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An officer of immigration and customs control services travels in the aisle of Mexican immigrants chained aboard a chartered plane from the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to be deported.
LM Otero / AP
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LM Otero / AP
An officer of immigration and customs control services travels in the aisle of Mexican immigrants chained aboard a chartered plane from the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to be deported.
LM Otero / AP
The crackdown on immigration by President Trump is not profitable.
Take Expulsion Fees: Immigration and Customs Enforcement has its own airline to repatriate the evicted home. To date, this exercise has exceeded the budget of $ 107 million.
ICE Air is the not-well-known one-way ticketing branch of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE Air is busier than ever because of the increased deportations of President Trump and the fact that more countries around the world are agreeing to take back the expelled from the United States. The cost of the pace has increased by 30% this year.
Ten times a week, an unidentified white airliner lands at Guatemala airport and degrades a hundred unhappy passengers. They enter the Guatemalan air force terminal, check immigration and get out of double doors, ready to sneak back to the US border or start their lives at home.
Guatemalan deportees at Guatemala City airport after being repatriated by immigration and customs control services. ICE Air has exceeded its budget of $ 107 million this fiscal year.
John Burnett / NPR
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John Burnett / NPR
Guatemalan deportees at Guatemala City airport after being repatriated by immigration and customs control services. ICE Air has exceeded its budget of $ 107 million this fiscal year.
John Burnett / NPR
"I left Guatemala in 1983," said Luis Alberto Castro, 53 years old. Thirty-five years ago, he passed a student visa, started a home improvement business in Salt Lake City, raised a family, and was arrested and deported.
He carries a plastic bag full of his belongings. Her sneakers are loose because they removed her stockings during detention.
"I'm sad," he said. "But what are you going to do, I'll see my family, my wife is ready to come here."
Castro says he was arrested by immigration officers after being intercepted by police officers for speeding. He complains that ICE Air treated everyone on board as a criminal. "We have been handcuffed all the time," he said. "They should not treat us as total criminals."
A spokesman for the ICE said the detention of illegal immigrants was in keeping with their detention standards.
On the flight from Mesa, Arizona, to Guatemala City, there were no films in flight. No pillows. No pretzels. Castro says that a dozen uniformed security guards watched over them. Lunch was a sandwich.
"No Bologna, no ham, nothing, just cheese with a piece of bread," he says.
American cheese – their farewell meal.
The guards came with handcuff keys while the airliner descended to the conical volcanoes that surround the Guatemala Valley.
Private jets, commercial flights and charters
ICE Air transported more than 97,000 migrants last year. Most went to Guatemala, followed in order by Honduras, El Salvador, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Ecuador and Colombia. ICE Air is also stealing detainees between US cities, while prison populations are declining.
With respect to "high risk" immigrant evictions, ICE is chartering smaller Gulfstream aircraft. When there are not enough deportees to fill a charter flight, ICE buys tickets on commercial flights. This summer, several major carriers refused to fly children separated from the government by their parents.
ICE had no breakdown for the cost of a conventional charter flight, but these international trips are expensive. A report from the Inspector General published three years ago indicated that the cost of charter flights was about 85 cents per hour, regardless of the number of passengers.
ICE Air relies on a network of subcontractors. CSI Aviation, of Albuquerque, New Mexico, was the largest. His contract with Homeland Security has grown from $ 88 million to $ 96 million this year. In July, CSI reports that the ICE Air contract has been awarded to another company.
Reallocation of funds to cover the operations of ICE
It's not just ICE flight operations that exceed the budget. The Trump administration's crackdown on immigration is straining the federal government's resources, leaving the authorities scrambling to cover the additional cost of detaining and deporting new immigrants.
The Department of Homeland Security's budget, which includes immigration and customs control, is more than $ 47 billion. The ICE budget for custody operations is a record $ 3 billion this year, up from $ 1.77 billion in 2010.
But that still has not been enough
So, Homeland Security and other agencies are moving funds to fill the gaps. Last month, DHS informed Congress that it was allocating about $ 200 million from its current budget to Coast Guards and FEMA, among other things, to cover ICE operations.
It is not uncommon for administrations to reallocate resources. The Obama administration did the same thing when an influx of unaccompanied children from Central America arrived at the southwestern border in 2014. Prevented by law from denying them, the Administration had to deal with unexpected expenses related to the care of these children.
Today, the Department of Health and Human Services has a record number of unaccompanied children in government – funded homes. HHS has transferred $ 260 million from other parts of its budget to cover expenses, including funds allocated to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Cancer Institute.
Spend on an "unsustainable rate"
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle opposed these reallocations. Democrats complain that the priorities of the administration are irrelevant. While some Republicans have criticized a "lack of budget discipline" in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
ICE is spending "at an unsustainable pace," according to a June report by the Senate Subcommittee on Homeland Security, chaired by Republican Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia.
In a statement, DHS indicates that reallocation is needed to support its current workforce and operations.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has even more ambitious plans.
He is still trying to finance a wall on the southwestern border.
The administration also wants to detain more families of migrants apprehended at the border and longer. Immigration authorities are currently allowed to detain children and families in detention for a limited period. the administration seeks to detain them indefinitely.
To detain thousands of migrants arriving at the border every month, the administration should build and operate more family-run detention centers. And experts say it would probably require hundreds of millions of dollars in new Congressional funds, not just the reallocation of existing funds.
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