ICE AIR: TIED DEPORTEES, AIR FRESHENERS AND CHEERS. AMERICA'S OUTWARD JOURNEY
ICE AIR: TIED DEPORTEES, AIR FRESHENERS AND CHEERS. AMERICA'S OUTWARD JOURNEY.
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Nick Miroff
Reporter for Immigration Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security
August 10 at 5:55 pm
GUATEMALA CITY – About 45 minutes before the descent, the guards went up and down the corridor to untie the passengers, and the mood in the cabin began to improve. A mother with a boy near the front still cried, but they were the only family aboard the flight. Almost all the other 93 deportees were men, and they joked and talked excitedly.
Soon Guatemalan territory appeared under it, foggy and green. A cheer rose.
"Do you see? They smile! "Said Matt Albence, incumbent director of the US Immigration and Customs Bureau, who spends a lot of time defending his agency's core functions, including: a one-way trip with ICE Air from the US. "That's probably better than some of the commercial flights I fly on."
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The deportees will meet Thursday at an airfield in Alexandria, La., To prepare for the flight to Guatemala. (Nick Miroff / The Washington Post)
President Trump has promised to exclude "millions" of immigrants, a target that far exceeds the government's capacity and seating capacity of 737-year-olds.
The reality is that Trump is losing ground locally: since the start of fiscal 2019 in October, ICE has deported some 50,000 Guatemalans, but nearly five times that number has illegally crossed the US border at this time record influx of families and children.
In its efforts to deter Central American migrants, last month the Trump government reached agreement with the Guatemalan government, which will allow the United States to send in addition to Guatemalan deportees aircraftloads of Honduran and Salvadoran asylum seekers.
The country has a runoff election on Sunday, and both candidates have criticized the deal, which must be approved by Guatemala's Congress.
Trump has threatened to ruin the country's economy with tariffs and taxes if it is not appeased.
ICE sends about nine flights a week to Guatemala. The government has agreed to accommodate up to 20, each with 135 passengers, which could potentially turn the country into some sort of reverse Ellis island – a depot far from the US border for those who have rejected the United States.
Albence, a longtime ICE official, said he wanted to follow the process first-hand and had never been to the Northern Triangle region of Central America.
The day before, ICE had searched seven poultry and food factories in Mississippi, arresting 680 workers, the agency's largest job for more than a decade. Nearly 400 of those arrested are from Guatemala.
Despite scenes of anxious children without their parents in Mississippi, Albence called it a "textbook surgery." No one was hurt, and nothing leaked in advance.
The authorities said that many families were reunited after the parents were processed and charged in court.
However, some children were left alone and ICE did not coordinate with state and local child welfare providers.
"Our job is to enforce the law," said Albence, who is known in the White House and his agency for his stubborn demeanor and uncomplicated, unsentimental view of the job.
"It's up to the congress to pass laws or change laws."
[ICE defends Mississippi raids as local, state officials decry effect on children]
The flight to Guatemala began at an airfield in Alexandria, a sleepy town in the center of Louisiana on the Red River.
It is next to Miami one of the five deportation centers of ICE Air. San Antonio; Brownsville, Tex .; and Mesa, Ariz.
ICE has a "staging facility" at Alexandria Airport, where the deportees can be held up to 72 hours after their transfer from prisons on the East Coast.
About half of the passengers on Albence's flight were convicted, according to ICE officials, but the agency provided specific information to the Washington Post for only a fraction of these passengers.
According to ICE records, her offenses included drug trafficking, assault and serious sexual acts by a child.
One had been arrested for "entering, wandering and nightly wandering."
Some had been in US prisons and prisons for months or years, and for them the escape to Guatemala was a relief that promised freedom.
The deportees shuffled individually on the asphalt to the aircraft. Private contractors and ICE workers removed their legrests from the jet staircase and knocked on their bags as they got in. Many of the men seemed to be dressed in the same clothes they wore when they were arrested.
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Shackles on the tarmac at an airfield in Louisiana after ICE agents loaded deportees fleeing to Guatemala. (Nick Miroff / The Washington Post)
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Contractors working for ICE pat off deportees and check their bags before boarding. (Nick Miroff / The Washington Post)
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The ICE Air flight carried 95 deportees from Guatemala – some women, but mostly men. (Nick Miroff / The Washington Post)
A postal reporter and a Univision camera crew were also allowed on board, although the journalists were forbidden to speak with the inmates during the flight.
Albence and senior ICE officials climbed in as well as a dozen guards, all of them unarmed.
The Boeing 737-300 was older but clean. As the cabin door closed, a sweet, sweet smell wafted through the door.
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The passengers were tied up for the flight. (Nick Miroff / The Washington Post)
Many of the passengers were stoic and muffled, and their handcuffs rang softly in their laps.
For some it was the first time in an airplane.
In less than three hours, the southbound flight erased a journey that had cost them weeks or months, often ending in a risky desert trek to remote areas of the US-Mexico border.
To return to spouses and children with US citizens and their lives in the United States, they would have to do it again.
Some on the plane were visibly upset and eager to see parents, children, and siblings left years earlier. And as the plane fell through the clouds and came to a halt on the runway, the cabin filled with clapping and cheering.
"We'll all be back in a month," a deportee said in English as he and others crossed the airfield and entered the Guatemalan government's "reception and repatriation center." Financed with US aid, it is a dark, noisy arrival terminal with rows of seats and check-in counters where employees call out passengers from the manifesto.
Albence did not find it worse than a DMV.
Bouncing Guatemalan marimba music echoed in the hall. Patricia Marroquín, the First Lady of Guatemala, was there to greet Albence and the deportees.
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The deportees arrive after the flight from Louisiana in Guatemala City. (Nick Miroff / The Washington Post)
A Guatemalan official welcomed the deportees, who are now "returnees", intoxicating.
"They are the lucky ones," he told them, reminding the group that so many of their compatriots had died during their trip to the United States. "You're back home with the loved ones you left here to help," he said. "This land is and will remain your home."
[[[[Trump officials signed an important asylum agreement with Guatemala. Now they are trying to sell it.]
Luis de Leon, 28, did not want any part of it. He was still wearing the work clothes with the color stripes he wore when he was arrested during a traffic jam in Bowling Green, Ky.
He had been in the United States for seven years, avoiding deportation. After a 2016 DUI, he said, he stopped drinking. His wife and US-born children, aged 2 and 4 months, were still in Kentucky.
"There's nothing here for me," he said. "The only choice I have is to return."
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After arriving at a government reception center, many of the deportees ran down an alley to the exits. (Nick Miroff / The Washington Post)
Money changers huddled with family members awaiting long-lost relatives and offered to convert US dollars into Guatemalan quetzals. They shouted, "Pesos, pesos, pesos."
The 28-year-old Stephanie Barrios stood under a golf umbrella in the crowd and waited for her husband. Two years earlier, she had been deported from the US and returned to a country she left as a toddler.
In Los Angeles, where she grew up, she was in juvenile detention and struggling with drug use. Now she works in a call center and earns $ 700 a month. "I hate it," Barrios said in unaccented English.
A daughter, 8, is back in Los Angeles with Barrio's mother. To raise the child through FaceTime is terrible, she said.
"I understand where Trump comes from, but I do not think it's fair that many people are separated from their families without having done anything to earn it," said Barrios. "Especially the kids."
Barrios does not believe her husband – who owns a car repair shop in California – wants to stay in Guatemala.
"We plan to stay awhile, but then we go back," she said.
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