According to interviews with Immigration and Customs Enforcement staff and internal agency memos, the Biden Administration is flying dozens of Cameroonians into the country whose asylum claim was denied under former President Donald Trump’s administration.
The Washington Free Beacon reports that the program, which has yet to be made public, is the result of a Human Rights Watch report and will bring back more than 80 Cameroonians who were denied entry between 2019 and 2021 due to an invalid asylum claim.
“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.”
WFB reports that the motivation behind bringing the Cameroonians back to America is entirely legal and 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.”
From The Free Beacon:
The Department of Homeland Security does ship previously deported migrants back to the United States in rare circumstances. Those returns, according to ICE officials, are typically handed on a case-by-case basis and typically require an order from a judge after the court found an error by the prosecution.
Those returns are also usually conducted between Homeland Security Investigations and the agency’s Parole Law Enforcement Programs Unit. In the case of the Cameroonians, ICE officials appear to be working with at least one outside nonprofit, the Immigrant Rights Clinic.
The DHS needs to push back on open border activists — not work with them to fly in migrants who have already been denied asylum. Deportations have plummeted under Biden, with fewer than 5% of the 3.2 million migrants encountered at the border removed by the agency in 2023.
