https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/26/us-immigration-flights-emissions
Revealed: huge climate cost of harmful emissions from US immigration flights – Trump campaign accelerating climate crisis as officials move migrants to detention jails and deport them from US
By Alexandra Villarreal – UK Guardian
Excerpt: US immigration enforcement flights are producing hundreds of thousands of metric tonnes of climate-damaging carbon emissions as officials shuttle unprecedented numbers of people to detention centers far from home and deport them to countries across the world.
Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign has spurred at least an 80% increase in such flights year over year, accelerating the climate crisis by emitting massive amounts of carbon dioxide, according to data analysis shared exclusively with the Guardian.
Emissions from ICE enforcement flights went up 88% between 2024 and 2025
Breitbart News:
Global warming is getting worse because of the deportations conducted by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), says the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper.
“We’ve seen a staggering increase of all U.S. immigration [enforcement] flights,” Savitri Arvey, a research director at the pro-migration Human Rights First group told the newspaper for a May 26 article, which then claimed:
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) air operations pumped into the air an estimated 335,876 tonnes (370,240 US tons) of carbon emissions in 2025, up 88 percent from the year before.
But a quick comparison to the U.S. domestic airline industry shows that ICE air produces just one-thousandth of the greenhouse gases produced by the domestic airline industry, and one two-thousandths of all aircraft emissions in 2017.
For those extra emissions, ordinary Americans get the benefits from deporting many of President Joe Biden’s economic migrants, including lower crime, less diversity, higher wages, cheaper housing, and more citizen influence in their society and nation.
ICE is operating roughly three times as many flights every month in 2026 as it did in 2024 — roughly 1,800 flights vs 600 flights — partly because ICE often transports illegals from northern states to holding centers in Texas and other southern states. Migrants usually have to be detained for several weeks before ICE can get them through the various hurdles created by pro-migration progressives.
Immigration advocates remain desperate to inflate the minority opposition to President Donald Trump’s deportation policy.
“The pollution that these flights cause is causing harms to every single family in the United States.” Brett Heinz, global policy coordinator at the pro-migration American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), told the Guardian‘s writer, Alexandra Villareal. She formerly worked for a pro-migration group, the National Immigration Forum.
“When we try to inflict suffering on immigrants… it also inflicts suffering on ourselves, on everyone,” he said, adding, “There’s no one that escapes when we’re trying to increase human misery.”
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