U.S. Immigration Policy Accepts Dog Refugees from Caribbean Island

By David North on October 6, 2021

All of us think about immigration policies as dealing with other human beings. And like most of us, I pay special attention to news about my home town, a pleasant suburban county seat some 30 miles west of Manhattan, Morristown, N.J.; it is 20 miles or so from Newark.

It was with these two mental frameworks operating that I read a U.S. Customs and Border Protection press release with this headline: “CBP at Newark Receives Rescue Dogs: Dogs and Cats of Antigua Inc. arrive at Morristown Airport”.

Naturally, I read it thinking at first that the rescue dogs were trained to help recover people, alive and dead, in the collapse of buildings in big cities and were landing in a strange place. Morristown’s little airport takes care of Piper Cubs, not overseas flights, and what catastrophe had struck my hometown area that caused their arrival?

The CBP press release should have written about “rescued dogs” not “rescue dogs”. Later in the release, there is this passage: “Dogs and Cats of Antigua – US is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization established in 2015 with the aim to help reduce the dire street dog overpopulation in Antigua.”

There were 25 dogs on the flight destined for homes in New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut, and 50 more dogs on the way to adopting families in Toronto.

So the Department of Homeland Security provides services to those (both human and canine) fleeing from Third-World poverty and over-population.

Photos accompanying the press release showed that each dog arrived in its own carrier; there were no window seats for these refugees from Antigua.