US Deports Over 1,000 Haitians But DHS Declines to Say How Many Released in America By Charlotte Cuthbertson and Zachary Stieberhttps
The United States has deported more than 1,000 Haitians who streamed into the small border city of Del Rio, Texas, although officials are refusing to say how many others have been released into America’s interior.
The number of illegal immigrants, primarily from Haiti, rapidly grew under the international bridge near the border last week, at one point topping 14,000. The quick jump sparked the deployment of more than 600 agents and officers, as well as repatriation flights to Haiti.
U.S. officials have since moved more than 6,500 people from Del Rio to other parts of the border in an attempt to alleviate pressure. Approximately 1,083 have been deported back to Haiti on nine flights through Sept. 21, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email.
Others are being released into the interior. How many is unclear, because DHS officials aren’t saying.
The same spokesperson declined to answer questions about those being released, while Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, both offices within DHS, referred The Epoch Times to DHS.
DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has twice this week declined before Congress to share data about the number of illegal immigrants being released. On Sept. 21, he told senators in Washington he didn’t have the precise numbers and wanted to wait so he could provide accurate information; on Sept. 22, he again said he didn’t have the data.
“Yesterday, you were asked exactly the same question and you gave exactly the same answer. You would think you would be a little better prepared now that you’ve been asked that question. … You don’t have that information?” Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-Fla.) wondered.
“I work 18 hours a day. So when I returned from yesterday’s hearing, I actually focused on the mission,” a testy Mayorkas responded. “We will get that data both to the senator who posed it yesterday and to you, congressman, today.”
The Problem With Canada
By David Solway
- https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2021/09/22/the-problem-with-canada-n1480521
The results of the recent and utterly unnecessary Canadian election, called two years before the expiry of a four-year term and returning Justin Trudeau’s Liberals to the same minority government status as before, were not unexpected. Indeed, they were graven in stone—a tombstone, I’m tempted to say.
Although the slogan “the natural governing party” has been applied to the Liberals since the lengthy administrations of William Lyon Mackenzie King, there have been thirteen Conservative prime ministers since the nation’s founding, including the architect of Confederation, John A. Macdonald. Nonetheless, Canada is no longer a conservative country. The one party true to conservative precepts and practices—belief in personal responsibility, freedom of choice, low taxes, small government, freedom of expression, a balanced budget, border integrity, energy self-sufficiency, and more—the People’s Party of Canada led by the principled Max Bernier finished out of the running—a scathing judgment on an anemic and ungrateful country.
In fact, according to Justin Trudeau, Canada has no “core identity,” and he is probably right. Given a reasonably affluent electorate having taken its freedoms and privileges for granted and growing increasingly apathetic; a vote-rich portion of the country bought off by transfer payments from Western Canada, principally Alberta, to the Eastern provinces, primarily Quebec and the Maritimes; a species of internal balkanization owing to massive immigration; and the socialist march through the institutions, Canada’s traditional coherence and national character—with the exception of irridentist Quebec that never regarded itself as part of the Confederation—have undergone a sea-change. The country I once knew is no longer recognizable.
A political, social, and cultural upheaval has established a new and historically unprecedented dispensation. With few exceptions, our leadership, provincial as well as federal, has sold its stewardship for a mess of pottage. The electorate has been suborned by bribes—that is, government largesse sourced from foreign borrowing, the minting of fiat currency, and subventions gouged from the public’s own tax payments. Citizens have succumbed to the temptation of ethnic and sectorial advantages at the cost of national unity. And over the last years, the nation could not resist the glamor of a dynastic name and the Teflon superficiality of an incumbent prime minister.
We were—and are—wrong. A shallow, corrupt, and clapter politician, Justin Trudeau is not and never was prime ministerial material. There is nothing genuine or praiseworthy about this latest Trudeau iteration, despite the puffery of a battery of stringer journalists, as evidenced, for example, in a sycophantic piece by Jonathan Kay in Canada’s leftist literary journal The Walrus, painfully titled “The Justin Trudeau I Can’t Forget.” Even the presumably wise and pensive Conrad Black made a substantial donation to the Liberal Party in 2015 and extolled Trudeau rather extravagantly—”flexible in public finance…a very alluring personality, a quick intelligence and an apparently reasonable combination of principle and openness”—before changing his solemn opinion rather dramatically.
A prime minister who once enjoyed dressing up in blackface; who is on record admiring the “basic dictatorship” of China; who preposterously stated that “the budget will balance itself” and recently said he “doesn’t think about monetary policy”; who put his country of 38 million souls into trillion-dollar-plus debt with a budget deficit of hundreds of billions; who hiked an already onerous and needless carbon tax in the midst of a pandemic; who is intent on introducing legislation restricting Internet access and shutting down free speech (there is no First Amendment in Canada), in the form of Bill C-10 and C-36 (the latter to fight “hate online,” a convenient way to control speech); and who is legislating vaccine passports in flagrant contradiction of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, with the help of legal fudgery—such a leader should never have been allowed anywhere near the seat of power.
Everything about the man is so undeniably suspect that a rumor is now circulating that he never actually accepted the jab he is so keen on enforcing. A video has surfaced that puts the issue in some doubt, according to a registered nurse who is convinced the occasion was all for show—readers must judge for themselves, but the demonstration appears convincing.
