by Jason Hopkins
The incoming Trump administration is reportedly devising a plan to remove illegal migrants from the United States, even if their home countries refuse to accept them.
Illegal migrants that have been ordered deported by an immigration judge, but hail from a country that refuses to take them back, may be sent to Turks and Caicos, the Bahamas, Grenada, Panama or possibly elsewhere once President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House, according to NBC News. Such a plan, which has yet to be confirmed by the transition team, could prove to be a game-changer in the president-elect’s promised goal of conducting the largest deportation initiative in U.S. history.
It’s not immediately clear if these illegal migrants would be allowed to remain and work in the countries in which they are deported, or what type of pressure Trump officials are applying to these host governments. A spokesperson for the Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Foreign governments that refuse to take back deportees have long frustrated federal immigration authorities in multiple administrations. In lieu of remaining in detention indefinitely, many of these individuals may simply be released back into the U.S., even if an immigration judge has ordered them to be removed.
Under the Biden administration, federal immigration authorities and major cities across the country experienced an unprecedented illegal immigration crisis. Management of this crisis was made more difficult when Venezuela, the second-highest source of illegal immigration into the U.S., stopped accepting deportation flights in February.
Nearly 8 million Venezuelans have fled the country under Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, a leftist authoritarian who has overseen rampant inflation, economic turmoil and political repression. Trump is reportedly being pushed to make a deal with Maduro’s government, which would involve them accepting deportees again in exchange for an easing of U.S. sanctions, but it’s not clear if the incoming president is receptive to such an idea.
In the past, the Chinese and Cuban governments have also proven uncooperative with deportation flights from the U.S. However, both countries have begun accepting more flights from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) once again.
During Trump’s first White House term, he secured safe third country agreements with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, which were intended to keep asylum seekers at bay by forcing them to seek refuge in those countries first before applying in the U.S. However, the Biden administration suspended those deals immediately upon entering office — part of a massive unraveling of Trump-era immigration policies by President Joe Biden that helped spark the current southern border crisis.
Trump plans to enter office and begin to not only conduct the largest deportation program ever witnessed in U.S. history, but he has also vowed to resume border wall construction, end birthright citizenship for those born to illegal migrant parents, restart the travel ban and bring back the Remain in Mexico program — which kept asylum seekers waiting in Mexico while their claims were adjudicated in immigration court.
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Jason Hopkins is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation.
The huge majority of the illegal aliens, regardless of if from Mexicoa, Venezuela, Cuba or the Middle East entered the US through Mexico. They should be returned to Mexico who can address the problem they created.
Countries that refuse to accept their own nationals are referred to as recalcitrant countries. And the US has ways of dealing with those countries.
This has happened in the past quite a bit, but usually only Democrat administrations have been in charge so they don’t do a thing. They just release the criminals into our communities.
However, there is a section in the law that allows the US to withhold visas to any country who refuses their nationals. We have only used it once and it took exactly one day for the country to back down and accept their deported people.
The Trump administration is very smart in this regard. Any country that refuses to accept their nationals will suffer extreme consequences. So I suspect they will back down immediately.
What I’m saying is this is a nothingburger.