James Keivom
Venezuela has stopped accepting flights of migrants deported from the United States and Mexico – putting increased pressure on President Biden to address the continuing flood of new arrivals to the US.
Flights from the US to Venezuela stopped late last month, US officials said, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Customs and Border Protection figures show in October, November, and December the government was sending back between six and seven thousand people a month on repatriation flights. That number dramatically decreased to 2,727 people in January, the statistics show.
President Nicolás Maduro’s administration followed through on its threats to kill an agreement reached last October for flights to go into the country, after the US reimposed economic sanctions on the country, saying Caracas had failed to restore democratic order, the outlet explained.
Venezuela has also laid claim to a resource-laden part of nearby Guyana, furthering inflaming tensions with Washington.
Caracas’ decision also shuts the door on Mexico’s migration enforcement, which had just restarted direct deportations to Venezuela in late December.
In the past, Mexican authorities had been flying migrants from the US border to cities in the south in a push to discourage the onslaught of Venezuelan arrivals to the States, the Wall Street Journal explained.
There are no direct commercial flights from the US to Venezuela, and Mexico also will not deport Venezuelans via commercial flights, the outlet said.
The halt of deportation flights is not a formal move, a person close to the issue told the Journal. Instead, diplomats are supposedly blocking the departures of flights by failing to verify the citizenship of the deportees.
Some of the diplomats stonewall the situation by saying they do not have the staff to perform the verifications, the source said. Others claim they will only accept those who volunteered to return home.
Following the agreement reached last fall, the US only sent 15 flights of about 1,800 Venezuelan nationals – barely scraping the barrel of the nearly 500,000 thousand detained at the southern border over the last two years, the outlet reported.
Even so, the move was seen as a serious warning to would-be migrants that they faced deportation if they tried to cross the border illegally, the outlet noted.
A similar strategy effectively curtailed an uptick in new arrivals from Haiti last year.
Despite the setback, US officials say they are committed to border enforcement.
“If Venezuelan migrants do not avail themselves of lawful pathways, they are subject to removal,” such as being sent to Mexico, a spokesperson for the US Department of Homeland Security told the Journal.
But if there are no government deportation flights back to Venezuela, “it stands out that there’s no ability to deport Venezuelans back to Venezuela,” Tom Cartwright of Witness at the Border, a U.S. immigration advocacy group, suggested.
As a result, the US is now significantly more dependent on enforcement in Mexico and Panama, where thousands of Venezuelans have gone in order to eventually seek asylum in the US, the Wall Street Journal reported.
An estimated 7.7 million Venezuelan citizens have fled the country since Maduro took office in 2013, the outlet said.
Those seeking asylum are fleeing widespread crime, poverty, and political persecution.
While lifting the sanctions on Caracas was intended to ameliorate conditions and stem the flow of new arrivals from the country, some experts say that Maduro has only become more authoritarian since the initial deal.
His regime has jailed dozens of opposition figures – including security expert Rocío San Miguel, who was nabbed by counterintelligence agents earlier this month, according to The New York Times.
Her lawyers say she is being held in a detention center while her family – including her daughter, her two brothers, and even two former romantic partners – are also in state custody.
The government also recently booted the United Nations human rights arm to leave the country, and has banned opposition leader María Corina Machado from running in the next election, the Wall Street Journal noted.
As a result, the US reimposed sanctions on Venezuela’s gold industry in mid-February and has hinted that sanctions on the oil industry may be re-imposed in the spring.
On Wednesday, Maduro himself urged Venezuelan migrants to return to the country.
“We love Venezuelan migrants. Come back. We’re waiting for you, this is your land,” he insisted.
The deportation flights were also controversial with human rights experts, who explained how Venezuela jails and otherwise mistreats those who are returned.
One father – whose family declined to give their name – told the Wall Street Journal that his teenage son was traumatized after being deported to their Caracas slum in November.
The deportees are often held for several days for background checks and health tests, family members claimed.
“He’s restless. The young people here all want to leave,” the father said of his son.