What You Don't Know About a Mass Deportation—How It Feels

Everyone's talking about mass deportations: how much they'll cost; how they'll tank the economy; how they'll tear communities apart, even if the Trump regime can’t realistically corral and expel the millions of people living and working and raising families without status in the US. Even if their promise was only ever meant to stoke terror and drive the MAGA base to the polls.

What's missing from discussions—what’s always missing from the immigration discussion—is the human impact: what such missions look, feel, sound, and smell like as well as the trauma endured by all involved, including the federal agents made to carry out such actions.

The truth is, few people know. And those who do know aren’t telling. Or can’t.

Well, I know. And we should all be horrified.

I interviewed over four dozen people deported en masse under Trump 1.0 by ICE Air and Department of Defense contractor, Omni Air International. I describe their revelations in my book, Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands, one of only two public accounts that details what happens to an estimated average of 11,500 individuals on roughly one hundred ICE Air flights every month.

As I am not someone who’s been forced to endure the horrors of an ICE Enforcement and Removals Operation expulsion campaign, I can only imagine the terror and humiliation my sources felt based on the testimonies they shared with me. I, therefore, must ask you to imagine, too…

If you've ever been on a long-distance, economy-class flight, you will know that the body fatigues from sitting in the same position for too long. The joints swell, both from inaction as well as from the cabin's lower-than-normal humidity, which sucks moisture from the tissues and cells, causing dehydration. Shoes become uncomfortably tight; hands lose their grip. Even a six-hour journey across the continental US can be taxing to the lower back, hips, knees.

Now imagine being forced to fly across half the US as well as the Atlantic Ocean with your ankles in manacles, your hands cuffed, and tied tightly to a waist chain. Or your body locked in a torturous “stress position” because ICE ERO agents immobilized you in The WRAP. Imagine the links of the waist chain planting themselves into your spine and back muscles. Imagine not being able to shift or adjust them because you are bound for sixteen, twenty, twenty-four, thirty-six, even forty-eight hours in the case of a botched Omni Air International flight to Somalia documented by Rebecca Sharpless in Shackled (2024).

Imagine sitting for sixteen hours to Douala, Cameroon, your ankles and hands swelling, causing the metal hardware to pierce your skin and eat into your nerves. Imagine your panic at a moment of turbulence when you realize that in the event of an emergency, you will not be able to place over your nose and mouth the oxygen mask that drops from above; you will not be able to open the hatch if the aircraft lands on water; you will not be able to grab a life buoy or to tread water in the event you must deplane in a hurry. You will not be able to hurry. You will be helpless.

Imagine being fed nothing but stale white bread and potato chips. Imagine having to bend over, like a dog, to eat the tasteless, salty fare because your chains are so tight, that you cannot bring your hands to your mouth to feed yourself. Imagine not wishing to eat like a dog and going without, for sixteen hours, maybe more.

Imagine your mouth and nose so parched, the natural, human act of breathing causes you pain. Imagine hours passing before anyone offers you water. Now imagine being physically unable to raise the plastic bottle up to your bone-dry lips and throat.

"To get a drink," recounts Oscar (not his real name), "you had to squeeze both your hands around the container to push the water out the top and try to catch a little on your tongue."

Imagine not being allowed to go to the bathroom without the escort of an armed guard. Imagine having to shuffle your way down the aircraft aisle in manacles and chains with a bladder full to bursting only to find, when you reach the cabin restroom, that the guard refuses to close the door. It is impossible, of course, to lower zipper and trousers with your hands enchained. Imagine missing and soiling yourself. Imagine your escort erupting in laughter, shaming you. Imagine returning to your seat, made to sit in your own urine and feces.

Imagine being a menstruating woman denied a fresh pad; or given one but unable to apply it to soiled panties with bound hands. Imagine even wanting to try with the toilet door left open, and a male guard peering in. Laughing. Imagine.

Imagine that no one has cleaned the toilets and being overpowered by the stench of human excrement. Imagine trying desperately to hold it, but finally giving into the call of nature and the stench being so bad your body takes over. You pee in your pants as you retch, adding to the unholy mess.

I'm told it wasn't just the raw essence of human waste that infused Omni Air International N207AX. There was the constant sobbing of passengers; the ceaseless yelling of guards dressed for war and toting guns; and the odor of nervous, panicked sweat. Again quoting Oscar: "It was torture. You could smell the trauma."

Oscar wasn't the only one to say so. The four-dozen-plus accounts I collected from those forced into this ICE Air torture chamber collectively describe a flying Abu Ghraib. “There are laws preventing even terrorists being treated this way,” states Oscar.

He and the others were not terrorists. They were asylum seekers, fleeing a dictator’s war in which they had become human targets.

In the waning months of the first Trump administration, Omni Air International’s Boeing 767 wide bodies took off multiple times from Alliance Field in Fort Worth, Texas, a hub for defense contractors and cargo operators like Amazon, which is also the majority shareholder in Omni’s parent company, Air Transport Services Group (ATSG). Omni Air charged US taxpayers an estimated $1 million per mission.

How many such flights will it take to exile millions? And how many crimes against humanity will be committed by the so-called “leader of the free world” in the process? You do the math.