by WorldTribune Staff, July 2, 2024 Contract With Our Readers
Individuals from Cameroon whose asylum claims were determined to be invalid by the Trump administration are being flown back into the United States, the Washington Free Beacon reported on Monday, citing interviews with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) staff and internal agency memos.
In February 2022, Human Rights Watch reported that about dozens Cameroonians deported by the U.S. between 2019 and 2021 were 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,” the Free Beacon reported.
“Gutting deportations isn’t enough for the Biden administration, so now they’re apparently bringing back previously deported illegal aliens,” said former ICE official and director of investigations at the Center for Immigration Studies Jon Feere. “These are people who have already had their cases closed, one way or another, and they’ve been returned home.”
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. The Free Beacon cited ICE officials familiar with the program as saying 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.
“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.”
On his first day in office, Joe Biden rolled back a number of President Donald Trump’s border policies and paused southern border wall construction. Biden later ended a policy that forced asylum seekers to wait in Mexico before their court hearing, which critics blame for the sharp uptick in illegal border crossings.
More than eight million migrants have illegally crossed the northern and southern border since Biden took office. Millions of those migrants have been released into the nation’s interior. Millions more are believed to have entered as “gotaways,” those who elude border authorities.
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