Joe Biden’s Administration will reactivate the mass deportation of Venezuelans. The United States has been repatriating citizens of Venezuela for years through commercial flights. Immigration authorities will once again use their 12 planes to unclog the border in the midst of the immigration crisis, US government officials confirmed this Thursday. They have not explained how the Nicolás Maduro regime, with which Washington has not formally had diplomatic relations since 2019, admitted the repatriation of thousands of people. The first of these flights will take off in the next few hours and will transport Venezuelans who arrived illegally in the country after July 31.
Although there is no Venezuelan consular network in the United States, the United States Government has been repatriating Venezuelans who have fled the economic crisis in their country to cross the southern border of the United States for years. During the era of Donald Trump, the authorities of the immigration police, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), returned Venezuelans through countries in the Caribbean such as Trinidad and Tobago. This Thursday, government officials have confirmed that agents will continue to use allies for these returns, such as Mexico by land, at the same time that they resume flights operated by ICE.
Washington reports the measure two weeks after the Administration announced that it was expanding the status of protection against deportation to nearly half a million Venezuelans. This measure benefits some 470,000 people from the South American country who arrived in the United States before July 31. The humanitarian program shields them from deportations and allows them to obtain a temporary work permit until immigration judges determine whether or not they can remain on US soil, something that can take months or even years.
Officials have assured that citizens who can document that they have received threats or whose return represents a danger to them will not be returned to Venezuela. Only those who do not have a legal basis to be in the country will be deported, sources in Washington have indicated. In this way, the Biden presidency emphasizes that it is willing to toughen the treatment of those who do not use the tools it has provided to make the trip north legally, such as the CBP One mobile app. The cases of some 73,000 Venezuelans are being analyzed by immigration authorities. Of these, 66,000 are already in the country. Among other requirements, Americans ask migrants to have a passport from their country, which costs about $200, ten times more than the minimum wage. The Social Research Observatory stated last year that only 1% of people who have 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 during fiscal year 2023, which starts on October 1, 2002. until last September. One of the nationalities that immigration agents encountered the most at border crossings was Venezuelan. The economic and political crisis that the South American country is experiencing has caused the displacement of seven million people. Many have set the goal of reaching the United States territory.
CBP estimates that about 50,000 Venezuelans crossed the southern border of the United States in September, according to CBS, which obtained preliminary numbers. The figures should be confirmed in the coming days, when the authorities close the 2023 fiscal year. The number can for the moment give an idea of the flow that has reached the country’s doors in recent months. Venezuelans represent a quarter of the total arrests that immigration authorities made last month. In September 2022, 34,000 crossed.
Join EL PAÍS to follow all the news and read without limits.
Subscribe
The number of Venezuelans arriving in September is equal to the total number of Venezuelans detained at the border in fiscal year 2021. In the first eight months of that period, only 176 citizens of the South American country were deported. With the arrival of Biden to the White House, in January 2021, the number grew rapidly until this group of immigrants surpassed, in September 2022, the sum of people who left Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador .
Follow all the international information on Facebook and xor in our weekly newsletter.
#United #States #reactivates #mass #deportations #Venezuelans #unclog #border #Mexico