Reports that the Biden administration is releasing Haitian migrants from the Del Rio, Texas concentration into the interior of the U.S. despite pledges to remove them from the country bring back memories of an enduring myth surrounding his old boss. Former President Barack Obama was given the tag of “deporter-in-chief” despite his flagrantly obvious sympathies for illegal aliens. Like many a big-box media framing, the truth was something quite different entirely.
It serves as a reminder that there is simply no reason to believe anything the dominant media reports about what is happening on our chaotic southern border. Establishment outlets would have you believe President Biden is ruthlessly cracking down on the mass of Haitians in Texas. Yet Anna Giaritelli at the Washington Examiner wrote the following on Sept. 23 while she was on the ground in Del Rio:
“Haitian migrant families who illegally crossed the southern border and lived in a makeshift camp beneath an international bridge are being released into the United States, contradicting the Biden administration’s claims that they would be removed from the country.
“Border Patrol released just over a dozen Haitian migrants at a gas station Wednesday evening [Sept. 22]. Large government-contracted buses drop off families twice a day at a gas station on a busy commercial road in the middle of town.”
A Simple Lie
The U.S. major media complex helped to deliberately foist the falsehood that Barack Obama’s administration was rounding up illegal aliens en masse and shipping them out of the country during his eight years in office. This would be the same Obama who never tired of championing “immigration reform” that would have led to amnesty for tens of millions of illegal aliens inside the U.S.
What it amounted to in the end was a simple accounting trick. In 2014, Jessica Vaughan at the Center for Immigration Studies dismantled progressive writer Jessica Lind’s efforts to promulgate this deceit:
“Lind dives in over her head with an analysis of different forms of deportation. She concludes, based on bogus assumptions and thoroughly fictitious definitions that are too numerous to address here, that the only appropriate metric to assess enforcement is ‘removals,’ which are one form of deportation. The Obama administration did in fact achieve a record number of removals in 2012. However, as [then-Department of Homeland Security] Secretary [Jeh] Johnson stated… that record was achieved by counting border cases, which were never counted by previous administrations. Moreover, removals represent only one-third of all immigration-enforcement actions and thus do not tell the whole story of enforcement.”
Obama himself acknowledged what his administration was up to while engaging in an online discussion with Latino journalists in 2011. “The statistics are actually a little deceptive, because what we’ve been doing is, with the stronger border enforcement, we’ve been apprehending folks at the borders and sending them back,” Obama told the reporters. “That is counted as a deportation even though they may have only been held for a day, or 48 hours, sent back. That’s counted as a deportation.”
Barack Obama and Joe Biden
Rather than being crowned “deporter-in-chief,” the former president should be remembered as the man who made illegal aliens untouchable once they had made their way into the interior of the U.S.
Vaughan wrote in 2014 that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement “is now releasing more illegal aliens than it is arresting. In 2013, ICE agents reported encountering more than 700,000 illegal aliens, but they took action against less than 200,000 of them, letting the rest get off without charges. Among the many illegal aliens ICE agents were told to ignore were 68,000 with criminal records.”
‘Expulsions Have Fallen Steadily’
The Obama-friendly Los Angeles Times in 2014 admitted 44 was responsible for a stunningly low percentage of actual deportations of illegal aliens residing within the interior of the United States.
“A closer examination shows that immigrants living illegally in most of the continental U.S. are less likely to be deported today than before Obama came to office, according to immigration data,” the paper noted. “Expulsions of people who are settled and working in the United States have fallen steadily since his first year in office, and are down more than 40% since 2009.”
“The Greyhound bus pulled in at 5:35 p.m., and a white boarded-up school bus pulled in several minutes later with detainees onboard — moments away from being out of federal custody. Just over a dozen people stepped off the white bus and walked across the lot to board the commercial vehicle,” Giaritelli luridly wrote in her firsthand account from Del Rio.
Do not be fooled by hand-wringing tales about agents on horseback rounding up Haitians. Watching those Greyhound buses, and where they are heading, is the real story. Once they arrive at their destinations, the illegal aliens disembarking will be free from all attempts to enforce this nation’s immigration laws.
~ Read more from Joe Schaeffer.
