Over a 10-day period, the Trump administration sent more than 100 deportees from Afghanistan, Cuba and other nations to eight countries across Africa, according to internal government documents obtained by CBS News.
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ICE denies arresting kids at school bus stops while shipping Afghan allies to Africa
As it ran on the front
There is no policy — and I want to be very clear, no policy — of Immigration and Customs Enforcement making arrests at school bus stops. That claim came from a single senator in Connecticut, and it was directly and immediately rejected by the border czar, on the record, which in this administration is usually where the story ends. I'd point out that a rejection from an official spokesperson is, definitionally, the final word, unless — well, unless there's a pattern of official rejections turning out to need a follow-up correction, which, I'm told by the desk, has happened before, so maybe it isn't definitionally anything.
Meanwhile, and this is a completely separate matter, the agency has expanded what's called third-country removal, which means individuals — in this case Afghans, among others — with final orders of removal are being relocated to African nations rather than their countries of origin. This is a routine, orderly, congressionally — I was going to say congressionally authorized, and I should check that before I say it, so let's just say it's a program, it's a real program, it exists, it's expanding, and the word 'third country' is doing a lot of work in that sentence because it means the destination has nothing to do with where the person is from or where they're going to be safe, it's just wherever there's a seat available.…
…(cont) So here's where I actually land, and I'll own this: you've got a flat denial on a small, specific, local claim — arrests at a bus stop, a place parents can point to — right next to a confirmed, expanding, larger program that moves people thousands of miles from anywhere they've ever lived, and somehow the small claim is the one that got a press conference. I don't have a clean explanation for why the denial gets more oxygen than the deportation flight manifest. I was going to say it's about protecting due process, and it isn't that, it's about which photo runs on the local news at six. I'll take the loss on that one and move on.
“They'll deny the local stuff every time, the claim that made the news, because the real program is the one nobody's filming — an ally who worked for the U.S. in Afghanistan getting routed to a third country he's never seen. The denial is the tell; if the small claim weren't a problem, they wouldn't need the border czar on camera saying so.”
“There is no policy of arresting children at school bus stops, full stop — that claim is categorically false. As for the Africa relocations, those are third-country removals for individuals with final orders, which — that's not the reassuring comparison I meant to make.”
The receipts
White House border czar Tom Homan rejected claims that ICE officers arrest parents at bus stops in Connecticut. But there is no argument that arrests are up nationwide. Lana Zak reports from Stamford, Connecticut.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.