Biden Admin Flying Migrants Deported by Trump Back Into the US

The Biden administration is flying previously deported Cameroonians whose asylum claims were determined to be invalid back into the United States, according to interviews with Immigration and Customs Enforcement staff and internal agency memos reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

The program, which has not been announced to the public, appears to be a response to a February 2022 Human Rights Watch report about dozens of Cameroonians deported between 2019 and 2021 and then allegedly mistreated by their government. An estimated 80 to 90 Cameroonians were deported during that period of time.

But now some are arriving back in the United States under a program with little precedent, both current and former ICE officials say. All of the individuals deported under the previous administration were found not to have valid asylum claims in the United States.

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Internal memos reviewed by the Free Beacon show an ICE official working with outside nonprofits to help relocate the Cameroonians. One email from earlier this year reviewed by the Free Beacon shows the director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at Texas A&M University, Fatma Marouf, informing an ICE official where one migrant will arrive.

In that incident, the migrant arrived at Washington-Dulles airport in Virginia. ICE officials familiar with the program say airports around the country are being used as ports of entry for the Cameroonians in an attempt to keep the public in the dark about the program and avoid concentrating the migrants in a single location.

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The official rationale for the program, according to internal memos reviewed by the Free Beacon, is to avoid a “potential lawsuit.” There is pending litigation in New York over documents related to alleged abuse of Cameroonian migrants, but no court has ordered their return.

“These individuals were deported by the order of a court after they were afforded all due process rights,” said former ICE chief of staff Tom Blank. “For DHS to arbitrarily reverse court orders to satisfy complaints from an activist group makes a joke out of the entire legal immigration process. It looks like outside activist groups now run the DHS immigration process instead of the courts.”

Both current and former ICE officials expressed alarm about whether this program will be a model for others in the future. Should any outside activist group threaten a lawsuit about migrant mistreatment, they said, the Biden administration may choose the path of least resistance and simply return the asylum seekers.

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Left-wing activist groups have been a thorn in the side of DHS for decades, regardless of which party controls the White House. But in recent years some of those activist groups have received federal taxpayer dollars to fund their operations.

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