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The Trump administration’s first flight deporting Brazilians involved aborted takeoffs, sweltering heat, emergency exits and shackled deportees on a wing.
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Jan. 28, 2025, 6:14 p.m. ET
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.”
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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.
