Marco Rubio’s state department has successfully deported 25,000 migrants whose repatriations were blocked by their home countries or by U.S. courts, according to a mournful article in the Washington Post.
“He has been making rapid progress,” the Post lamented about Rubio, adding:
The Trump administration has authorized or pledged at least $410 million to facilitate agreements with 31 countries, mostly in Africa and Latin America, as of the end of June, according to internal government records reviewed by The Washington Post. The documents, which have not been previously reported, provide the most comprehensive picture to date of the Trump administration’s fast-growing third-country network.
The Post‘s article is built on leaks from disgruntled bureaucrats who supported the pro-migration, cheap-labor policies set by President Joe Biden and his Wall Street allies. The article says:
One person, who left the office this year, said some of their former colleagues struggled to remain positive about their work and commiserated on encrypted messaging platforms, sharing links to news stories about the plight of third-country deportees with a trigger warning that reading them would “make you feel awful.”
“Everybody feels pretty conflicted,” this former staffer said. “Morale is bad and it’s busy, and people do not want to be doing what they’re doing. It was a very painful thing.”
Rubio and his deputies have struck agreements with up to 31 foreign nations to act as “Safe Third Countries,” so they can be legal destinations for deportable migrants who are rejected by their home countries.
Many home countries, such as Vietnam, Russia, Afghanistan, Ecuador, Iran, Egypt, and China, block the return of their migrants after they serve prison sentences in the United States.
The negotiations are conducted by Rubio’s top deputy, Deputy Secretary Chris Landau, backed by Stephen Miller, Trump’s top migration deputy.
Many of the deported migrants have also persuaded judges to block their deportation to their home countries for fear of human rights violations. But federal law allows their deportation to “Safe Third Countries.”
The deportations are conducted by Markwayne Mullin’s Department of Homeland Security.
The Post’s report was part of an international collaboration by progressive media, which downplayed the deportation of violent and dangerous migrants while playing up the deportation of women. The Guardian, for example, reported:
Nika, a 32-year-old Iranian woman, recalled how the handcuffs dug into her wrists. She begged the officers to loosen them, but they did not. Other passengers had it worse, she said. Some of the men were restrained in black and yellow body wraps, as if mummified, after resisting orders to get on the plane.
Nika, who had fled Iran 18 months earlier after protesting against its regime, had imagined the US as a place of sanctuary. Iran was already one of the most repressive countries in the world when she left, and its horrors had only deepened since then: security forces gunned down thousands of other demonstrators this year, then Donald Trump’s administration launched the war there.
Public support for the deportations was ignored, and the Post buried expert support for the policy in the 107th paragraph:
“There is no doubt that people are removed to third countries and then end up going back to their own country anyway, and that’s because their gambit failed” to remain in the United States, said Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “This is a way to remove people who should be removed. The country of citizenship is responsible for their own citizens. I’m not saying it’s a great outcome for folks, but that’s the way it is.”
Much of the elite horror over the deportations is prompted by the subordination of the State Department’s pro-migration staffers to President Donald Trump’s 2024 mandate for mass deportation. The article says:
The Office of Remigration — a division of about 15 employees in the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM) — marks an extraordinary break in U.S. foreign policy, inverting the nation’s long-standing commitment to resettling refugees in need into an intensive focus on expelling them from the country. The office’s name itself is a point of contention, as the term “remigration” has been popularized by white nationalists in Europe who seek the expulsion of racial minorities and immigrants.
The countries include Mexico, Ghana, Eswatini, Cameroon, Sierra Leone, and the Dominican Republic.
Mexico has been cooperating with the deportation program, the Guardian reported:
…About 20,000 people have been bussed to Mexico, according to a count by Refugees International and Human Rights First. And more than 5,000 others have been put on flights to countries in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and central Asia to which they have no connection, and then, often, returned to the countries where US immigration judges had ruled their lives or liberty were at risk.
The international campaign to spotlight the Third Country deportations was described by the Post:
The Washington Post examined the Office of Remigration as part of The Deportation Project, a joint investigation into third-country removals conducted over six months by 26 media organizations in 15 countries, organized by Forbidden Stories, a nonprofit news organization based in Paris. Journalists interviewed dozens of former and current U.S. government officials, foreign leaders and immigration attorneys, reporting in seven of the third countries and speaking to 35 third-country nationals who were deported from the U.S.
The group is funded by establishment donors, such as the MacArthur Foundation and the Ford Foundation. So far, the group has refused to follow the redirected flow of money in migration as it flows upwards from citizens towards wealthy investors, politicians, and left-wing foundations.
The investors include Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon and the Washington Post.
Read the full article here