Deportation starts for US ‘criminal’ migrants
GUATEMALA CITY—The White House announced late Thursday that “538 illegal immigrant criminals” had been arrested and hundreds deported by military aircraft, saying that “the largest massive deportation operation in history is well underway.”
On Friday, two US military planes carrying dozens of expelled illegal migrants arrived in Guatemala on Friday, authorities said.
A total of 79 Guatemalans—48 men and 31 women—were on a first flight that landed at around midnight, the Central American country’s migration institute said.
The second, with an unspecified number of illegals on board, arrived Friday morning.
“These are flights that took place after Trump took office,” an official in the Guatemalan vice president’s office told AFP.
A Pentagon source told AFP that “overnight, two DOD (Department of Defense) aircraft conducted repatriation flights from the US to Guatemala.”
‘The bad’
Early Friday the White House posted an image on X of men in shackles being marched into a military aircraft, with the caption: “Deportation flights have begun.”
And President Donald Trump told reporters that the flights were to get “the bad, hard criminals out.”
“Murderers, people that have been as bad as you get. As bad as anybody you’ve seen,” he said.
Deportation flights were carried out regularly under Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden, whose administration removed some 270,000 people in fiscal year 2023—more than any year of Trump’s first presidency.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data published by Newsweek show that from 2021 when Biden took office up to early 2025, US authorities had more than 11 million encounters with ‘migrants’ at the border.
The year 2023 showed the highest number of border encounters at 3.2 million.
Campaign promise
Friday’s deportees were taken to a reception center at an air force base in Guatemala’s capital, away from the media.
Trump promised a crackdown on illegal immigration during the election campaign and began his second term with a flurry of executive actions aimed at overhauling entry to the United States.
On his first day in office he signed orders declaring a “national emergency” at the southern border and announced the deployment of more troops to the area while vowing to deport “criminal aliens.”
