Inside a Chaotic U.S. Deportation Flight to Brazil

Temperatures were rising inside the plane. Eighty-eight Brazilian deportees, most of them handcuffed and shackled, were getting restless on Friday under the watch of U.S. immigration agents. The passenger jet, dealing with repeated technical problems, was stuck on the tarmac in a sweltering city in the Amazon rainforest.

Then the air conditioning broke — again.

There were demands to stay seated, shoving, shouting, children crying, passengers fainting and agents blocking exits, according to interviews with six of the deportees aboard the flight. Finally, passengers pulled the levers to release two emergency exits, and shackled men poured out onto the plane’s wing, shouting for help.

Brazil’s federal police quickly arrived and, after a brief standoff, told the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to release the deportees, though they had not yet reached their scheduled destination.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ordered a Brazilian Air Force aircraft to pick up the deportees and take them the rest of the way. His government’s ministers then publicly slammed the Trump administration’s handling of the deportees as “unacceptable” and “degrading.”

It was those complaints about the Brazilian flight that President Gustavo Petro of Colombia was replying to on social media when he announced Sunday that his government had turned away two deportation flights from the United States. That set off dueling threats of tariffs between the United States and Colombia that ultimately ended in Mr. Petro backing down.

The diplomatic dust-up over the deportation flights to Brazil and Colombia marked a turbulent first weekend for President Trump’s hard-line policy to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.

The pushback from two leftist Latin American governments revealed the simmering discontent across the region over President Trump’s vilification of its migrants as hardened criminals threatening the fabric of the United States.

On Monday, Mr. Trump said of deportees that “every one of them is either a murderer, a drug lord, a kingpin of some kind, a head of the mob, or a gang member.” The head of Colombia’s migration authority said that in reality, none of the deportees who arrived on two flights to Bogotá on Tuesday had criminal records.

Both the Colombian and Brazilian governments posted online thinly veiled messages to Mr. Trump, showing their citizens returning home and noting that they deserve respect. “They are free and dignified, and they are in their homeland where they are loved,” Mr. Petro wrote on Tuesday.

The Pew Research Center estimated there were 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States in 2022, including 4 million Mexicans, 2.1 million Central Americans, 230,00 Brazilians and 190,000 Colombians.

Mr. Petro had initially turned away the deportation flights because they were operated by the U.S. military, a recent change under the Trump administration. It was Colombian military aircraft that flew the Colombian deportees home on Tuesday. Mexico is not yet known to have received any deportation flights on military planes.

The Brazilians were flown on a commercial charter. The Brazilian government summoned the top American diplomat on Monday to discuss the conditions of that flight. The government has repeatedly asked the U.S. government to shackle deportees only if they pose a threat, including in a 2022 call between Brazil’s foreign minister and then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken, according to a summary of Brazilian efforts detailed in a 2022 government document.

U.S. officials have largely ignored those requests, according to Brazilian officials and academics who track the issue. The U.S. government has deported about 7,700 Brazilians on roughly 95 flights since 2020, according to Brazilian officials. On many of those flights, ICE agents have chained Brazilian deportees at the hands and feet, officials said.

Yet Friday’s deportation flight to Brazil — the first of Mr. Trump’s new term — was also the first to draw such public backlash from the Brazilian government. The difference on Friday, officials and passengers said, was the condition of the plane and the rough handling of the deportees by ICE agents.

ICE did not respond to a request for comment.

For many of the Brazilian deportees, the journey began weeks ago, with long bus rides across the United States — from California, Georgia, Arizona and Texas — to a federal immigration center in Alexandria, Louisiana. The men spent those rides handcuffed, sometimes for days.

In the early morning hours on Friday, ICE agents filled the passenger jet with the deportees, putting dozens of shackled men in the rear and women and children, who were not handcuffed, in the front, the deportees said.

The flight, operated by a charter airline, GlobalX Air, had problems from the start. The passengers said that on first attempt, the plane struggled to take off. After a mechanic worked on a turbine, it departed, but passengers were uneasy.

“They started to question: If something happens, how are you going to take the shackles off 80 people?” said Luiz Campos, 35, one of the Brazilian deportees, who was on the flight after spending six weeks in Texas detention centers. “‘Please, take off these chains,’” he recalled people asking. “They said, ‘No. It’s protocol. It’s always like this.’”

Tensions increased hours later during a refueling stop in Panama. Again the plane struggled to take off, and this time, three passengers described seeing smoke come from an engine on the wing. The incident also caused the air conditioning to stop working, they said, and the plane quickly became a sauna in the tropical heat.

Eventually the air conditioning was restored and the plane took off again. Hours later, it landed in Manaus, the largest city in the Brazilian Amazon. The flight was scheduled to finish in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, a city 1,600 miles to the south. Brazil’s federal police said the plane landed because of a technical issue.

GlobalX Air and ICE did not respond to requests for comment.

In Manaus, the plane then struggled to take off for a third time, again with apparent engine issues, passengers said. And then, again, the air stopped flowing inside the cabin.

“Desperation began to take hold. To be honest, I didn’t think I’d make it home alive,” said Luiz Antônio Rodrigues Santos, 21, one of the deportees. He said his asthma began to kick in and he struggled to breath, so ICE agents brought him to the front of the plane and poured water on his head. “The kids started crying, the parents were screaming, desperate,” he said. “That’s when we decided to do something.”

Mr. Santos and other deportees said that in the muggy cabin, the shackled men began pushing their way up the aisles, physically pressing up against ICE agents standing in the way. Agents and passengers shouted and pushed one another, and several deportees said they were struck. Then some passengers opened the emergency exits.

Within minutes, at least seven handcuffed men stepped out onto a wing. “Call the police!” one shouted, according to a video of the moment.

Brazil’s federal police eventually entered the cabin and ordered ICE agents to let the Brazilians go. With people at the airport looking on and taking video, the deportees said, the ICE agents sought to remove the shackles before letting them off the plane.

“But no one would allow that. The passengers themselves said, ‘No, now you’re not taking off the handcuffs,’” Mr. Campos said. “Because if they removed the handcuffs, I think the story would be different.”

News broadcasts showed the shackled men shuffling across the tarmac. Brazilian officials then removed the chains and the passengers spent the night at the Manaus airport. On Saturday, a Brazilian military plane took them to Belo Horizonte.

There they were greeted by Brazil’s minister of human rights, Macaé Evaristo. “I’m here at the request of President Lula,” she told the passengers on the plane, according to a video posted by the Brazilian government. “Our position is that countries can have their immigration policies, but they can never violate anyone’s rights.”

Ju Faddul contributed reporting from São Paulo, Brazil, and Genevieve Glatsky contributed reporting from Bogotá, Colombia.