, concrete and commercial grade fireworks.” The agency said less lethal munitions have been authorized and “may cause pain and discomfort.
The curfew covers an area where demonstrators have spent days protesting President Donald Trump’s immigration raids and the deployment of the California National Guard. A federal judge blocked his use of the guard late Thursday, but did not rule on the Marines also deployed there.
Gov. Gavin Newsom held a press conference in San Francisco shortly after the ruling, calling out Trump for deploying the guard without his consent. U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer’s preliminary injunction takes effect Friday, at which point Newsom will resume control of his National Guard.
“This is what he does. He creates a problem, and then he tries to be a hero in his own Marvel movie. He initiated those raids,” Newsom said of Trump’s actions. “He significantly increased the scale and scope of those raids. That’s why he wants the National Guard, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of guardsmen and women, now being dispersed everywhere.”
The Trump administration filed an intent to appeal Breyer’s ruling shortly after. In the meantime, the guard will go back to its regular duties on Friday instead of guarding the federal immigration in downtown Los Angeles, only one day before thousands of protests nationwide against Trump.
According to a press release, the LAPD arrested 71 people for failure to disperse Wednesday night into Thursday morning, and intends to post another update Friday morning. Seven others were also arrested for violating the curfew, and two for assaulting an officer with a deadly weapon.
Protesters filmed live streams on YouTube leading up to the curfew, reporting that some people were arrested and that they heard munitions being fired. Some demonstrators encouraged the group to disperse, adding that escalating things may be what the administration is waiting for.
The Los Angeles Department of Transportation posted to social media Thursday evening that it had cut services short for the day in response to the protests. LAPD vehicles were seen lining the streets, with officers ready to issue arrests in the event of further unrest or curfew violations.
In some live streams, officers were seen issuing arrests just 30 minutes after the 8 p.m. curfew, and in some instances, towing away vehicles. Another protest in Salt Lake City, Utah, kicked off at 6 p.m. on Thursday after the Party for Socialism & Liberation called for demonstrations there.
The Salt Lake Police Department told KSL News Radio that the demonstration of roughly 600 people was mostly peaceful, aside from a damaged Tesla. Officers broke up some fights and remained on scene as it died down around 8:30 p.m., Brian Will with KUTV 2 News reported.
“So we’re going to have an order on that pretty soon – we can’t do that to our farmers and leisure too, hotels, we’re going to have to use a lot of common sense on that.”
President Donald Trump said Thursday that changes are coming to his aggressive immigration policies after complaints from farmers and business owners.
“Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” Trump wrote in a social media post Thursday morning. “In many cases the Criminals allowed into our Country by the VERY Stupid Biden Open Borders Policy are applying for those jobs. This is not good. We must protect our Farmers, but get the CRIMINALS OUT OF THE USA. Changes are coming!”
Later Thursday, Trump made it clear that businesses need workers.
“Our farmers are being hurt badly. They have very good workers – they’re not citizens, but they’ve turned out to be great. And we’re going to have to do something about that,” the president said.
He added: “We can’t take farmers and take all their people and send them back because they don’t have, maybe, what they’re supposed to have.”
Just how Trump may change his approach to immigration enforcement remains unclear, but he said he wants to help farmers and business owners.
“You go into a farm and you look and people, they’ve been there for 20 or 25 years and they work great and the owner of the farm loves them and you’re supposed to throw them out. You know what happens? They end up hiring the criminals that have come in, the murderers from prisons and everything else,” Trump said.
Trump said changes would be coming soon, but gave little detail on how policies could change.
“So we’re going to have an order on that pretty soon – we can’t do that to our farmers and leisure too, hotels, we’re going to have to use a lot of common sense on that.”
In a later post on Truth Social, Trump said illegal immigration had destroyed American institutions.
“Biden let 21 Million Unvetted, Illegal Aliens flood into the Country from some of the most dangerous and dysfunctional Nations on Earth — Many of them Rapists, Murderers, and Terrorists. This tsunami of Illegals has destroyed Americans’ Public Schools, Hospitals, Parks, Community Resources, and Living Conditions,” the president wrote. “They have stolen American Jobs, consumed BILLIONS OF DOLLARS in Free Welfare, and turned once idyllic Communities, like Springfield, Ohio, into Third World Nightmares.”
He added that deportations would continue: “I campaigned on, and received a Historic Mandate for, the largest Mass Deportation Program in American History. Polling shows overwhelming Public Support for getting the Illegals out, and that is exactly what we will do. As Commander-in-Chief, I will always protect and defend the Heroes of ICE and Border Patrol, whose work has already resulted in the Most Secure Border in American History. Anyone who assaults or attacks an ICE or Border Agent will do hard time in jail. Those who are here illegally should either self deport using the CBP Home App or, ICE will find you and remove you. Saving America is not negotiable!”
