In the first two months of the intense anti -immigration campaign of President Donald Trump, the Government has adopted new and unusual measures to deportations. He enlisted military airplanes, pressed other countries to receive their citizens back, sent third -party countries away from their homes and invoked a war law to expel migrants without due process.
But, although immigration officials have intensified their efforts to expel people from the United States, they still do not reach the massive deportations Trump promised to carry out. In general, the number of flights and their destinations are very similar to those of President Joe Biden’s mandate.
According to an analysis that made The New York Times From an independent database, there have been 258 deportation flights since Trump came into functions, approximately the same level of the last months of the Biden government. What is less typical is that at least 31 flights were carried out in military airplanes, whose operation is much more expensive than that of the charted aircraft used by the customs immigration and control service (ICE, for its acronym in English).
Flights are not a perfect measure of deportations. Many immigrants are deported by land to Mexico and others on conventional commercial flights. But since the Federal Government has not published the data on who deportes, monitoring deportation flights is a way to evaluate which people and countries affect Trump’s aggressive migratory policies.
The flight data were collected by Tom Cartwright, defender of immigrants, and were verified by the Times. Cartwright has been using public information for five years to monitor deportation flights.
In response to the questions about the number of flights, an official of the National Security Department made a statement in which he declared that ICE was working to stop and deport people and that the agency expected the number of deportations to increase.
Normally, when a person is deported, he is returned to his country of origin. The Trump government has been pressing for more third countries to accept deported people from other places. In February, Costa Rica accepted a military flight with people from Central and India Asia, and Panama accepted people from Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
By virtue of an agreement with the United States, Mexico has been accepting deportees from certain countries in Central America. But the new agreements with other countries could lead to more expulsions of immigrants whose countries refused to accept them.
The Government has put into practice novel methods to expel immigrants and press their countries of origin to accept them back. He moved hundreds of detainees by plane, many of them Venezuelans, to the American military base of Guantanamo before sending them to Honduras or, in many cases, return them to the United States as detainees.
On March 15, the Government announced that it would use the Law of Foreign Enemies to justify the transfer to El Salvador of hundreds of Venezuelans accused of being gang members. That night, a federal judge ordered the flights to stop.
Despite these efforts, immigration officials have had difficulty meeting Trump’s objectives in migratory control. According to the most recent federal data, at least 27 thousand people were deported in the six weeks after their possession, a slower pace than under Biden’s mandate. After an initial rebound in arrests, there are more and more people held in immigrant detention centers, partly because deportations have not remained at the same rate.
Another reason why there have been less deportations is that fewer people try to cross the southern border. In February, less than 50 people arrested by the Office of Customs and Border Protection were sent directly on deportation flights to Mexico and Central America. That compared to the more than two thousand in each of the months of October, November and December.
Cartwright commented that he had noticed that more flights made several scales, especially those traveling to Central America. This suggested that immigration officials were more difficult to group enough people from the same country to fill each flight, he explained, and that in general he was transporting less people.
Chronology of migrant deportation flights
January 24: The use of military aircraft begins to deport people. The first two flights, with 160 passengers in total, land in Guatemala.
January 26: Colombia refuses to allow two US military planes to be terrified that transport deportees. After Trump’s threats, Colombia begins to regularly send aircraft from its own Air Force to pick up the deportees.
February 4: The first detainees are transferred by plane to the American military base in Guantanamo. Throughout the next two weeks, 13 military flights take 178 Venezuelans to Guantanamo.
February 10: Although it normally does not accept deportation flights, Venezuela sends two airplanes to El Paso, Texas, to pick up deported people and take them back to Caracas.
February 12: Almost 300 people, mainly from Asia, Middle East and Africa, are deported to Panama City on a military flight.
February 20: About 200 people from Central and India are deported to Costa Rica. The ICE moves all Guantanamo migrants: 177 Venezuelans are sent to Honduras, where they connect with a Venezuelan plane to return to Venezuela. Another migrant is transferred back to the United States.
February 23: The ICE moves more arrested to Guantanamo. From February 23 to March 7, flights transfer almost one hundred people from 27 countries to and from the base.
March 11: The Government empties Guantanamo, transporting the last 40 people held there back to detention centers in the United States.
March 15: After Trump invokes the Law of Foreign Enemies to suspend due process, the ICE sends three aircraft with hundreds of Venezuelans and Salvadorans accused of being gang members to El Salvador to be imprisoned.
Subscriber content
March 20: ICE moves a new group of about 20 detainees from El Paso to Guantanamo.
March 31: UU. Announces that he sent another 17 prisoners to El Salvador.
So far from the second Trump government, the number of deportation flights is largely similar to Joe Biden.