I played a small role in helping to produce the first estimate of carbon emissions from deportation flights in the Trump 2.0 era. Emissions from these flights rose 88% when Trump took office, and these deportations alone now produce as much pollution as a small island nation. From The Guardian this morning:
Trump campaign accelerating climate crisis as officials move migrants to detention jails and deport them from US
“When we try to inflict suffering on immigrants, it … inflicts a lot of suffering on them – it also inflicts suffering on ourselves, on everyone. There’s no one that escapes when we’re trying to increase human misery,” said Brett [Afloweroutofstone, who works at the] organization that shared its ICE flight emissions calculations with the Guardian. He added: “The pollution that these flights cause is causing harms to every single family in the United States.”... “Climate change is a driver of migration,” [he] said. “So the fact that the United States is accelerating climate change in [its] attempt to remove these immigrants seems like a vicious cycle in a very real way, where we are creating more undocumented immigrants through this pollution.”
