The announcement came a day after Colombia announced it was suspending flights, citing “cruel” treatment.
Colombia’s migration agency has announced that flights will resume next week carrying nationals deported from the United States’ border, a day after the South American country said it would temporarily halt its expulsion program over allegations of “cruel and degrading treatment”.
Fernando García Manosalva, head of Migración Colombia, issued a video statement to discuss the policy change on Friday. In a Twitter post, the agency confirmed that “humane treatment and reasonable conditions during transfer will be a fundamental axis” of connecting flights from the United States.
“US authorities expressed their willingness to act on the complaint,” he wrote, commending the “goodwill” of the parties involved.
The announcement follows a news release Thursday declaring a temporary suspension of flights, designed to reinstate undocumented arrivals from the US southern border to Colombia.
The news release cited repeated flight cancellations and “the alarming and demeaning treatment our compatriots received before and during the flight” as reasons for the suspension.
“The use of restrictive elements such as hand and foot cuffs, even for women, the mother of the family, has been one of the main aspects of negotiations with the agency, to respect the treatment of Colombia,” said García Manosalva in a release.
The migration agency estimates that 1,200 Colombians are expected to return on suspended flights between May 1 and 7.
García Manosalva points out that the number of flights is also increasing: A year ago, Colombia received one or two per month. In February, he said, “We receive about 20 per month.”
Those numbers coincide with an increase in the number of Colombians arriving at the US-Mexico border.
For fiscal year 2022, the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency documented 125,172 “encounters” with Colombian nationals who crossed the southwestern border illegally, up from 6,202 the previous year and a huge jump from the 404 recorded in 2020.
An estimated 89,201 crossings have been recorded during the first five months of the 2023 fiscal year.
The US is currently bracing for a surge in crossings as Title 42’s controversial expiry border policy expires on May 11.
The policy, imposed in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic under then-President Donald Trump, allowed officials to turn away asylum seekers on public health grounds, though experts say the benefits are dubious. Human rights activists also denounced the move as a violation of refugee law.
The US is expected to finalize new rules to limit asylum access at its southern border in the days leading up to the end of Title 42. As part of its strategy to “humanely manage migration flows”, Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration has “dramatically increased the number of transfer flights per week.” “.
“The number of weekly flights will double or triple for some countries,” the Department of Homeland Security said in April. Another agency, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), issued a release Wednesday stating that 48,381 people had been removed from the country on “transfer flights” in the first half of 2023.
At the end of April, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Cuba confirmed that it had also returned to accept a “removal flight” from the US for the first time since December 2020. It said the plane was carrying 40 people who had traveled to the US by raft, plus 83 others who were being held at the US-Mexico border.
