Where Deportees Are Being Held
Now that they’ve been deported, where do they go? There were 109 deportation flights in January, 65 before the inauguration of President Donald Trump and 44 after. The Department of Homeland Security posted publicly that agents had arrested almost 9,000 people between the start of the Trump administration and February 3.
Meanwhile, Trump is apparently angry that deportation numbers aren’t higher and that his preferred targets—between 1,200 and 1,400 arrests of illegal immigrants per day—are not yet being met.
So where are people going when they’re sent “back home” if “back home”—China, Iran, Afghanistan, for example—won’t take them?
So far, Costa Rica has opened its borders, receiving one flight of 200 deportees from Central Asia and India. And Panama has so far received at least three flights of deportees, with plans to first house migrants at hotels before sending them to camps near the Darién Gap, called San Vicente. The United States is paying for these flights, but assisting these migrants will be the joint responsibility of the United Nations and the host countries once they’ve landed.
“Lawyers in Panama say it is illegal to detain people without a court order for more than 24 hours,” reports The New York Times. “Yet roughly 350 migrants deported by the United States on three military planes have been locked in a soaring, glass-paneled hotel, the Decapolis Hotel Panama in Panama City, for nearly a week, while officials ready a camp near the jungle.” It’s not clear when San Vicente will be finished, what living conditions will be like for migrants who have no place to go, or how the Panamanian government will put pressure on these migrants’ sending countries—which, in some cases, may persecute those who have fled—to allow them to return.
The U.S. government has also tried another strategy: Guantánamo Bay. “Dozens of Venezuelan migrants sent by the Trump administration to the U.S. military base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are being guarded by troops rather than civilian immigration officers,” reports The New York Times, holding them in Camp 6, a prison building. This is, of course, where the military used to detain Al Qaeda suspects—an infamous spot that multiple presidents starting with Barack Obama vowed to close. The optics are undeniably bad, the conditions possibly even worse.
How much does it cost to deport? “ICE’s average cost during the Biden a
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