 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. The Joe Biden administration in the US is facing heavy criticism for its deportation policies, particularly the violent deportation of Haitian refugees. In just nine days, between September 19 and September 27, nearly 4,000 Haitians were deported. This includes around 2,300 parents and children who had entered US border custody as families seeking asylum. These refugees are being turned away at the border without being given any chance to put forward their case for asylum. The United Nations has stated that these mass expulsions possibly violate international law. Why are so many Haitians seeking asylum in the US? How is the Biden administration able to turn them away without assessing any asylum claims? Biden during his presidential campaign had promised to reverse the restrictive immigration policies put in place by his predecessor Donald Trump, but has anything changed? The expulsion of Haitian migrants from the United States, from the southern border of Del Rio, Texas, was taking place under something known as Title 42 authority. This was a pandemic-era regulation that had been established by the Trump administration under the pretext of keeping the country safe for COVID-19, but in reality, in order to make it easier to deport individuals from the country, the underlying US law around the issue of asylum is if you reach the physical territory of the United States, you cannot be deported until you're given an opportunity to seek asylum. So what Title 42 does is it eliminates that and under a public health authority allows the US government to deport anyone without giving them the opportunity to seek asylum. So essentially it just means that they can turn right around and deport people very quickly. And so this was the authority that was used by the Trump administration on the southern border for a good chunk of 2020, of course, after March of 2020, and has been continued by the Biden administration to expel people from the southern border, certainly from Haiti, but also from many other nations. The context for why so many of these migrants ended up on the southern border and they ended up in a place called Del Rio, Texas, which is just under the international bridge that connects Mexico to the United States over the Rio Grande River at one location. Many of these individuals have in fact been out of Haiti for a number of years, but over the past several years, really quite frankly, going back to 2010 in the massive earthquake in Haiti, but also deeply related to the deeper causes of poverty in Haiti, where there's sort of an enforced immigration that takes place in the country. There's been the destruction of agriculture and people moving to the cities. Some people are able to get jobs at these very low wage sweatshops, which sell almost all their goods to the United States and Canada, subcontractors for big global brands, but many, many people are not able to find work. The something like 70% of the economy in the cities is informal economy, and many people are forced to migrate. Many had migrated to Brazil during the World Cup to be migrant workers there. Some had also gone to Chile. Some are more recent and are coming because of the recent earthquake and the recent turmoil in the country. But I think it's important to note that really the large scale of migrants, as many as 15,000 from Haiti who had gathered in the Del Rio camp really represents a spectrum of almost the past decade of US policy towards Haiti, really, which has been to maintain an extreme neoliberal government that has created the conditions for mass immigration and the broader exploitation of Haiti inside of the hemisphere, where Haitian labor is used by this or that country, certainly the United States, certainly Canada, but also countries like Brazil, like Chile and others, where Haitians are used essentially as very cheap surplus labor, often for big things like the World Cup and the Olympics and other pieces like that that were happening in Brazil. And then people are discarded. They can't really find work. And the United States, which is the place where there is the largest Haitian diaspora going back many, many, many decades in the United States, really going back to the 1930s, is a place that many people want to come because they have friends, they have relatives. And obviously, this is the richest country on earth. So there's greater opportunity or at least potential opportunity for people to be able to find employment and to have a decent standard of living. And so that's what we really saw there in the Del Rio camp is the results of almost a decade of US policy and yes, policy by Haitian leaders backed by countries like the United States, Canada, and France, all coming together all at once in this squalid camp, because there were no services at all provided to people who were there, no food, no water, no sanitation. And so really, it was the policies that had induced this extreme desperation amongst thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of Haitians to try to find some way to live a decent life. One of the things that I think is deeply notable is that Joe Biden had campaigned on doing much more for migrants. So I think when we look at the issue of, you know, what this says more broadly, what we saw at the border with Haitian refugees about immigration policy is that the Biden administration has been more of a continuation from the Trump administration than a clean break. Now, they have made some changes. The most notable change, of course, is that they ended the separation of families. Now, they may remove an entire family and keep them together, but still remove them from the country. But some of the worst images of young children and others who were being wrenched away from their families, that has generally stopped. Although, of course, the poor treatment of unaccompanied minors who don't come with their parents has continued. There have been a number of incidences and crises where we have seen, again, thousands of children filling up these makeshift detention centers, many children being exposed to conditions that we now know were beyond subpar, even somewhere they were placed in holding facilities where individuals had been convicted of abusing children in the past, but were able to maintain their contracts. So what we have seen is that the Biden administration has been fearful of making any clear, clean break on immigration policy from the Trump administration. And there are really two reasons for that, but the principal reason for it is immigration has been weaponized as a political issue by the Republicans who have aggressively stoked a racist backlash to many people, some of whom I'm sure are just racist, others of whom are deeply confused about the causes of their own deprivation and feel like somehow it's caused by immigrants. And the Biden administration does not want to look as if they are, quote unquote, soft on the border, soft on immigration, soft on border security. So they have continued most of the policies that have happened at the border. Now, they have championed to some degree a policy of a pathway for citizenship for those already in the country. There has been a continuation of something that's called temporary protective status, including, by the way, for Haitians who were in the United States prior to August 3rd of 2021. And also for other countries in Central America that have been more compassionate than what we saw from the Trump administration. But what we've also seen is that they've been mainly cosmetic and partially rhetorical. And in fact, in the controversy that is happening in Washington right now over the budget reconciliation bills, one of the first things that the Democrats have actually dropped in terms of the demands that they had placed in the bill or the policies they placed in the bill was a pathway to citizenship for 8 million undocumented immigrants here in this country. So at the border, we've seen a continuation of the brutal policies of not just the Trump administration, but quite frankly, the Obama administration that deported more people than any presidency up to that time. But going back to the Clinton administration, where there was a huge increase in the concept of border security, the militarization of the border, and the brutalization of immigrants who are coming. So we've seen a continuation of that policy with a rhetorical expansion of supporting immigrants. But no real strong heft has been put behind any major legislation either.