by NATASHA LENNARD
The Biden administration is using a Trump-era policy to justify mass deportations — only Biden is doing it at a faster pace.
Just four months ago, the Department of Homeland Security designated Haiti for temporary protected status. The rare designation applies to immigrants in the United States who are temporarily unable to safely return to their home country because of conditions of extreme political upheaval, conflict, or natural disasters. The U.S. government thus asserted, in no uncertain terms, that Haiti was not a safe place. Temporary protected status was extended and expanded for Haitians just five weeks ago.
Yet in the last 24 hours, 320 Haitians were placed on planes by the Biden administration and expelled back to Haiti, having been removed from the huge border camp that has amassed around a bridge in Del Rio, Texas. Six more flights are expected to land in Haiti on Tuesday, and then as many as 10 per day from Wednesday onward. Around 14,000 Haitians will be expelled from the U.S. over the coming three weeks — almost the exact number currently gathered at the Del Rio encampment.
The Biden administration is expelling thousands of people to a country officially recognized as unsafe for repatriation. It is a deportation operation of scale and speed not seen in decades. And it gives the lie to any notion that President Joe Biden’s border regime is kinder than that of former President Donald Trump.
Trump and his ghoulish allies framed their brutal border policies in unabashed racist rhetoric and white supremacist fearmongering. Like Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama before him, Biden shrouds his anti-immigrant policies in empty liberal overtures. The necropolitical border logics are nonetheless the same; the suffering of those denied safety in this country — which could well provide it — is no different, whether enforced by an alleged “friend” to immigrants or an explicit white nationalist.
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