00:00We can cross live to DW's correspondent Benjamin Alvarez-Gruber.
00:04He's in the state of Texas, outside the military airbase Fort Bliss, where one of those deportation
00:09flights took off on Thursday.
00:12Benjamin, deportation flights aren't anything new.
00:15What is different about these ones, though?
00:21That's right.
00:22Deportation flights are not new.
00:23They happened during the previous administrations of Joe Biden, of Barack Obama.
00:27What's different now is that those are military cargo planes, so U.S. Air Force planes that
00:32are supporting DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, with these deportation flights.
00:38You just mentioned the plane and the flight that was confirmed that happened on Thursday
00:44evening with 80 migrants that were here regularly in the United States that were deported back
00:51on this cargo plane to Guatemala City.
00:54There is also another plane departure expected later on from San Diego, California.
01:00We also heard that there was one deportation flight conducted from Arizona.
01:06The White House press secretary said that the deportations have begun, but they have
01:11been happening.
01:12But that's the big difference.
01:13Now, usually, ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, uses charter planes.
01:18So these are additional planes supporting those efforts and those promises that we also
01:22saw by President Trump with those executive orders, executive actions that were announced
01:29earlier this week.
01:30And the Department of Defense said that they will hand over these planes to support those
01:35efforts with more of these deportation flights also expected in the next couple of days.
01:42So is there more to come then?
01:44Are there any more flights of this kind expected?
01:50So we're still waiting of confirmation.
01:52There are many actors involved here.
01:55So we have DHS.
01:56We have Department of Homeland Security.
01:58We have also Customs and Border Protection and, of course, also the army that is involved
02:04with these deportation efforts.
02:05There will be flights, but they also are expected that there will be deportations by bus.
02:11Yesterday, we visited Ciudad Juarez on the Mexican side, where authorities, local authorities
02:16are building up tents, where they expected thousands of people to arrive there.
02:20The big question will now be what will happen to those people and how the Mexican authorities
02:26will be able to help not only their nationals, but also people from other countries, from
02:31Venezuela, who might also need to wait there until they can cross to the United States.
02:38So there will be probably more information coming out there.
02:41What we heard from Customs and Border Protection is that there is not a limited time frame
02:45for these cargo airplanes to keep handing out and continuing with these deportation
02:51flights.
02:52Well, thank you so much for your reporting.
02:54That is DW's correspondent, Benjamin Alvarez-Gruber, reporting from Texas, near the border with
02:58Mexico.
