CIUDAD ACUNA, Mexico (September 21, 2021) — Late Sunday the Biden administration began deporting Haitian migrants from the illegal alien camp in Del Rio to Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The Center for Immigration Studies reports from Acuna, Mexico that as a result of the repatriation of 327 Haitians over the weekend, dozens are boarding buses and returning south unwilling to risk any alternative attempt to cross elsewhere.

Todd Bensman, the Center’s senior national security fellow, interviewed dozens of Haitians in the Ciudad Acuna bus station buying south-bound tickets to get as far away from Texas as possible — a stark reversal from just days earlier when caravans of buses arriving from southern Mexico were dropping off Haitians headed to the Del Rio encampment. Many plan to return to Tapachula to get Mexican papers and wait out Biden’s interest in repatriation flights.

Bensman said, “In Washington, for policy-makers and leaders, the major takeaway from what these Haitians had to say in an Acuna, Mexico, bus station is that air deportations to home countries are a very effective tool to reduce illegal immigration.”

Former President Donald Trump often used ICE passenger jets to repatriate immigrants to distant home countries as an enforcement complement to his other policies, while President Biden has eschewed them as cruel and discontinued them.  Many of these Haitians decided to come now because Trump’s tougher policies had been replaced by Biden’s lenient policies.