Revealed: huge climate cost of harmful emissions from US immigration flights

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 (37,0240 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, El Paso and Harlingen in Texas, and Alexandria in Louisiana.

“When we try to inflict suffering on immigrants, it … inflicts a lot of suffering on them – it also inflicts suffering on ourselves, on everyone. There’s no one that escapes when we’re trying to increase human misery,” said Brett Heinz, global policy coordinator at the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), the social justice organization that shared its ICE flight emissions calculations with the Guardian.

He added: “The pollution that these flights cause is causing harms to every single family in the United States.”

Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda has resulted in a dramatic increase in arrests, detentions and deportations, leading to a record 245 documented removal flights last month. The consequences have been especially dire for immigrants without criminal convictions, who, compared to the six months before Trump took office, were arrested eightfold in January, according to the Deportation Data Project.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the parent agency of ICE, pledged repeatedly to focus on “the worst of the worst” criminals. Now, of more than 60,000 people detained as of early April, more than 70% have no criminal convictions, while the repatriation rate within two months for detainees without criminal convictions or an existing final deportation order has doubled.

“Across the board, we’ve been concerned that people are being put on flights without due process, separated from families, and then suffering … inhumane conditions on board,” Arvey said, adding: “Certainly, the emissions of this huge ramp-up in flights and the environmental impact is also a huge concern.”

Allegations of constitutional and human rights violations have been well-documented and continue, including routine shackling aboard and using a body-restraint suit called the Wrap on long-haul flights, which homeland secueity said was legal and standard – despite congressional challenges over health and safety revealed by the Guardian.

But ICE’s carbon emissions from its vastly increased air operations had not been previously calculated.

To do so, the AFSC used HRF’s tracking data and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO)’s methodology to estimate carbon emissions from immigration enforcement flying for the past two calendar years, which the Guardian then independently verified and adapted to also show emissions for this year so far.

In the first four months of 2026, ICE’s air operations have contributed 139,594 tonnes in carbon emissions, which when scaled would signify an almost 25% increase in annual emissions in 2026, over 2025’s already high total. That’s in addition to pollution from the nation’s sprawling immigration detention system, the largest in the world, altogether aggravating several problems.

“Climate change is a driver of migration,” Heinz said. “So the fact that the United States is accelerating climate change in [its] attempt to remove these immigrants seems like a vicious cycle in a very real way, where we are creating more undocumented immigrants through this pollution.”

In response to questions from the Guardian about ICE air operations and emissions, global heating, pollution, human rights and climate migration, an unnamed DHS spokesperson emailed back saying, about the environment: “Where were these concerns about the mountains of litter that illegal aliens dropped on ranches and riverbeds during Biden’s border crisis?” There was an increase in unauthorized crossings of the US-Mexico border during the Biden administration.

And on the issue of restraining passengers, DHS said: “The use of restraints on detainees during deportation flights has been long standing, standard ICE protocol and an essential measure to ensure the safety and well-being of both detainees and the officers/agents accompanying them. Our practices align with those followed by other relevant authorities and is fully in line with established legal standards.”

ICE’s air transportation is being carried out through a network of chartered flights – and at times military and Coast Guard aircraft or international carriers – amid an aggressive expansion of the agency’s flight capacity, bolstered by a $205m budget increase for such operations. An estimated average of 22 airplanes perform 58 enforcement flights on any given day, research by Human Rights First has concluded.

“Whenever they [federal officials] say that they don’t have enough money for social services, they have money for the military complex to deport people,” said Bashir Elhassan, policy fellow at the AFSC.

The ramped-up flight schedule represents a departure from past operations, when most removals were to relatively close destinations in Mexico and Central America and many were done by land. However, building on groundwork laid by the Biden administration to repatriate people on flights to destinations outside the western hemisphere, officials conducted flights to 79 countries during Trump’s first year back in office, compared to 45 during Joe Biden’s final year, some of them to African and Asian countries that had reportedly never received US deportation flights in recent history.

In the second Trump administration, immigrants have been sent to countries mired in conflict or autocracy, such as Haiti and Venezuela. Palestinians have been returned to Israel and moved to the occupied West Bank; Ukrainians have been flown to Poland and later repatriated to their war-torn homeland; and people who had already won US humanitarian protections against returning to the risk of torture and persecution in their native countries have been dispatched elsewhere, including to Uganda, Ghana, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and South Sudan, despite having no connections there.

Last month, the US ramped up the practice of deporting Mexicans by flying them to notoriously dangerous cities in southern Mexico, potentially in an attempt to deter repeat crossings. By mid-April this year, removal flights to Mexico averaged 23 a week, compared to five a week between January and March.

“They are sending people to southern Mexico, far away from their families and communities often, and at the same time these flights have a massive environmental footprint,” Arvey said.

Meanwhile, US domestic transfers, which haul people to and between detention facilities or to DHS staging hubs, surged at least 132% between Biden’s last year and Trump’s first back in office.

In addition to warming the planet, planes frequently idling, taking off and landing in the same communities contributes to local air pollution that can cause lung issues, bronchitis and premature death.

“Airport emissions are near the surface already, but even when flights are flying, their pollution descends down to the surface over time,” said Mark Z Jacobson, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University. “And then the greenhouse gases spread globally and affect climate.”

He added: “Every tonne of carbon and black carbon and methane that’s added to the atmosphere contributes more to global warming, and also the air pollutants contribute to air pollution mortality, morbidity.”

This article was produced as a project for the USC Annenberg’s Center for Health Journalism and the Center for Climate Journalism and Communication’s 2025 Health and Climate Change Reporting Fellowship