Mass deportations of undocumented immigrants

[ajax18]

I'd just work for a lower rate.

Cool. I’m offering $2.10 an hour.

Start at 6 AM tomorrow?

You've already outbid America's Best. But you'll never get opticians or staff willing to get up before 10am or work past 4pm in the afternoon.

[canpakes]

.
Uh ohs.

Trump is mad that not enough people are being rounded up yet.

From today’s Wall Street Journal:

Trump Administration to Replace Acting ICE Director
Officials have been frustrated with the pace of deportations

The acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Caleb Vitello, was removed from his post, administration officials and other people familiar with the matter said, amid frustration in the Trump administration that deportations haven’t accelerated faster.
…
Top administration officials have been putting growing pressure on ICE to increase its daily arrests, even at one point telling individual field offices they were expected to hit daily targets of 75 arrests a day, or about 1,500 across the country. They have been casting around for solutions as daily arrests haven’t been hitting those targets.

[Gadianton]

Well Campakes, if they are already going for the low-hanging fruit -- raiding workplaces, then maybe then need to invent something that looks like fruit? Perhaps arrest people in the store for speaking Spanish? How are we going to get these big number our president demands? I wonder if Markk has any ideas? I'll bet it won't be through the detective work and trail sniffing that goes into tracking criminals.

[Jersey Girl]

Bumping this to the top so Markk has THREE threads to post about it on.

[canpakes]

Apparently, while we are cutting ‘government waste’, Trump has requested Kristi Noem initiate a $200 million dollar ad campaign about mass deportations and ‘closing the border’. The bonus? We are spending that money to prop up Trump’s fragile ego.

Per Kristi Noem, via Rolling Stone:

Noem said that Trump instructed that he didn't want to be in the ads himself, telling her: "I want you in the ads, and I want your face in the ads... but I want the first ad, I want you to thank me. I want you to thank me for closing the border."

She recalled: "I said, 'Yes, sir, I will thank you for closing the border.' So if you notice, in that ad, we thanked him for closing the border."

[Markk]

Bumping this to the top so Markk has THREE threads to post about it on.

What is funny Gunnar actually has at least a dozen Trump threads on the first two or three pages and you say nothing? I have four threads here in years, one on fentanyl and one on solutions for illegal immigration, one on a SNL skit, and my favorite Trump doing the YMCA dance and that's it. Do you think maybe the problem is not my having four threads, but something deeper. Do you have a crush on me? Let me leave you with this...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQugcviHDTA

Love ya!

[Gadianton]

Zeihan's update on mass deportation. I don't agree with him on everything but he's about as good of a baseline as I know of.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEwVQnLnHRo

[canpakes]

.
Maybe DOGE should look into this.

U.S. Suspends Costly Deportation Flights Using Military Aircraft
Trump administration had used C-17s to fly migrants abroad and to Guantanamo Bay

By Shelby Holliday and Nancy A. Youssef
March 5, 2025, 12:58 pm EST

The Trump administration has stopped using military aircraft to fly migrants who entered the U.S. illegally to Guantanamo Bay or other countries, defense officials said.

President Trump has made a crackdown on illegal immigration a focus of his second term. But using military aircraft to transport some migrants to their home countries or to a military base at Guantanamo Bay has proved expensive and inefficient, The Wall Street Journal has reported. 

The last military deportation flight was March 1, officials said. The Pentagon said Tuesday that no such flights were scheduled for the next 48 hours. A flight scheduled for Thursday was canceled, a defense official said. The pause on such flights could be extended or made permanent, officials said. 

Soon after Trump took office in January, his administration began using military aircraft for flights traditionally handled by the Department of Homeland Security to transfer some migrants to other countries and to U.S. military facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The administration wanted the military flights to send a message about their intent to get tough on immigrants in the country illegally, defense officials said.

“The message is clear: If you break the law, if you are a criminal, you can find your way at Guantanamo Bay,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said last week after watching migrants arrive on a C-130 aircraft during a visit to Guantanamo Bay. “You don’t want to be at Guantanamo Bay.”

The Trump administration has conducted roughly 30 migrant flights using C-17 aircraft and about a dozen on C-130, according to flight-tracking data. Destinations included India, Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru, Honduras, Panama and Guantanamo Bay. 

But the military flights have taken longer routes and transported fewer migrants at higher cost to taxpayers than the government’s typical deportation flights on civilian aircraft, the Journal found. 

Three deportation flights to India cost $3 million each. Some flights carried a dozen people to Guantanamo at a cost of at least $20,000 per migrant, the Journal’s analysis showed.  

A standard U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement flight costs $8,500 per flight hour, according to a government webpage. Former ICE officials told the Journal the figure is closer to $17,000 per flight hour for international trips. 

It costs $28,500 per hour to fly a C-17, which is designed to carry heavy cargo and troops, according to U.S. Transportation Command, which provided the aircraft.
 
Adding to costs, the C-17s haven’t been using Mexico’s airspace, which can add several hours to flights destined for Central and South America. Mexico and some other countries in Latin America haven’t allowed the military flights to land and have instead sent their own aircraft or arranged for deportees to travel on commercial flights. 
…
https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-s ... t-c37c577a

[Kishkumen]

Zeihan's update on mass deportation. I don't agree with him on everything but he's about as good of a baseline as I know of.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEwVQnLnHRo

He really is in love with his dubious belief in the collapse of China. LOL.