“First Trump $1,000 ‘self-deport’ flight conducted by DHS,” reads the headline in The Hill newspaper this evening. The first of many, one hopes.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has conducted its first charter flight for migrants who agreed to “self-deport” after starting a program to give those voluntarily leaving the country a $1,000 stipend.
The flight took 64 citizens of Colombia and Honduras to their home country.
Perhaps, one day, the future Newsom Administration will pay to fly them back.
Bill Melugin of Fox News brings some more good news in a lengthy post on Twitter (X). Focusing on the previously deported who have since re-entered (a Federal felony), ICE is calling the bluff of sanctuary cities by obtaining judge-signed court orders and warrants for individual aliens. These documents cannot be ignored by sanctuary authorities. Melugin reports,
EXCLUSIVE: We witnessed an incredibly rare sight in the sanctuary city of Los Angeles, as Twin Towers jail transferred an illegal alien inmate to ICE custody, not because sanctuary policies have changed, but because the jail is being *forced* to cooperate w/ ICE as part of a new federal operation designed to “neutralize” California’s sanctuary state law.
The new U.S. Attorney for the central district comments,
They have no choice, they will comply, and if they don’t, if they interfere with our ability to arrest a federal felon, they can expect to face consequences for that.
The whole process is labor-intensive and we’ll see whether or not it can be ramped up to scale across America. Trump has only been back in office for some 114 days, so it’s too early to come to any conclusions.
The people behind TRAC have been keeping an eye on the data and they issued a new report last week. They conclude,
Or using an apples-to-apples comparison, Trump’s average daily rate of removals currently is around one (1) percent below what was Biden’s average daily rate of removals.
Apples to apples? Not even close. If you dig down into TRAC’s report, they use (Table 1) a cherry-picked time frame (FY 2024) for the Biden numbers, a time when the outgoing administration was trying to look tough on immigration for the voters last year. In fact, TRAC shows that Trump is leading the late-stage Biden effort in arrests.
The raw data tell a more complete story. The most recent data available are from March. The immigration court backlog (still over 3,600,000) fell that month, for the first time, ever.
Data for April should be available soon.
