MEXICO CITY — Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum hedged Tuesday on whether Mexico would accept U.S. military flights carrying deportees under the Trump administration’s mass-expulsion plans
“Until now, this hasn’t taken place,” Sheinbaum responded at her morning news conference when asked several times whether her nation would consent to Pentagon aircraft returning deported citizens. She declined to elaborate.
The White House has begun using military aircraft to transport deportees, including two Pentagon flights that flew more than 150 people to Guatemala last week.
The use of the military — including the deployment of active-duty troops to the United States’ southwest border — is a cornerstone of Trump’s hard-line immigration agenda. But it bumps up against Mexican sensitivities — heightened by a long history of U.S. invasions and incursions — against military encroachment by its northern neighbor.
It is not clear whether Pentagon air assets would be deployed to transport deportees to Mexico. Media reports last week that Mexico refused a U.S. military flight that would have brought deportees have not been publicly confirmed by either country.
The military-transport issue has raised alarms throughout Latin America since a weekend diplomatic crisis in which an enraged President Trump moved to impose tariffs and other penalties on Colombia — a longtime U.S. ally — after President Gustavo Petro denied landing permission for two Pentagon aircraft carrying deportees.
After negotiations, the White House withdrew the threatened sanctions and Colombia said it had received assurances of the “dignified conditions” Petro had demanded. Petro said on social media that he had never refused to accept deportees but would not agree to their being returned handcuffed and on military aircraft.
The Brazilian government also denounced “degrading treatment” of its citizens after some deportees walked off a nonmilitary U.S. plane on Saturday in the northern city of Manaus in handcuffs and leg shackles.
The idea of giant C-17s flying over Mexican airspace and unloading deportees at Mexican airports is a potentially incendiary prospect in a country with a long memory of U.S. invasions; the nation lost much of its territory in the Mexican-American War of 1846-48.
Though Washington has not intervened militarily in Mexico for more than a century, Mexican youth are schooled in Mexico’s “heroic” resistance to past U.S. actions.
Many in Mexico are already unnerved at previous Trump threats to deploy the U.S. military against drug traffickers. His executive order to designate cartels as foreign terrorist organizations is viewed by many as a prelude to direct military intervention.
Already casting a shadow on binational relations are Trump’s threats to impose tariffs of 25% on Mexican imports if the country does not do more to stop U.S.-bound undocumented immigrants and the smuggling of fentanyl. Trump has indicated he would decide by Saturday on the tariffs — which could devastate a fragile economy heavily dependent on cross-border trade.
Sheinbaum is under pressure to bend to Trump’s demands in order to safeguard the economy, but she must also take care not to alienate citizens sensitive to perceived slights against Mexico’s sovereignty.
“President Sheinbaum is in a tight spot,” said Tony Payan, who heads the Center for the U.S. and Mexico at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. “The optics of military planes flying deportees back to Mexico would not be good for her nationalist base. But she may not have a choice other than to accept it.”
Mexican citizens are by far the largest nationality among the estimated more than 11 million immigrants in the United States illegally. In recent years, Washington has removed about 200,000 deportees annually to Mexico, mostly via the southwestern land border — but including some ferried by nonmilitary aircraft to the Mexican interior. The number of deportees returned to Mexico is widely expected to increase under Trump’s directives.
Sheinbaum has already agreed to accept Trump’s reinstatement of the controversial Remain in Mexico policy, which forces asylum seekers arriving at the border — including Central Americans and other non-Mexicans — to wait in Mexico for adjudication of their cases in U.S. immigration courts. She has said Mexico would seek financial aid from Washington to reimburse the costs of repatriating third-country nationals to their homelands.
Mexico received four deportation flights last week— on nonmilitary aircraft — but has yet to see a significant uptick in returned deportees, officials say.
But Mexican authorities are erecting large-scale new shelters along the country’s northern border with the United States and making other preparations to house and otherwise assist repatriated citizens and third-country nationals sent to Mexico.
Special correspondent Cecilia Sánchez Vidal contributed.
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