By Rich Lowry
Wednesday, September 22, 2021
Alejandro Mayorkas likes to say that our border
isn’t open.
This line rang particularly hollow on Monday when he said
it in close proximity to a migrant camp where people were coming and going
freely across the Rio Grande and had to take tickets to wait to get
formally apprehended by U.S. authorities.
It’s one thing to say the border isn’t open, it’s another
to implement the policies and do the work to keep it under control.
The Biden team tells the story that it is constantly
undone by circumstances at the border — “seasonality” creating a surge last
spring, climate change hurting agriculture in the Northern Triangle, the coup
in Haiti — but there’s a reason that scene at the Del Rio bridge happened on
Biden’s watch and not his predecessor’s.
The Trump team was aware of the potential of a surge of
Haitian migrants running out of control and made it a priority to keep it from
happening.
In general, the focus was on “putting out even a small
little spark before it became a fire,” explains a former administration
official. “And that’s how it happened, that you never saw any one at any time.
You never had a single situation in the entire pandemic where a facility was
even at capacity, let alone over capacity.”
At the border, we hear a lot about two categories of
migrants: Mexicans (who can be returned home relatively easily) and “other than
Mexican” (who are much more difficult to return almost entirely because of our
senseless rules). But there was another category that administration officials
referred to as “extra continental countries,” such as Haiti.
Dealing with these migrants was tricky because they
couldn’t be returned to Mexico or a Northern Triangle country. Haitians don’t
naturally fit in culturally in these places. Mexico can be convinced to take
Guatemalans, and Guatemala can be convinced to take Salvadorans, but Haitians
are a different story.
They don’t speak Spanish, rather Haitian Creole or
French, and the Spanish-speaking countries worry about assimilating them.
“Mexico doesn’t take Chinese deportees — to choose a very
obvious example — but there’s no legal reason why they couldn’t,” says the
former administration official. “They just don’t. And so when you’re trying to
find solutions for Haitian migrants, the only available option is really to
send them back to Haiti.”
Given the truly awful conditions in Haiti and the fact
that tens of thousands of Haitians had already left home for countries in South
America, the administration recognized that there was an enormous pent-up
demand to come to the United States, and once a flow got started it could be
hard to stanch.
One of the lessons of the border crisis of 2019 was that
if people are getting through, they spread the word to other would-be migrants,
and it creates an incentive for more migrants to try to come. The number of
migrants successfully getting into the United States doesn’t have to be high
for this dynamic to take hold.
“If they release one single Haitian,” former acting
commissioner of Customs and Border Protection Mark Morgan explains of Biden’s
situation now, “one family, that family is calling and it’s going to continue
to drive more Haitians coming.”
The Trump team focused on stopping a surge before it
happened.
During the beginning of the pandemic, right around the
time of the implementation of Title 42, the public-health measure used to expel
migrants, the White House began leading a morning call among administration
officials to monitor the number of migrants coming from various places and make
sure that they were removed from the United States expeditiously.
They didn’t want overcrowding at any border facilities
for public-health reasons, and they didn’t want any backups that would
potentially overtop the system somewhere and encourage more people to come.
With most migrants there might be a few options of where
they could be returned. With Haitian migrants, there was only one — Haiti.
This meant constant negotiations with the Haitian
government, sometimes over each flight and how many people would be on it.
The former administration official recalls, “At this
point in time in particular, Haiti was being really difficult about the
flights.” Haitian officials might balk at approving a flight manifest, or try
to negotiate down the number of people on a flight.
“I was personally on phone calls on a regular basis where
the Department of State was on those phone calls and they were heavily engaged
with the Haitian government on an ongoing basis,” says Morgan. “Obviously, ICE
and CBP provided data and information, et cetera. But it really was that
diplomatic pressure that was put on Haiti that they were going to accept their
own citizens who illegally entered the United States.”
Another important piece was cooperation from Mexico. Todd
Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies reports that Haitian migrants have told him that while
they were waiting for papers in Mexico, suddenly Mexican officials told them
they could proceed north. Certainly, if Mexico hadn’t allowed the migrants to
move through its territory, Del Rio never would have happened.
Trump was willing to use sticks, and not just carrots, to
ensure cooperation from Mexico and Northern Triangle countries.
Morgan cites the importance of Trump’s “commitment that
if Mexico didn’t step up he was going to take very specific actions on tariffs.
The same thing with the Northern Triangle countries where relief and assistance
was temporarily removed until they stood up and did what they needed to do to
address this as a regional crisis.”
By last year, the former administration official says,
“the relationship we had with Mexico was in a very solid place.” The Mexicans
had initially been skeptical of the Trump approach but changed their view when
it began to show results. “They saw,” he adds, “that suddenly their border
towns weren’t overwhelmed. Suddenly their immigration services weren’t
overwhelmed.” So the Trump team and its Mexican counterparts had, he continues,
“this professional understanding that a little bit of preventative work today
would prevent a much bigger problem tomorrow.”
Morgan points out that caravans that gathered to our
south in 2020 didn’t go through. The Mexicans, Morgan says, “increased their
southern border enforcement between them and Guatemala. So, Guatemala stepped
up. A lot of the caravans were stopped in Guatemala before they even reached
the Guatemala–Mexico border. And those that got through Guatemala, Mexican
officials stopped.”
Finally, Trump officials were keenly attuned to
intelligence about who might be coming from where.
“I received briefings and intelligence when a small group
of the illegal aliens, of immigrants, were forming anywhere, whether that was
Brazil, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, or Mexico,” recalls Morgan. “We had
sources, we were getting intelligence, and I was briefed. Any single time even
a small caravan was starting.”
“So there’s no doubt in my mind,” he says of Biden
officials and the current surge, “that they had information and intelligence
about this and they ignored it.”
It all adds up to the Biden administration’s constantly
having to say, against all evidence, that a porous border is closed.
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