Trump Uses Military to Send Deportees to Guatemala, El Salvador

(Bloomberg) -- The Trump administration began sending deportees on US military planes back to Guatemala and El Salvador, according to people familiar with the matter, as it looks to demonstrate that it’s acting on campaign promises to return millions of migrants to their home countries.

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White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed the start of military flights in a post on X that included a picture of shackled men boarding a cargo plane, without saying their destination. The Pentagon first announced that it planned to use Air Force planes for flights earlier this week.

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The people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing private information, said the military flights were headed to Guatemala and El Salvador, two countries that have been a source for many migrants. They said the flights were in addition to regular ones run by the Department of Homeland Security.

“Deportation flights have begun,” Leavitt wrote in a post on X. US immigration authorities have run hundreds of such flights a year for several years, just not with military aircraft.

A Pentagon spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about the flights’ destinations.

The administration move drew immediate criticism from people who monitor migrant flights. Thomas Cartwright, a refugee advocate with Witness at the Border, called the pictures posted by Leavitt “theater of the absurd” given that military cargo planes carry fewer people than the regular charter flights that DHS has used for several years. Cartwright said the US had already been sending an average of 10 deportation flights per week to Guatemala.

“The only thing new about this is subjecting people to transport on a cargo plane rather than charter and the LOWER number of people on the plane,” Cartwright wrote on X.

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The deportations are part of a broader sweep to round up migrants across the country. In New Jersey, the mayor of Newark and a Democratic Congresswoman criticized Immigration and Customs Enforcement for allegedly raiding a business to detain undocumented residents without producing a warrant.

President Donald Trump has vowed to target an estimated 11 million people who are in the country illegally. He’s ordered a new deployment of military troops to the border to help block migrants from crossing illegally. The Defense Department said at least four military planes will also be used to help carry out deportations of about 5,000 detained migrants from El Paso and San Diego.

During a visit to North Carolina on Friday, Trump said the flights were “going very well.”

“We’re getting the bad, hard criminals out,” he said.

The flights and Trump’s deployment of the military to help secure the US southern border are likely to be challenged under the Posse Comitatus Act, a late 19th century law that limits the use of the military for domestic law enforcement.

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Trump in an executive order on Monday ordered for the military to “seal the borders” and help by repelling forms of invasion including unlawful mass migration.”

“We haven’t seen the military involved in deportation operations in recent history,” said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. “So this is a significant increase in the military’s involvement in immigration control, though still in a measured and carefully bounded way.”

Guatemala already receives more than a dozen deportation flights per week and underlined its readiness to receive its citizens, with the vice president going earlier this week to greet a flight of deportees as it landed.

Trump pledged during last year’s campaign to deport millions of undocumented migrants from the US, saying that they have contributed to crime and that the nation faces a crises on its southern border.

Guatemala and El Salvador were some of the top destinations for deportees in the past decade, according to Department of Homeland Security data compiled by the Migration Policy Institute.

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