Prominent media outlets and Democratic lawmakers have recently expressed “grave concerns” over the Trump administration’s deportation flights of illegal aliens.
Headlines describe them as “secretive,” “clandestine,” and even suggest mistreatment, with calls for FAA investigations into transparency and detainee handling.
Rachel Maddow and other vocal illegal migration advocates posing as “journalists” on cable news paint a picture of shadowy operations designed to hide enforcement from public view and waste taxpayer money.
Yet this sudden outrage over logistics rings hollow when contrasted with the near-total media silence during the Biden years, when the federal government conducted hundreds of night flights ferrying illegal aliens into American communities under cover of darkness, often without notification to local officials or residents.
Interior enforcement under President Trump — as prescribed by federal law — involves removing individuals who are already in the country illegally, frequently after criminal convictions or failed asylum claims.
These flights serve a core governmental function: executing final removal orders issued by immigration courts. There is transparency through ICE Air Operations tracking, congressional oversight, and public reporting on removal numbers. Framing routine deportation logistics as an outrage ignores decades of precedent for such flights.
Compare that to the Biden administration’s approach.
From 2021 onward, the Department of Homeland Security operated extensive charter and commercial flights transporting hundreds of thousands of migrants directly from the border into interior cities. Reports documented flights arriving at regional airports in the dead of night to minimize visibility. Destinations included smaller communities in Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, and beyond, often without prior consultation with local mayors or governors.
This made the U.S. government the de facto delivery service for the Mexican cartels’ human trafficking operation.
Whistleblowers and congressional inquiries revealed flights carrying unaccompanied minors and adult migrants processed through expedited programs, with limited public disclosure of exact numbers or locations. Estimates placed the volume at over 300,000 such transports in certain periods.
Where was the media indignation then? Maddow and her cohorts at the sparsely-viewed MS Now (formerly MSNBC) that now decry Trump-era “secret flights” largely dismissed or downplayed Biden’s operations as routine humanitarian logistics or “debunked” conspiracy theories.
Stories framed them as standard shelter transfers for families and children, while ignoring the lack of consent from receiving communities already strained by shelter costs, school overcrowding, and rising crime concerns.
Anti-borders commentators who today demand full transparency for removals showed little interest in auditing how the prior administration dispersed populations into sanctuary cities and swing districts alike.
This selective outrage reveals more about the corporate media’s shameless emphasis of ideology over objectivity.
When the Biden administration flew illegal aliens into the country at scale, the press treated it as compassionate governance. When the current administration flies people out pursuant to law, it becomes a civil liberties crisis.
The inconsistency is part of why the public holds the media in such low regard.
The Biden night flights were just one part of his administration’s scandalous immigration track record that garnered scant media attention.
In addition to record numbers of border crossings, there was expanded catch-and-release of aliens into the country, halting border wall construction while the unassembled parts of Trump’s already purchased border wall rusted in the sun for years, and playing a tragicomic version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” by insisting for years that the Southern border was secure when statistics and eyewitness video told the ugly truth.
None of this raised alarm at legacy newsrooms, but now the lawful removal of border violators is executive branch authority run amok?
Sorry, not buying it.
Whatever the cost of the flights, they are well worth it in the long term. Deportation flights reduce reliance on prolonged detention, lower taxpayer costs, and deter future illegal entries by demonstrating that legal remedies will be pursued for illegal entry. But the politicians and media talking heads who want ever-expanding Big Government suddenly become budget hawks when the expense is for removing illegal border crossers.
Strong enforcement, including deportation flights, is not cruelty; it is governance. Countries worldwide deport individuals who violate immigration law, often with minimal fanfare. By amplifying every procedural complaint about current flights while ignoring the prior administration’s expansive, secretive migrant transport program, much of the establishment media acts as an advocacy arm rather than a watchdog on government.
If transparency in immigration flights is the standard, apply it retroactively and prospectively. Scrutinize both inflows and outflows with equal rigor. Until then, hyperbolic claims about “secretive ICE flights” just undermines overdue and necessary efforts to enforce laws passed by Congress.
Americans voted for law and order at the border and accountability inside it. That can only be achieved with sustained interior enforcement supported by efficient removals. The alternative — rhetorical outrage and policy amnesia — just returns us to the rapid decline of the country we lived with not long ago.
Brian Lonergan is director of strategic communications and content at the Federation for American Immigration Reform in Washington, D.C., and co-host of the “No Border, No Country” podcast.
Image: Defense Visual Information Distribution Service // public domain
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