By New York Post (Opinion) | Created at 2025-01-15 22:14:44 | Updated at 2025-01-16 01:12:39
3 hours ago
When Joe Biden, in one of his final acts as president, approved a sweeping extension of “Temporary Protected Status” to 600,000 Venezuelans, most Americans could not know that his official justification was based almost entirely on a lie.
TPS prevents deportations for 18 months, ever renewable, on grounds that home countries are simply too dangerous to send the migrants back.
“It was determined that an 18-month TPS extension is warranted based on the severe humanitarian emergency the country continues to face due to political and economic crises under the inhumane [Venezuelan President Nicolás] Maduro regime,” a January 10, 2025 Department of Homeland Security press release announced, going on to cite high levels of crime and violence and lack of access to food, medicine, healthcare, water, electricity, and fuel.
Venezuela certainly is terrible, but left unsaid is that most of the deportation-protected Venezuelans hadn’t been living in Venezuela.
Almost every one of the thousands of Venezuelans crossing Biden’s open border already lived in perfectly safe, prosperous other countries that had granted them asylum, residency, and work authorizations, or otherwise tolerated their presence off-book — such as Colombia, Ecuador and Chile.
The only reason hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans living outside Venezuela left was because they realized Biden would let them into the US unchecked.
They came for higher wages — not due to any danger they faced.
I’ve personally interviewed hundreds of Venezuelans these past four years. Not one of them told me they were coming from Venezuela.
“I looooved Ecuador! It’s beautiful. The people are very kind. They have a lot of values. And the fruit, in particular, is very good! Anything with onions is very good!” said one well-appointed Venezuelan woman I met in Juarez who had just received U.S. permission to enter on a humanitarian protection permit. “It’s a very generous place, a very beautiful place.”
She positively beamed at the good memories of having lived in Ecuador the last seven years making a good living as manager of a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Quito, loving every minute of life there.
She and her boyfriend only decided to abandon Ecaudor upon learning that those crazy Americans were suddenly letting everyone in to notch up to an even richer lifestyle.
I heard the same stories from Haitians, who also received their extended deportation stays from Biden.
Every one of them crossing the US border had been living safely in Chile and Brazil, which took Haitians in by their hundreds of thousands starting a decade ago and ever since.
How to get around this inconvenient fact when crossing the US border and claiming you can’t be returned to Haiti because it’s just too terrible?
Easy: Lie.
And throw away any evidence of it once you cross the Rio Grande. I’ve found hundreds of their burned, torn, and twisted up Chilean ID cards and Brazilian passports that would prove their lies if American authorities found them.
Many of their children were born in those countries and held citizenship.
One story emblematic of many I heard from Haitians came from a 24-year-old Haitian man I met at a hostel full of his countrymen in the far northwestern Costa Rica town of La Cruz in 2021.
He and his brother sheltered in place in Santiago, Chile, four years earlier, in late 2016, as Donald Trump was on the campaign trail vowing to deport illegal immigrants.
While waiting out the Trump years, the young man told me he found work as a baker and an Uber Eats driver. He and his brother made good money and built their savings fund. The brother was already in the US and flagged him to come too.
I wondered aloud if something bad in Chile pushed him to escape north.
“Did the government of Chile ever threaten you?” I asked.
“No, that never happened there.”
“So, you were never afraid?
“No, never.”
This fellow had loved Chile. He showed me iPhone videos of beautiful Chilean beaches he’d enjoyed and others depicting urban Santiago nightlife. His work afforded him his favorite fashionable clothing brands on the internet.
“It’s a nice country,” he said of Chile.
The brothers only decided to abandon that nice life because the Biden win “makes it easier to get into the States.”
“It’s the reason,” he added.
Asked how he would compare his Santiago life to the one he left in Haiti, he promptly answered: “A thousand times better.”
Then why come to the United States border now, when his life in Chile was so peaceful and non-threatening? I asked.
“Because,” he said, chuckling, “life in the United States will be a million times better.”
The Trump administration will, of course, need to diplomatically muscle these countries to take back their former residents.
But the administration and its supporters must know that doomsday advocate claims that removing “protective status” from these most numerous of nationalities who crossed are flagrant lies.
These deportations will not place these immigrants in harm’s way but, rather, put them back to safe, happy places they liked for years and which, by most accounts, liked them back.
It’s important that the American people know that suggesting anything else is a lie.
Todd Bensman, a senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, is the author of “Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.”
