The Biden administration has begun flying illegal immigrants who came over the southern border back to China after a six-year hiatus in large charter plane repatriation flights.
The Department of Homeland Security announced Tuesday that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducted its first large charter flight to the People’s Republic of China over the weekend.
The flight was the first since 2018, and additional flights are expected. The DHS did not disclose how many people were returned to China.
“We will continue to enforce our immigration laws and remove individuals without a legal basis to remain in the United States,” said DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in a statement. “People should not believe the lies of smugglers.”
The flights are technically removal flights, not deportation flights because they involve illegal immigrants who were arrested at the southern border and not within the country.
The number of Chinese citizens coming across the southern border from Mexico has skyrocketed to the fastest-growing demographic of illegal immigrants in recent months, triggering serious concerns among lawmakers in Washington, D.C.
Tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants have been arrested by Border Patrol agents over the past year, far beyond the hundreds to a couple of thousand seen in recent history preceding COVID-19, according to Customs and Border Protection data.
In 2022, fewer than 2,000 Chinese immigrants were stopped at the southern boundary.
In the first eight months of fiscal 2024, from October 2023 to May 2024, Border Patrol agents on the U.S.-Mexico border caught more than 31,000 Chinese illegal immigrants who had come into the country by walking through unfenced areas.
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The figure is more than the record-high 24,048 Chinese immigrants arrested in all of 2023 and almost 100 times than the 320 Chinese apprehended in 2020.
The Biden administration has vowed to increase the number of removal flights to faraway countries since President Joe Biden took executive action on June 4 to bar asylum-seekers.
