Deportation flights from Florida have begun out of the capital.
In an Aug. 15 social media post, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier said it was the first time the Florida Highway Patrol assisted U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a flight to remove undocumented and other immigrants from the state out of Tallahassee.
In his post, Uthmeier thanked U.S. Department of Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem for the flight, which was done with a U.S. Coast Guard plane.
“Florida will continue to deliver on President Trump’s mandate to detain, deport, and deliver for the American people!” Uthmeier wrote on X.
The flight left at 1:23 p.m., according to online flight trackers, but did not say where the plane was going. By 3:06 p.m., the plane was over Louisiana.
The removal of undocumented immigrants is under federal jurisdiction, and it’s not known how many immigrants were on the Coast Guard plane. Questions are pending with ICE.
The flight is a first for Florida’s capital, but Tallahassee and the surrounding areas have been a testing ground for the state’s immigration enforcement.
In May, the largest single-day operation yet in Florida to date was at a construction site near the city’s CollegeTown neighborhood. Witnesses said approximately 150 people were detained and most were turned over to ICE custody.
In February, the Florida Division of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles began working with ICE and detaining people at traffic stops in rural Gadsden County. That operation led to eight arrests from 58 traffic stops.
The deportation flight out of Tallahassee comes a day after the state announced it was opening a second immigration detention facility in north Florida.
In about two weeks, the Florida Department of Emergency Management will use Baker Correctional Institution in Sanderson as a processing and deportation facility, which Gov. Ron DeSantis dubbed “Deportation Depot.”
Baker will house more than 1,300 people, and immigrants will be removed into ICE custody out of the Lake City Gateway Airport, about 13 miles away in Columbia County.
Deportation flights already have started out of the South Florida Detention Facility in the Everglades, also known as “Alligator Alcatraz.” In late July, DeSantis announced that DHS began flying out immigrants to an ICE facility in Louisiana or other “hubs” to be sorted and then flown to another country.
Even though the flight on Aug. 15 was the first deportation flight out of Tallahassee, the airport has a history with the military.
Recently the airport garnered headlines when a chartered plane of National Guard members made an emergency landing at the airport, briefly closing down the only serviceable runway and leading to the diversion of a flight back to Dallas, Texas, where passengers were stranded for the night.
With Tallahassee centrally located to Eglin and Tyndall Air Force bases in the Panhandle and Naval Air Station Cecil Field in Jacksonville, the state’s capital is a useful military stopover location. The airport is a regular destination for military flights and training missions.
The Florida State Guard also plans to create its own air base on land at the Tallahassee International Airport. The Florida State Guard was revived by Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2022 to “protect and defend the people of Florida from all threats to public safety” and can be activated by the governor only.
The Florida State Guard is included in a February 2025 memorandum of agreement with DHS and ICE to execute functions of immigration enforcement within the state.
When contacted, a spokesperson for the City of Tallahassee said she was unaware of the flight.
Ana Goñi-Lessan, state watchdog reporter for the USA TODAY Network – Florida, can be reached at agonilessan@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Florida works with Homeland Security on deportation flight out of Tallahassee airport
Reporting by Ana Goñi-Lessan, USA TODAY NETWORK – Florida / Tallahassee Democrat
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