In the first two months of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, the administration has taken new and unusual measures to conduct deportations. It has enlisted military planes, pressured other countries to retrieve their citizens, sent people to countries far from their homes and invoked a wartime law to remove migrants without due process.
But even as immigration officials have escalated efforts to remove people from the United States, they continue to fall short of the mass deportations Trump vowed to carry out. Overall, the number of flights and their destinations look largely similar to those under President Joe Biden.
There have been 258 deportation flights since Trump took office, according to a New York Times review of an independent database, about the level in the final months of the Biden administration. Less typical: At least 31 flights were on military planes, which are much more expensive to operate than the chartered jets U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement uses.
Flights are not a perfect measure of deportations. Many immigrants are deported by land to Mexico and others on regular commercial airline travel. But because the federal government has not released data on whom it is deporting, tracking deportation flights offers a way to assess which people and countries are affected by Trump’s immigration crackdown.
The flight data was collected by Tom Cartwright, an immigrant rights advocate, and was verified by the Times. Cartwright has been using public information to monitor deportation flights for the last five years.
In response to questions about the number of flights, a Homeland Security Department official provided a statement saying that ICE was working to arrest and deport people and that the agency expected the number of deportations to rise.
Typically, when people are deported, they are sent back to their country of origin. The Trump administration has been pushing for more third countries to accept deportees who are originally from elsewhere. In February, Costa Rica accepted a military flight carrying people from Central Asia and India, and Panama accepted people from Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
Under the terms of an agreement with the United States, Mexico has for years accepted deportees from select countries in Central America. But new agreements with other countries could lead to more removals of immigrants whose countries have declined to accept them.
The administration has tried other novel ways to remove immigrants and pressure their home countries into accepting them. It has flown hundreds of detainees, many of them Venezuelan, to the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay before sending them on to Honduras or, in many cases, returning them to detention in the United States.
On March 15, the administration said it was using the Alien Enemies Act to justify flying hundreds of Venezuelans accused of being gang members to El Salvador. That night, a federal judge ordered the flights to stop.
Despite these efforts, immigration officials have struggled to meet Trump’s enforcement goals. At least 27,000 people were deported in the six weeks after he took office, the latest federal data shows, a pace slower than under Biden. After an early surge in arrests, more people are sitting in immigrant detention facilities, in part because deportations have not kept up.
Another reason deportations are lower may be that fewer people are trying to cross the southern border. In February, fewer than 50 people detained by Customs and Border Protection were put directly onto deportation flights to Mexico and Central America. That’s compared with more than 2,000 in each of October, November and December.
Cartwright said he had noticed more flights making multiple stops, especially those traveling to Central America. This suggested that immigration officials were finding it harder to group enough people from the same country together to fill each flight, he said, and that fewer people were being transported overall.
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Timeline of flights deporting migrants
Jan. 24: Use of military planes to deport people begins. The first two flights, carrying 160 people in total, land in Guatemala.
Jan. 26: Colombia refuses to allow two U.S. military planes carrying deportees to land. After threats from Trump, Colombia begins regularly sending its own air force planes to pick up deportees.
Feb. 4: The first detainees are flown to the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay. Over the next two weeks, 13 military flights bring 178 Venezuelans to Guantánamo.
Feb. 10: Despite not normally accepting deportation flights, Venezuela sends two planes to El Paso, Texas, to pick up deportees and return them to Caracas.
Feb. 12: Nearly 300 people, mainly from Asia, the Middle East and Africa, are deported to Panama City on a military flight.
Feb. 20: About 200 people from Central Asia and India are deported to Costa Rica. ICE transfers all migrants from Guantánamo, flying 177 Venezuelans held there to Honduras, where they connect to a Venezuelan plane to return to Venezuela. One other migrant is transferred back to the U.S.
Feb. 23: ICE transfers more detainees to Guantánamo. From Feb. 23 to March 7, flights shuttle nearly 100 people from 27 countries to and from the base.
March 11: The administration empties Guantánamo again, transporting the last 40 people held there back to detention centers in the U.S.
March 15: After Trump invokes the Alien Enemies Act to suspend due process, ICE flies three planes carrying hundreds of Venezuelans and Salvadorans who are accused of being gang members to El Salvador to be imprisoned.
March 20: ICE transfers a new group of about 20 detainees from El Paso to Guantánamo.