A quiet rebellion against President Donald Trump is unfolding in Latin America after he deployed the military to send deportees home in handcuffs.
Since taking office on Monday, President Donald Trump has announced a slew of immigration-related executive orders, paving the way for a broad effort to crack down on undocumented immigrants in the U.S. In more than 21 actions, Trump has moved to overhaul parts of the U.S. immigration system, including how immigrants are processed and deported from the U.S. The White House has since released some of those efforts. On Friday, the new White House Press Secretary shared images of deportation flights being carried out by military cargo planes. While Trump has promised “mass deportations” and arrests, it remains unclear how much of his plan is already being implemented.
LATIN AMERICAN REBELLION
A quiet rebellion against President Donald Trump is unfolding in Latin America after he deployed the military to send deportees home in handcuffs. The U.S. military has a track record of intervention in Latin America, and Mexico, which has routinely accepted U.S.-chartered deportation flights, appears to have drawn a line at using military aircraft. Colombia and Brazil also condemned the conditions in which deportees were returned, and Colombia suspended deportation flights on Sunday.
Last week, Mexico refused to accept a deportation flight for the first time in decades. The country refused an Air Force C-17 deportation flight on Thursday, a move first reported by NBC News. A Border Patrol agent adjusts the equipment used to secure migrants after handing them over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Migrants from Guatemala would be deported using commercial airlines and charter flights on Wednesday, May 10, 2023.
TENSIONS
Two other Air Force C-17 flights on Friday appeared to take a significant detour around Mexican airspace to reach Guatemala, said Tom Cartwright, who tracks deportation flights to the U.S. as a volunteer for the immigrant rights group Border Witness. The flights — which appear to have departed from Tucson, Arizona, and El Paso, Texas — passed over the newly renamed “Gulf of the Americas,” flying south along Costa Rica, only to double back north toward Guatemala, he said.
Following the NBC report, White House press secretary Caroline Leavitt posted on the X social media page that Mexico had accepted four more deportation flights on Thursday. “This is in addition to the unlimited returns at the land border, the deportation of non-Mexicans, and the resettlement of Remain-in-Mexico,” Leavitt told X. There were three flights on Thursday to Mexico, Cartwright said. All were regular U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement flights, according to Cartwright.
COLOMBIA’S REFUSAL
On Sunday, Colombian President Gustavo Petro suspended deportation flights from the U.S., saying the Trump administration must first establish a protocol to treat migrants with dignity before he would accept the flights. “The United States cannot treat Colombian migrants like criminals,” Petro said in a post on the social media site X. Brazilian officials also demanded that U.S. agents remove the handcuffs from a group of deportees flown there on Friday on a standard ICE charter plane.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s foreign minister called the practice a sign of “blatant disrespect” for his fellow citizens, Reuters reported. The United States cannot unilaterally send deportation flights to foreign countries; it must create an agreement with each nation. Some countries have largely refused to accept deportation flights, among them China and Cuba. The U.S. is also unable to return migrants to countries with which it has no diplomatic relations, including Venezuela.