Joe Biden’s administration will reactivate the mass deportation of Venezuelans. The United States has been repatriating Venezuelan citizens via commercial flights for years. Immigration authorities will once again use their 12 aircraft to clear the border amid the immigration crisis, US government officials confirmed this Thursday. They did not explain how the Nicolás Maduro regime, with which Washington has not had official diplomatic relations since 2019, admitted to the repatriation of thousands of people. The first of these flights will take off in the next few hours and will transport Venezuelans who entered the country illegally after July 31.
Although there is no Venezuelan consular network in the United States, the U.S. government has for years repatriated Venezuelans fleeing their country’s economic crisis to cross the United States’ southern border. During the Donald Trump era, immigration enforcement authorities Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) repatriated Venezuelans through countries in the Caribbean such as Trinidad and Tobago. This Thursday, government officials confirmed that agents will continue to use allies for these returns, such as Mexico by land, while resuming flights operated by ICE.
Washington is reporting the move two weeks after the government announced it would expand protective status from deportation to nearly half a million Venezuelans. Around 470,000 people from the South American country who arrived in the USA before July 31st will benefit from this measure. The humanitarian program protects them from deportations and allows them to receive temporary work permits until immigration judges decide whether or not they should be allowed to remain on U.S. soil, which could take months or even years.
Officials have assured that citizens who can prove they have received threats or whose return poses a danger to them will not be sent back to Venezuela. Only those who have no legal basis to stay in the country will be deported, sources in Washington said. In this way, the Biden presidency is emphasizing that it is ready to toughen the treatment of those who do not use the tools it provides to make the journey north legally, such as the CBP One mobile application. The cases of around 73,000 Venezuelans are being analyzed by the immigration authorities. 66,000 of them are already in the country. Among other things, Americans require migrants to have a passport from their country, which costs about $200, ten times more than the minimum wage. The Social Research Observatory said last year that only 1% of people who left Venezuela have this document.
The border with Mexico is experiencing a tense moment under the Biden era. Preliminary figures in the hands of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) indicate that there have been more than two million apprehensions at the border in fiscal year 2023, which begins October 1, 2002, through last September. One of the nationalities most commonly encountered by immigration officers at border crossings was Venezuelan. The economic and political crisis that the South American country is experiencing has led to the displacement of seven million people. Many have set their sights on reaching the territory of the United States.
CBP estimates that about 50,000 Venezuelans crossed the southern border of the United States in September, according to CBS, which obtained preliminary figures. The figures are expected to be confirmed in the coming days as authorities close the 2023 financial year. The number can initially give an idea of how much electricity has reached the country’s doors in recent months. Venezuelans accounted for a quarter of all arrests made by immigration authorities last month. In September 2022, 34,000 people crossed the border.
Join EL PAÍS to follow all the news and read without restrictions.
Subscribe to
The number of Venezuelans arriving in September corresponds to the total number of Venezuelans detained at the border in fiscal year 2021. In the first eight months of this period, only 176 citizens of the South American country were deported. With Biden’s arrival at the White House in January 2021, the number increased rapidly until, in September 2022, this group of immigrants surpassed the number of people leaving Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
Follow all international information on Facebook and Xor in our weekly newsletter.