FILE – In this Sept. 18, 2021, file photo Haitian migrants use a dam to cross into the United States from Mexico in Del Rio, Texas. President Joe Biden embraced major progressive policy goals on immigration after he won the Democratic nomination, and he has begun enacting some. But his administration has been forced to confront unusually high numbers of migrants trying to enter the country along the U.S.-Mexico border and the federal response has inflamed both critics and allies. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Facing bipartisan criticism over its approach to immigration, the Biden administration on Thursday announced new rules that require authorities to only pursue migrants who recently crossed into the country without permission or are deemed to pose a threat to public safety.

The new guidelines replace interim rules issued in February that were initially blocked by a federal judge in August as part of a lawsuit brought by Texas and Louisiana. They break from a more aggressive approach to immigration enforcement under former President Donald Trump, who early in his presidency directed authorities to apprehend anyone who was illegally in the country.

The release comes as President Joe Biden has come under fire from allies for his reliance on a Trump-era public health authority to rapidly expel migrants encountered on the U.S.-Mexico border while also facing Republican criticism that he hasn’t done enough to counter a sharp increase in migrants seeking to enter the country.

The Biden administration has expelled about 5,000 Haitians who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border at Del Rio, Texas, in recent weeks. A federal appeals court in Washington on Thursday cleared the administration to continue expelling families under the public-health authority known as Title 42. The appeals court put on hold a lower court order barring the expulsions of families hours before the ban was to take effect.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told reporters that the new policy was based on the reality that the U.S. can’t go after all people in the country without legal status and shouldn’t try because many “have been contributing members of our communities for years.”

Authorities will be directed to focus on noncitizens who have crossed recently, defined as after Nov. 1, 2020, or who determined to be a threat because of national security or “serious criminal activity.” Homeland Security includes U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol.

Unlike the interim rules, the criminal activity is not limited to the category known in legal terms as an aggravated felony but will depend on the “totality of the facts and circumstances,” Mayorkas said. Anyone would be considered a priority if they are engaged or even suspected of terrorism or espionage, according to the memo. The new rules take effect Nov. 29.

Immigration authorities would be prohibited from arresting and seeking to deport someone in retaliation for exercising First Amendment rights, such as joining a protest or taking part in union activities.

“We are requiring and frankly empowering our workforce, critically empowering our workforce, to exercise their judgment, their law enforcement judgment,” the secretary said.

Advocates for strict immigration enforcement have criticized the interim guidelines, which were similar in intent as the newly released rules, because they were seen as a top-down approach and one that precluded low-level arrests that might yield investigative leads into bigger cases or help serve as a deterrent to illegal immigration.

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said on Twitter that Biden has “welcomed” the migrants who have crossed and would now promise those already in the country that “they may stay in the U.S. without repercussions” with the new rules.

Immigrant advocates, including some who have in the past called for eliminating ICE and immigrant detention altogether, welcomed limits on enforcement but are wary given the rapid detention and expulsion of thousands of Haitians at Del Rio.

“This policy is only going to be as good as the results,” said Jacinta Gonzalez, senior campaign organizer of Mijente. “If detention numbers continue to rise, as deportations continue to happen, if we still see human rights abuses at the border, this policy won’t mean anything.”

A federal judge in Texas blocked the interim rules in August, ruling that the administration did not have discretion to choose which migrants to detain, but a federal appeals court allowed the guidelines to take effect while the lawsuit proceeds.

Mayorkas said it makes little sense to pursue all of the estimated 11 million people in the country without legal status, even if the U.S. had the law enforcement capacity to do so.

“They contribute to the well-being of our country and justice requires that we exercise our discretion accordingly,” he said. “The fact that an individual is a removeable non-citizen should not alone be the basis of an enforcement action against them.”

Trump’s administration took hundreds of measures to restrict both legal and illegal immigration, including a zero-tolerance policy on border crossings that resulted in the forcible separation of thousands of families and requiring asylum seekers to await the processing of their cases in Mexico.

In the end, total deportations were higher under the first term of President Barack Obama, who enacted enforcement priorities similar to Biden’s, than under Trump. That was due in part to a lack of cooperation from many cities and states whose leaders opposed Trump’s immigration policies.

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Associated Press writer Elliot Spagat in San Diego contributed to this report.

