White House says migrant deportation flights with military aircraft have begun

The Trump administration has started flying immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally out of the country using military aircraft, a White House spokesperson said Friday.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt shared photos on the social media site X of individuals in handcuffs boarding a military plane.

“Deportation flights have begun,” Leavitt said. “President Trump is sending a strong and clear message to the entire world: if you illegally enter the United States of America, you will face severe consequences.”

The use of military planes for deportation is the result of a Trump executive order signed this week but deportation flights are not new.

The series of social media posts from the White House were mocked by immigration advocates who noted that deportation flights have been ongoing.

“Are these people seriously trying to suggest the deportation flights have not already been going on?” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow with the American Immigration Council wrote on X.

“They’re lying to you. The Biden administration had already ramped up deportations from the border to a higher level than it was under the Trump admin.”

Trump made cracking down on immigration his top issue in the 2024 campaign, and administration officials have sought to aggressively tout any action taken on that front in his first few days in office.

The president took a slew of executive actions on his first day in office to limit the flow of migrants in the United States. Trump paused refugee admissions, declared an emergency at the southern border and increased the U.S. military presence at the border.

Trump’s Department of Homeland Security also authorized agents to carry out arrests at sensitive locations like schools, churches and businesses, reversing a Biden administration rule to not make arrests in what was deemed as “sensitive areas.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) touted that it had made 538 arrests and lodged 373 detainers as of Thursday night.

“I said from day one, no one’s off the table. If you're in the United States illegally you got a problem, but we're focusing on public safety threats first," Trump's border czar, Tom Homan, told NewsNation on Thursday.

However, those figures are also not a sharp departure from the levels that were under Biden, with Reichlin-Melnick saying the Trump administration was “slap[ping] a ‘mass deportation’ sticker on the side of normal ICE operations.”

The ramp up in action has also led to backlash.

Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.) late Thursday accused ICE of conducting an “unconstitutional raid” in Newark, N.J. Local officials said agents detained undocumented immigrants and U.S. citizens without producing a warrant.