ICE Air: Carrying deportees and a message
GUATEMALA CITY, Guatemala - About 45 minutes before descent, the guards went up and down the aisle unshackling the passengers, and the mood in the cabin began to lighten. A mother with a boy near the front was still crying, but they were the only family aboard the flight. Nearly all the other 93 deportees were men, and they began joking and talking excitedly. Soon Guatemalan territory appeared below, misty and green. A cheer rose. "You see? They're smiling!" said Matt Albence, the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who spends a great deal of time defending his agency's core functions, including this: a one-way trip out of the United States on ICE Air. "This is probably better than some of the commercial flights I fly on." It was Albence's first visit to Guatemala, the country that has surpassed Mexico as the largest source of unauthorized migration to the United States. ICE Air, the agency's charter airline, was bringing two planeloads of people to Guatemala on Thursday. The Trump administration has big plans to increase that. President Donald Trump has pledged to expel "millions" of immigration violators, a goal that wildly exceeds the government's abilities and the seating capacity of its aging 737s. The reality is that Trump is losing on the ground: Since the start of the 2019 fiscal year in October, ICE has deported about 50,000 Guatemalans, but nearly five times as many illegally crossed the border into the United States during that time, leading to a record influx of families and children. In its efforts to deter Central American migrants, the Trump administration reached an accord with the Guatemalan government last month that will allow the United States to begin sending planeloads of Honduran and Salvadoran asylum seekers here, in addition to Guatemalan deportees. The country has a...