Source:  https://apnews.com/article/immigration-donald-trump-joe-biden-mexico-arrests-af64610730b9c603b592101e4a7ddfa8

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Haitian migrants line up outside the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance, COMAR, to request refuge in Mexico City, Wednesday, Sept. 22, 2021. (AP Photo / Marco Ugarte)

A Haitian migrant rests on the sidewalk after arriving at the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance, COMAR, to request refuge in Mexico City, Wednesday, Sept. 22, 2021. (AP Photo/Marco Ugarte)

A group of migrants are driven away on the back of a truck at an encampment after agreeing to be transferred to a shelter, in Ciudad Acuna, Mexico, Friday, Sept. 24, 2021, across the Rio Grande from Del Rio, Texas. (AP Photo/Felix Marquez)

FILE – In this Sept. 3, 2021 file photo, a Haitian vendor sells traditional food outside a market in Tapachula, Mexico. (AP Photo/Marco Ugarte, File)

Haitian migrant children arrive with their parents at the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance, COMAR, to request refuge in Mexico City, Wednesday, Sept. 22, 2021. (AP Photo / Marco Ugarte)

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico began flying Haitian migrants back to their homeland Wednesday, sending 70 people to Port au Prince.

The first flight took off from the Villahermosa airport in the Gulf coast state of Tabasco with 41 men, 16 women and 13 minors aboard. The United States is also returning migrants on flights to the Haitian capital.

Mexico’s National Immigration Institute did not immediately respond to questions about when more flights were planned. But it referred to those on Wednesday’s flight as “the first group,” suggesting it was the start of a process to handle thousands of Haitian migrants who streamed to the U.S. border this month.

Thousands more are stuck in the southern city of Tapachula, near the Guatemalan border, waiting to have their asylum or refugee claims processed by Mexican officials.

“Authorities from the Interior and Foreign Relations Departments agreed with representatives of the Republic of Haiti to start the assisted voluntary return of migrants in Mexico to their homeland,” the institute said in a statement.

The institute said the returns were voluntary, and that the Haitians had been living in Tabasco and central Mexico. That suggests they were not among those who had gone to the U.S. border this month, nor the thousands stuck in Tapachula.

A Mexican official said last week that the plan was to first remove Haitians who were already in detention centers and had not requested protective status.

On Friday, Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said, “We don’t want Mexico to be a migrant camp; we want the problem to be addressed fully.”

On Tuesday, Mexican officials opened a mammoth reception center outside a soccer stadium in Tapachula in a bid to ease a backlog in Mexico’s asylum system and the resulting frustrations that drove thousands of applicants to head toward the U.S.

The site outside Tapachula’s Olympic Stadium can handle as many as 2,000 people daily. Previously, huge crowds had packed the streets around the commission’s downtown offices in Tapachula, jostling for position.

In early September, groups of hundreds of migrants set out walking from Tapachula, in many cases fed up with waiting for the overburdened asylum system to process their cases. Each time, Mexican authorities broke up the groups.

More recently, some 15,000 mostly Haitian migrants appeared at the Mexico-U.S. border. Some of them also had open asylum cases in Mexico but had grown tired of waiting. U.S. authorities spent a week clearing that camp in Del Rio, Texas, deporting some directly to Haiti and releasing others into the United States with the expectation they would appear before immigration officials at a later date.

Some of those migrants who were detained by Mexican authorities in Ciudad Acuña were shipped back south to Tapachula.

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Press secretary Psaki, DHS Secretary Mayorkas hold press briefing

EXCLUSIVE: President Biden on Friday left Border Patrol agents stunned after repeating debunked claims that Del Rio agents whipped or “strapped” Haitian migrants, while promising to make those agents “pay.”

Biden weighed in on the controversy over images that emerged Sunday of agents on horseback blocking Haitian migrants from entering the U.S.

Claims that agents, who were using long reins to control their horses, were using “whips” were quickly debunked by officials and other agents – but activists and elected Democrats have continued to fuel it. The photographer who took the images said Friday he did not see any agents whipping migrants.

BIDEN WARNS MOUNTED BORDER PATROL AGENTS CHARGING MIGRANTS IN DEL RIO SECTOR: ‘THOSE PEOPLE WILL PAY’ 

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas had pushed back against the narrative alongside Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz, but a day later – after the White House had called the images “horrific” – went on CNN and said the images “troubled me profoundly” before adding that “one cannot weaponize a horse” against migrants.

Sept. 19, 2021: U.S. Customs and Border Protection mounted officers attempt to contain migrants as they cross the Rio Grande from Ciudad Acuña, Mexico, into Del Rio, Texas. (AP Photo/Felix Marquez)

On Friday, amid an ongoing investigation into the agents – who have now been shifted to desk duty – and a day after the Biden administration barred the use of horses in Del Rio, the president tore into those agents.

