The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced on Tuesday that 116 Chinese nationals were deported back to China. This operation comes in response to a recent increase in Chinese migrants entering the U.S. through the southern border. The deportation flight, coordinated with the Chinese government, took place over the weekend and marks the first large-scale deportation flight to China since 2018.

This removal followed recent discussions between U.S. and Chinese officials. In early June, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong held a videoconference to discuss cooperation in areas like drug control, repatriation of migrants, and fighting transnational crime, according to Chinese state news agency Xinhua.

Since October, at the start of the U.S. government's fiscal year, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents have apprehended 31,077 Chinese nationals along the southwestern border. This accounts for about a quarter of all arrests at the border during this period. The surge in Chinese migrants is largely driven by economic hardship and difficult encounters with Chinese authorities.

From January to May, 10,171 Chinese migrants crossed the treacherous Darién Gap, a 60-mile stretch connecting South and Central America. This compares with 25,565 for all of 2023, and only 2,381 from 2010 to 2022, according to Panama migration data. Chinese nationals were the fourth-largest group crossing the Darién Gap from Colombia in 2024, often paying smugglers to help them on their journey.

In April, Mayorkas told a House Appropriations panel that he had engaged with his Chinese counterpart about accepting removal flights and confirmed that a deportation flight to China had taken place for the first time in several years. "We will continue to enforce our immigration laws and remove individuals without a legal basis to remain in the United States," Mayorkas said in a statement on Tuesday. "People should not believe the lies of smugglers."

DHS stated that it will keep cooperating with Beijing for more deportation flights, aiming to reduce irregular migration and disrupt human smuggling through expanded law-enforcement efforts. Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for China’s Embassy in Washington, confirmed that Beijing will continue to cooperate with relevant national authorities on law enforcement.

In addition to the deportations, Ecuador recently stopped waiving visas for Chinese citizens. Previously, Ecuador was one of the few countries in the Americas offering visa-free travel for Chinese nationals, making it a popular entry point for those bound for the U.S. The DHS welcomed Ecuador's decision, noting that smugglers had exploited this route.

A new hashtag, #zouxian, meaning "trek," became popular in China about two years ago as some migrants posted videos of their journeys through Latin America on TikTok and its Chinese counterpart, Douyin. TikTok has since banned the search term #zouxian in Chinese, citing violations of its guidelines, and searches for #zouxian on Douyin now yield few results.

Li Xiaosan, a Chinese migrant who crossed the southern U.S. border last year and is seeking asylum, said that rumors about impending deportations have spread among Chinese chat groups, causing anxiety among many migrants. Some recent arrivals have been hesitant to report their whereabouts to U.S. immigration authorities for fear of deportation. Li, now in New York, is awaiting a final court hearing next month to determine if he can stay in the U.S.

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