Deported to El Salvador

Source: FlightAware.com

After Nayib Bukele offered to receive not just citizens of El Salvador, but persons from other nations expelled from the US by the Donald Trump deportation machine, Salvadorans have wondered what this offer, coupled with Trump's promise of "massive" removals, portends for their country.   

A government spokesperson told reporters yesterday that so far El Salvador has yet to see a large increase in deportation flights, and that levels of returnees since Trump took office have been typical of recent time periods.

Today another deportation flight arrived at El Salvador's international airport shortly after 10 in the morning.   The flight had left a US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) air removal staging facility in Alexandria, Louisiana a few hours earlier.

Friday's arriving flight from Louisiana, like those from a similar facility in Harlingen, Texas, was not an anomaly.  There were eight deportation flights to El Salvador in the month of January according to Tom Cartwright from Witness At The Border who tracks ICE removal operations.   Those eight flights, he estimates, carried 920 Salvadorans back to their country.  

Through the course of 2024, there were 119 deportation flights to El Salvador leaving from airports in Louisiana and Texas, for an average of ten flights per month last year.

Removal flight boarding in Alexandria, Louisiana (source: US DHS)

According to El Salvador's migration directorate (DGME), 7299 Salvadorans arrived on deportation flights from the US during the first six months of 2024, which represented an increase of 73% from the same period the year before. Numbers for the second half of the year have not yet been released.  

NBC News has described a typical ICE Air flight:

For ICE flights, the people being deported are not allowed to bring carry-ons, but they can bring one bag weighing up to 40 pounds. Many passengers are restrained with handcuffs, leg irons and a belly chain. Children and parents accompanying children are not restrained. Between 13 and 20 guards accompany the flight, as well as medical staff, and food is provided during the flight, according to ICE officials and public documents.

(This is not new under Trump, deportation flights have ben conducted this way for years).

When they arrive in El Salvador, deportees are placed on buses and taken to a reception facility outside of San Salvador. Each returning migrant is processed and receives from the government a bag of hygiene products and $5 in cash.  Persons with criminal warrants or charges in El Salvador are taken into custody.      

There have been recent press reports focusing on ICE using military aircraft to deport persons from the US, but the deportation flights to El Salvador have so far used the charter air carriers GlobalX and Eastern Air which are arranged by ICE contractor CSI Aviation.  

The deportation flights that currently arrive two or three times per week, may increase to daily, or multiple flights per day if Trump succeeds in his vision for mass deportation.  There are today 127,000 open cases in US immigration courts against Salvadorans who lack the protection of TPS. They are part of the estimated 741,000 undocumented Salvadorans living in the US. Trump's massive deportation promise puts all of them at risk.  The recent census conducted by the government in 2024 revealed that 159,415 Salvadoran households, representing 8.3% of the total, had at least one family member emigrate to another country in the last five years, during the Bukele presidency.