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Mexico refused a U.S. military plane access to its airspace when flying migrants to Guatemala. And as American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick noted, another Central American country appears to have also not allowed the United States to fly over its airspace, given the flight's unusually circuitous route.

"This deportation flight had to go all the way around the Yucatan first, and then it went through Costa Rica, suggesting Honduras may also have denied permission," Reichlin-Melnick posted to Bluesky. He observed that countries declining to accommodate the U.S. by granting it access to its airspace could be a result of them perceiving his use of military C-130 planes "as an insult."

As Virginia Commonwealth University associate political science professor Michael Paarlberg wrote [...], carrying out deportations requires both the country deporting migrants and the country accepting them to coordinate.

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"It should be obvious, but doesn’t seem widely understood that the US can’t unilaterally deport people," Paarlberg explained. "This gives those countries a degree of leverage over the US if they simply refuse, as Mexico just did."

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