The nation reels over images of Venezuelan migrants beating up on New York cops in Times Square, and is disgusted to discover that the dangerous transnational criminal gang known as Tren de Aragua has established beachheads in New York, Miami and Chicago. Reasonable people might believe that it is time, perhaps, to accelerate deportation of these criminal elements back to Venezuela. But did you know that the Maduro dictatorship stopped allowing deportation flights from the US?
Venezuela has followed through on a threat to stop accepting flights of migrants deported from the U.S. and Mexico, people familiar with the measures say, adding pressure on President Biden as a surge in illegal migration becomes a key issue in this year’s presidential election.
President Nicolás Maduro’s authoritarian regime introduced the measure after Washington reimposed some of the economic sanctions it had previously lifted on Venezuela. The U.S. said that Caracas has failed to live up to the loose pledges it made to restore the democratic order and move toward holding fair presidential elections. Venezuela has also asserted a claim to a resource-rich region of neighboring Guyana, drawing further warnings from the U.S.
The almost weekly flights from the U.S. to Venezuela came to a stop in late January, U.S. officials said, after an initial deal was struck in October. The chances of restarting them now appear bleak as relations between the two sides deteriorate, according to people involved in the discussions.
In sum, Maduro followed up on his threat to block incoming deportation flights from the U.S. over a snapback of sanctions, levied in response to the regime’s continued exclusion of opposition presidential candidate María Corina Machado from the ballot. We covered that threat when it happened a little over three weeks ago, while ABC, CBS, and NBC did not. The networks chose instead to continue to shill for the dead Senate border deal.
In lieu of shilling for the dead border deal, the networks now shill for the new Biden executive orders on immigration that are expected to come down the pike momentarily (no word on whether these orders will actually reverse his first batch of executive orders that created this border mess in the first place).
Therefore, there has been no time, whether on ABC, CBS, NBC, Telemundo or Univision, to explain that Biden has no way of actually returning Venezuelan illegal aliens to their home country.
This ongoing saga serves as a reminder that Biden's border policy is at the mercy of two Latin American socialists. The first just halted deportation flights. The second, Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), blew up at The New York Times over a report alleging that the cartels were funneling money to his closest assistant during the 2006 presidential campaign, and doxxed the NYT's Mexico City bureau chief.
And AMLO, who has operational control over the southern border, is mad at the Biden administration over this old investigation.
Which, again, you didn't hear about on the network evening newscasts.