“To see people treated like they did, horses barely running over, people being strapped – it’s outrageous,” Biden said, making a whipping motion with his hand. “I promise you, those people will pay. There will be an investigation underway now and there will be consequences. There will be consequences.”

Border Patrol agents were stunned and angered by the comments, which both claimed without evidence that migrants were run over and whipped, and at the same time cast a shadow over the investigation.

BIDEN ADMINISTRATION STOPS BORDER PATROL USING HORSES IN DEL RIO AMID DEM OUTRAGE

“Would you go to work and do your best knowing that if you do your boss is going to ‘make you pay’?” one agent told Fox News.  “I’m dumbfounded and don’t know what to say.”

The agent asked, “Is the president threatening to throw us in prison?”

Another said: “I see the administration wants to fry our agents. He just started a war with Border Patrol.”

Brandon Judd, head of the National Border Patrol Council, asked how there could be a fair investigation now that Biden had weighed in.

“Now that the president of the United States has already said they did wrong, how is an investigator supposed to do a true and honest investigation?” he told Fox News. “Because if that investigator finds they did nothing wrong — and they didn’t do anything wrong — but if that investigator finds they didn’t do anything wrong, how is that investigator’s job going to go?

Judd said Biden’s comments were “completely and totally outrageous” and accused Biden of “playing politics with Border Patrol agents’ lives.”

Judd again backed the agents at the center of the investigation and noted that they were doing the job they were tasked with doing by the same president who was now throwing them under the bus.

BORDER PATROL AGENTS FACING DEMOCRATIC ATTACKS SHIFTED TO DESK DUTY AMID INVESTIGATION

“Nobody was struck by a rein, not one person was struck by a rein, not one person was run over by those horses. They used the tactics they were trained to use, to do the job [Biden] sent them out to do — these are executive branch employees,” he said. “He sent them out there to do the job, and now he’s criticizing them because his base wants them to.”

Judd said he was mad over the comments, and said the anger was shared by his fellow agents.

Border Patrol agents on horseback. (Fox News/Bill Melugin)

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“Since he’s made that comment, my phone has obviously blown up. People are beyond incensed right now,” he said.

Former acting Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Mark Morgan told Fox News agents have been “condemned, careers ruined and reputations irreparably harmed, without any due process — all to distract from the out of control catastrophic crisis at our southern border.”

BORDER PATROL UNION CHIEF SAYS BIDEN ADMIN USING ‘WHIP’ FUROR TO DEFLECT FROM HANDLING OF MIGRANT CRISIS

“How will they get a fair impartial inquiry now when everyone in the chain of command all the way up to the president of the United States has already concluded they are already guilty of some form of atrocity?” Morgan, also a former Border Patrol chief, told Fox News in an interview.

“For the president to say that, he has become emotionally unhinged and caved to the woke cancel culture,” he said. “The agents feel betrayed, stabbed in the back, demoralized.”

“This year’s ongoing immigration crisis has single-handedly done more to hurt the morale of the Border Patrol workforce than any other year in its history, and it didn’t have to happen like this,” National Border Patrol Council Vice President Jon Anfinsen told Fox News.

Fox News previously had spoken to several of the horse agents who had been sidelines by the ban on the use of horses. They said they were angry and frustrated about the false “whip” narrative, with one telling Fox News he’s now giving out meals and turning lights on and off rather than patrolling the border.

He said the kids in the camp loved the horses and the horses are now locked in a stall all day.

The agents also said the pictures also show one of the migrants grabbing onto the reins of an agent’s horse, which is a use of force approval for them to use deadly force if they wanted to.

Another agent who spoke to Fox News on Friday said that their entire station is outraged at the controversy, and hoped that the agents at the center of it eventually sue.

“I am appalled but not surprised that this President would stand at a national televised address and bold face lie or again show his utter incompetence, to the press and the American people, including his childish threats of retaliation,” the agent said.

That agent also accused Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz as being “missing in action” over the controversy.

“This is really pushing the morale to lows not seen before…just when you think it is at its lowest in comes this administration to push it lower,” the agent said.

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Judd said Border Patrol agents, despite their morale being low, would keep doing their job — although he warned they would likely be second-guessing their actions, a move that could be dangerous for law enforcement and those they are seeking to protect.

“I know these agents…. even though they do not have the support of this president, they’re still going to go out and they’re still going to do their job, because they do care about this country, they do care about border security, they do care about the safety of the citizens of this country,” he said. “So they’re still going to do their job, but they’re going to be second-guessing themselves in everything that they do, knowing that the president, without the benefit of an investigation, is already condemning them.”

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Fox News’ Brooke Singman contributed to this report.

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