When deportation flights from the United States to Venezuela resumed last fall after four years, it was a move intended to demonstrate that President Biden was aggressively challenging the record number of crossings at the U.S. southern border.
The expulsions were also intended to determine other Venezuelans who might be considering the trip.
But on Wednesday, for the second week in a row, U.S.-operated flights to Venezuela carrying migrants did not depart as scheduled — a move that appears to have been initiated by Venezuela.
The Venezuelan government did not respond to repeated requests for comment on whether the deportation flights would be permanently suspended, but a social media post by the Venezuelan vice president last month threatened to halt them after the United States reimposed some economic sanctions.
US Department of Homeland Security officials confirmed that a flight scheduled for last week and another scheduled for Wednesday had both been cancelled.
Officials said they were not authorized to discuss the flights publicly.
They said the reason for the cancellations was unclear, but an official said the agency would continue its attempts to deport Venezuelans.
At a meeting in Colombia on Monday, Juan Gonzalez, a senior adviser to the US National Security Council, confirmed that a recent flight had been cancelled, but said he was “confident” that flights would resume soon.
“We look forward to actually restarting direct repatriations from the United States to Venezuela,” he said.
According to data obtained by the New York Times, from October to the end of December the United States deported more than 1,300 Venezuelans overall, representing only a small portion of the half-million Venezuelans who have arrived in the United States in recent years. .
But the deportation flights have been an important political symbol for the Biden administration, showing that the president is actively addressing the surge of migrants. Their possible demise would represent another setback for Biden, experts say, and would come just as a congressional border deal collapses in Washington.
“This comes at the worst possible time for the Biden administration,” said Geoff Ramsey, senior fellow for Venezuela at the Atlantic Council.
Shutting down deportation flights could be the Venezuelan government’s way of using immigration as a weapon to fight back against the United States for reimposing sanctions, said Christopher Sabatini, senior fellow for Latin America at Chatham House, a International Affairs Research Group in London.
Sabatini called it a desperate move intended to hit Biden at a perceived weak spot.
“They don’t have a lot of other things they can do,” he said.
Republican lawmakers have criticized Biden’s strategy towards Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. “Biden is being played again,” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida wrote last week on the social media platform. “I lifted sanctions on Venezuela in the agreement for free elections and deportation flights, now the regime is backing down.”
The uncertainty over deportation flights comes as rising tensions between the United States and Venezuela threaten to derail a deal struck between the two governments last fall: The United States lifted some sanctions after Maduro’s government agreed to take measures towards holding free and fair elections this year. year.
But late last month, after Venezuela’s highest court issued a ruling barring opposition leader María Corina Machado from running for president, the United States reinstated some sanctions.
On the same day, the vice president of Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez, declared a post on social media that flights could be grounded in response to those renewed sanctions, which she called “rude and unjustified blackmail.”
Ms. Machado won a landslide in opposition presidential elections last year that were held without official government support and are widely seen by experts as a significant threat to Maduro in a presidential contest.
The Biden administration has warned it may reimpose tougher sanctions on Venezuela’s oil and gas industry that it suspended for six months if the Maduro government fails to allow credible national elections, including allowing candidates representing the opposition. The six-month suspension expires in April.
Deportation flights to Venezuela were halted in 2019 under former President Donald J. Trump, citing conditions in Venezuela, including civil unrest, that threatened the safety of passengers and flight crews.
As U.S. officials try to get deportation flights back on track, Venezuelans in detention and slated for deportation have received mixed messages, said Luis Ángeles, a Florida-based lawyer whose firm represents more than two dozen Venezuelan clients.
Last week, Venezuelans facing deportation proceedings were told that flights had been suspended indefinitely, he said, creating panic among his clients and their families.
“Over the past two weeks, we have been inundated with calls from family members regarding detainees with final deportation orders,” Mr. Ángeles said. “There is a growing fear that their family members could be confined to detention centers for months or years.”
This week, the whiplash continued, he said, with the same customers receiving word from American immigration authorities that flights to Venezuela would in fact begin again, perhaps by the end of the week.
Monica Vázquez, 39, is among those whose asylum request was rejected. For the past few weeks, she had been waiting to board a flight, only to find herself still stuck in a detention center in Louisiana, her cousin Maxyoris Faria said.
“We are here anxious about the news that the deportation flights won’t go out — and they won’t even tell her that she can be released to the United States,” said Ms. Faria, who noted that Ms. Vázquez had been in detention for four months .
“The days pass without us knowing what will happen,” he added. “We pray to God that he can get out of there.”
Along with the deportation flights, Department of Homeland Security officials say the United States continues to remove Venezuelan migrants in Mexico and can expel Venezuelans on commercial flights to the country, although that is much more difficult to do.
Deportation flights between the two countries took off about 11 per week, a Homeland Security official said, and generally contained about 130 flights.
According to lawyers and migrant organizations in the United States, the Venezuelans on the flights were mostly men.
After arriving in Venezuela, deportees say they were detained by authorities and interviewed at length, lawyers and migrant groups say, adding that some are released after a few days, while others continue to be detained.
The summary of deportations was unusual because it covered the United States and Venezuela they have no diplomatic relationsalthough the Biden administration has shown a willingness to engage more with authoritarian rule than Trump.
The wave of Venezuelans trying to reach the United States has been fueled by the collapse of Venezuela’s economy and political repression at the hands of the authoritarian government.
The continued influx has led to growing pressure on Biden from Democratic mayors in cities where migrants — many of them Venezuelans — were straining local resources.
The conditions that drove many Venezuelans to leave have largely not changed. The economic crisis has decimated the country’s public health and education systems and food prices have soared. About a quarter of the country’s population has left Venezuela, one of the largest migrations in modern history.
Living conditions have become so difficult that the Biden administration offered temporary humanitarian protection to Venezuelans who were in the United States by July 31. Nearly 500,000 Venezuelans qualified for protection, which allowed them to work legally.
Isayen Herrera AND Julie Turkewitz contributed to the reporting.