Washington, D.C. (September 22) – Images of thousands of illegal aliens, mostly from Haiti, camped under the international bridge in Del Rio, Texas, last September created a serious political problem for the Biden administration, which feared it would harm Democratic prospects in the 2022 midterm elections.
Despite the administration's hostility to border enforcement, the need to make the problem go away caused the White House to decide to deport some of the illegal aliens back to Haiti. To secure Haiti's approval, it made a deal with Dr. Ariel Henry, Haiti’s acting prime minister and acting president: Haiti would accept the deportees in exchange for the Biden administration allowing the acting president to cancel the upcoming elections and remain in power.
This story was broken by Todd Bensman, senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, who joins
Parsing Immigration Policy this week to discuss his front page New York Post story on the incident – adapted from a chapter in his upcoming book, "
Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed The Greatest Border Crisis In U.S. History". Bensman interviewed the Biden-appointed special envoy to Haiti, who explained it was the quid pro quo that caused him to resign, contrary to mainstream media reporting at the time.
In his closing commentary, Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies and host of Parsing Immigration Policy, discusses Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis flying illegal border crossers to Martha's Vineyard, a move which has garnered extreme reactions from some politicians and media figures. Krikorian explains that Democratic leaders responded so intensely because they understand they are being mocked and, as Krikorian puts it, "mockery is a powerful political weapon."
