'So little planning': Experts mock Trump after Mexico refuses to let deportation flight land

24 January

For years, Mexico has allowed the United States' deportation flights to cross over its airspace when flying undocumented immigrants back to their home countries without incident. But that's apparently no longer the case, according to a new report.

On Friday, NBC News found that Mexico refused a U.S. military plane access to its airspace when flying migrants to Guatemala. And as American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick noted, another Central American country appears to have also not allowed the United States to fly over its airspace, given the flight's unusually circuitous route.

"This deportation flight had to go all the way around the Yucatan first, and then it went through Costa Rica, suggesting Honduras may also have denied permission," Reichlin-Melnick posted to Bluesky. He observed that countries declining to accommodate the U.S. by granting it access to its airspace could be a result of them perceiving his use of military C-130 planes "as an insult."

As Virginia Commonwealth University associate political science professor Michael Paarlberg wrote on Bluesky, carrying out deportations requires both the country deporting migrants and the country accepting them to coordinate. And as the Washington Post reported in December, countries refusing to cooperate with Trump could throw a wrench in the gears of his mass deportation plans.

"It should be obvious, but doesn’t seem widely understood that the US can’t unilaterally deport people," Paarlberg explained. "This gives those countries a degree of leverage over the US if they simply refuse, as Mexico just did."

Author Jeff Pearlman worried that Trump's actions could "start a war" with either one of the United States' neighboring countries. And Moderna engineer Kenneth Trease predicted that should Trump fail to obtain the cooperation of migrants' countries of origin, it could lead to myriad issues down the road for both the Trump administration and the migrants themselves.

"Nonzero chance they did so little planning that they can't handle the scenario of 'what if Mexico won't let the planes land' and they don't have any backup plan for housing the deportees and they just wind up either in regular prison or eventually released to the street," Trease wrote.

In a thread posted to X, Maryville College history professor Aaron Astor explained that Mexico refusing the deportation flight could be the start of greater tension between the U.S. and its neighbor to the south. Astor emphasized that he wasn't sure if the refusal was "kabuki theater" and "negotiation over terms of a new 'Remain in Mexico' plan" or "the beginning of something much more serious" that could have "huge economic consequences on both sides."

"What Mexico just did might be a minor tussle, part of a negotiation that results in a smoother new arrangement," Astor tweeted. "But we should keep an eye on how this unfolds."

Trump's first deportation flight to Belo Horizonte in Brazil landed earlier this week, according to a local Brazilian news source. That flight carried 88 Brazilian migrants and an untold number of migrants from other countries. Both Bazil and the United States have had an agreement in place on deportations since 2017.

Click here to read NBC News' report in full.

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