Essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Mumbles McGuirck – Just in case you thought activists had reached the bottom of the well of climate absurdity.
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
Alexandra Villarreal with graphics by Aliya UteuovaTue 26 May 2026 19.00 AEST
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.
“We’ve seen a staggering increase of all US immigration [enforcement] flights,” including “the number of flights as well as the locations that the flights are going to,” said Savitri Arvey, director of research and analysis for refugee and immigrant rights at Human Rights First (HRF), the US advocacy group.
US 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% from the year before. And the first four months of 2026 show the federal agency is on track to contribute even more to global heating this year from such flights, the Guardian can reveal.
Those emissions exacerbate the climate crisis, a driver of irregular migration in itself, while polluting the air in local communities used as flight hubs, such as Phoenix in Arizona, El Paso and Harlingen in Texas, and Alexandria in Louisiana.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/26/us-immigration-flights-emissions
Its tempting to say something snarky about how much more CO2 would be emitted if the illegals were granted amnesty and were able to live comfortable energy rich lives in the USA rather than being deported to whatever energy poor hellhole they came from, but the claim that immigration flights are impacting climate change is just too ridiculous.
The impact of such flights on CO2 emissions is a blip, an accounting error on last year’s expansion of China’s coal capacity. The impact of those flights would not be measurable, by any instrument which could be devised by known technology.
