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 administration for deporting a single person was about $10,500, including arrest, detention and the deportation flight,” per NBC News. Within our borders, the Biden administration had the capacity, via 106 facilities, to detain 41,500 people.

And then there’s this, dropped on Valentine’s Day, which really strikes me as not at all tonally correct coming from the United States government:

Happy Valentine’s Day pic.twitter.com/6d7qmo7gtz

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) February 14, 2025

In other words, Trump’s mass deportation scheme has so far been a predictable mess: Chaotically carried out, with no real plan in place, and an extra helping of cruelty seemingly designed to excite his base. But there are also very real challenges for which there is no way around: When the countries migrants originate from refuse to take them back in, where are they supposed to go? And who ought to foot their bill?

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Scenes from New York: New York’s supreme court is weighing whether voting by noncitizens should be allowed in New York City elections. Local Law 11, which was passed in 2022, “would allow green-card holders and individuals with work permits who have lived in the city for at least a month to cast ballots in municipal elections,” reports Politico. Vito Fossella, Staten Island’s borough president and a former member of U.S. Congress, is leading the charge against the law, which was passed by an almost entirely Democrat city council and would allow more than 800,000 people to newly vote.

“The lawsuit remains another shameful attempt by xenophobic Republicans who would disenfranchise residents rather than promote a more inclusive and participatory democracy,” said the New York Immigration Coalition in a statement. But calling your opponents dirty names because you believe your policy priorities will be better achieved when you add a ton of Democratic voters to the rolls is wrong; there are real, hard questions to grapple with regarding who gets a say over policy, and it’s not bad for New Yorkers to want to designate voting rights to people with skin in the game.

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QUICK HITS

• “The most charitable take on [diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the government] is that they’re a waste of money,” Washington Free Beacon reporter Aaron Sibarium says. But the least charitable take? “That they’re actively subverting the American constitutional order and promoting harmful race-based policies that are reorganizing the country.” New—and very fiery—Just Asking Questions on the dismantling of DEI programs in the federal bureaucracy.

• More evidence, courtesy of Fox, that NYC Mayor Eric Adams will basically do the bidding of any and all Trump administration officials because of a possible deal they made. Background here. Pretty awful if you care about the rule of law.
• “Top US and Russian officials started meeting in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday to discuss how to end the war in Ukraine, without anyone from Kyiv involved,” reports Bloomberg. “The head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, Kirill Dmitriev, tasked with dealing with economic issues at the talks, said US firms have lost $300 billion from quitting the Russian market since the war started.”
• More horrible aviation accidents to start the year: The wreckage of a commuter plane in Alaska, operated by Bering Air, was recently found crashed on sea ice with all 10 dead. Then, yesterday, a Delta plane with 80 aboard traveling from Minneapolis to Toronto crashed upon landing, caught on fire, and flipped over; there were 18 injuries but everyone survived.

BREAKING- Toronto had a Delta flight flipped upside down. I got these photos from a friend on the plane. He’s okay. Minnesota to Toronto. pic.twitter.com/DeSoYAlsVo

— Kellie Meyer (@KellieMeyerNews) February 17, 2025

• Bay Area death cult leader Ziz is in custody. Background here, courtesy of Reason Roundup.

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Source: https://reason.com/2025/02/18/where-deportees-are-being-held/