A lot of sensationalism has been spewed lately in response to the White House releasing a video of federal agents shackling deportees. Some have called it “slavery porn.” Others are acting as if President Donald Trump is the first to order the use of restraints during deportations or – worse – the first to deport illegal immigrants. He’s not. Maybe posting footage of agents laying chains out on the pavement and wrapping them around waists and ankles wasn’t necessary, but the restraints likely were. Just ask former President Joe Biden. His administration learned the hard way what can happen when deportees roam freely about the cabin.
Imagine being aboard an airplane of unruly passengers who start ripping seat cushions from their frames and tearing out their stuffing. In a fit of rage, they destroy whatever they can. They rip sunshades off the windows and try to yank the doors off the overhead luggage bins, bending their hinges. The people in charge of the flight are outnumbered. Two are bitten and attacked by furious passengers who do not want to go to their home country. Yes, this is a repatriation, one that really happened. How? None of the passengers were wearing restraints.
In September 2021, a chartered commercial flight with male migrants departing from Laughlin Air Force Base in Del Rio, TX, descended into mayhem when they realized their destination was Haiti, not another US location. During the same week, other deportations turned violent. In Port-au-Prince, dozens of deportees standing on a tarmac tried to reboard the plane on which they had just arrived. A Haitian security officer stood on the narrow staircase and blocked them. Another plane soon landed, carrying women and children, and several migrants went aboard and attacked the pilots, demanding a flight back to the United States. Haitian security eventually put an end to the violence. Luckily, no life-threatening injuries occurred.
“After the Haitians rioted on those first planes, they then mutinied on the ground and took over buses that were taking them to Laughlin Airfield,” said Todd Bensman, a senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, in a recent appearance on Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle. “That happened multiple times, and there were other attempted hijackings on the ground at Laughlin Air Base.”
That was back when Biden had ramped up deportations because, in just a matter of days, more than 15,000 migrants had converged below the Del Rio International Bridge in Texas. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) soon adopted stricter security measures, including additional officers on flights and – ahem – using restraints on adult passengers. The cuffs are especially vital now because the majority of the deportees are supposedly criminals. “Those are the ones you least want to trust 40,000 feet up,” said Bensman.
Biden went on to repatriate more than 4 million migrants, all while building an expansive deportation machine costing billions. “He gave 40 contracts worth more than $2 billion to the same GEO Group (and its associated companies) whose stocks spiked with Trump’s election,” said Todd Miller in The Nation. The former commander-in-chief issued “21,713 border enforcement contracts, worth $32.3 billion, far more than any previous president,” and $10 billion more than his predecessor’s administration. “In other words,” said Miller, “Biden left office as the king of border contracts, which shouldn’t have been a surprise, since he received three times more campaign contributions than Trump from top border-industry companies during the 2020 election campaign.”
The point is, Trump did not invent the wheel – he’s just spinning it to a different tune while using all the tools left to him by his Democratic predecessor. The critics pumping sensationalism into dramatized descriptions of the current administration’s repatriation efforts conveniently disregard the past.