That such a fundamentally facile but dangerous man, and a national embarrassment to boot, with evident Marxist leanings going back to his much-celebrated, China-keen, Castro-friendly, politically pirouetting father, should be enthusiastically embraced by a Canadian electorate, located mainly in urban Ontario, Quebec and the Maritime provinces, beggars all belief. Trudeau is back with a minority government which, with the support of the left-oriented NDP and Bloc Québécois, is effectively a majority government. The fault lies with us. The problem is not simply feckless leadership. As my colleague Tex Leugner, a proud Albertan with four tours of duty in foreign hotspots to his credit, has said: The problem with Canada is the people in it.
We get what we deserve. We live in a staunchly socialist country and the day will surely come when buyer’s remorse sets in. The other problem is that it will be too late to do anything about it.
DEL RIO, Texas—The United States has deported more than 1,000 Haitians who streamed into the small border city of Del Rio, Texas, although officials are refusing to say how many others have been released into America’s interior.
The number of illegal immigrants, primarily from Haiti, rapidly grew under the international bridge near the border last week, at one point topping 14,000. The quick jump sparked the deployment of more than 600 agents and officers, as well as repatriation flights to Haiti.
U.S. officials have since moved more than 6,500 people from Del Rio to other parts of the border in an attempt to alleviate pressure. Approximately 1,083 have been deported back to Haiti on nine flights through Sept. 21, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email.
Others are being released into the interior. How many is unclear, because DHS officials aren’t saying.
The same spokesperson declined to answer questions about those being released, while Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, both offices within DHS, referred The Epoch Times to DHS.
DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has twice this week declined before Congress to share data about the number of illegal immigrants being released. On Sept. 21, he told senators in Washington he didn’t have the precise numbers and wanted to wait so he could provide accurate information; on Sept. 22, he again said he didn’t have the data.
“Yesterday, you were asked exactly the same question and you gave exactly the same answer. You would think you would be a little better prepared now that you’ve been asked that question. … You don’t have that information?” Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-Fla.) wondered.
“I work 18 hours a day. So when I returned from yesterday’s hearing, I actually focused on the mission,” a testy Mayorkas responded. “We will get that data both to the senator who posed it yesterday and to you, congressman, today.”
Haitian nationals collect their belongings after U.S. authorities flew them out of a Texas border city after crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico, at Toussaint Louverture International Airport in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on Sept. 21, 2021. (Ralph Tedy Erol/Reuters)
The Biden administration is dealing with an unprecedented surge in illegal immigration, a surge critics say stems from his administration’s policies. The number of illegal immigrant apprehensions at the southern border is on track to set a new record for the calendar year. And the administration has refused to shift its strategy, claiming it’s working.
Part of the strategy is releasing illegal immigrants into the country’s interior, which has been described by some as “catch-and-release.” Some 600,000 illegal aliens have been released into the United States since President Joe Biden took office on Jan. 20, Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, told The Epoch Times in a text message.
That’s about half of the aliens who have been stopped by border agents since the inauguration. They’re released with a Notice to Appear, which gives a future court date to kick off their immigration proceedings, or a Notice to Report, a new phenomenon that requests the alien reports to a local ICE office within 60 days of being released.
Two U.S. officials told The Associated Press that many Haitians are also being freed, undercutting Mayorkas’s claims that Haiti nationals shouldn’t travel to the United States because they won’t be able to stay. One official said many of those being freed are being told to report to an immigration office within 60 days, as opposed to receiving a notice to appear in court.
A Border Patrol source told The Epoch Times that 3,843 illegal immigrants were apprehended in the Del Rio Border Sector in Texas between Sept. 20 at midnight and Sept. 21 at 11:45 a.m., with another 1,125 immigrants evading capture. Another 2,435 were apprehended in the Rio Grande Valley sector, in addition to 301 “got-aways.”
An ICE spokesperson told Fox News that the agency has, over the past several weeks, “released numerous immigrants who transferred from the border after determining they could safely be released into the community under alternate forms of supervision.” One independent reporter spoke with Haitian nationals on a flight out of Texas headed to inland destinations.
Roughly 8,400 illegal immigrants remained in the makeshift Del Rio camp as of late Sept. 21. Mayorkas told senators on Sept. 21 that the goal was to clear the litter-ridden camp in the next 10 days, with “dramatic results” expected in the next two to four days.
That could prove difficult if more keep crossing the border illegally.
Thousands of illegal immigrants, mostly Haitians, live in a primitive, makeshift camp under the international bridge that spans the Rio Grande between the United States and Mexico while waiting to be detained and processed by Border Patrol, in Del Rio, Texas, on Sept. 21, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
Rep. John Katko (R-N.Y.), the top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, said on Fox News that lawmakers were briefed on Sept. 21 that 40,000 to 60,000 more Haitians are amassing in Central America “and are on their way in a caravan up to the southwest border.”
Katko said some Haitians are being deported but some aren’t.
“Why? We don’t know,” he said. “The lack of consistency is feeding the frenzy to come across the border, the Southwest border. It’s making our country a lot less safe.”
While Republicans call for more deportations, some groups and Democrats are calling to stop them altogether.
“Deportation flights to Haiti must stop, and those seeking safety at our borders must be granted their legally assured chance to seek asylum,” a coalition of 39 groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote to Biden on Sept. 21.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who rarely criticizes Biden, took him to task on the Senate floor in Washington.
“The policies that are being enacted now—and the horrible treatment of these innocent people who have come to the border—must stop immediately,” Schumer said.
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