U.S. sends a plane of Chinese migrants to China

The Department of Homeland Security said Tuesday that 116 Chinese nationals were deported back to China, a move that came after a surge of Chinese migrants entering at the U.S. southern border in recent years.

The charter flight took place over the weekend and in coordination with the Chinese government, according to the DHS, which said it was the first large such flight since 2018.

The removal operation followed recent engagement between U.S. and Chinese authorities. In early June, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong held a videoconference discussing deepening cooperation in such areas as drug control, repatriation of migrants and combating transnational crime, according to the Chinese state news agency Xinhua.

The U.S. started to see a surge in Chinese migrants coming through Latin America in 2023. Since the start of the government’s budget year in October through May, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents have apprehended 31,077 Chinese nationals along the southwestern border, about a quarter of total arrests at the border during the period.

The Chinese migrants crossing the border are generally people from underprivileged groups, with low incomes, education levels and skills and with little or no chance of securing a U.S. visa. Their departures have often been driven by economic hardship or traumatic encounters with Chinese authorities.

Between January and May, some 10,171 Chinese migrants crossed the Darién Gap, the 60 miles or so of treacherous terrain connecting South and Central America. That compares with 25,565 for the full year in 2023, and a total of 2,381 in the years from 2010 to 2022, according to Panama migration data. Chinese nationals were the fourth-largest group making the Darién crossing from Colombia in 2024, the data showed. Many pay smugglers to help them en route.

Mayorkas told a House Appropriations panel in April that he had engaged with his Chinese counterpart about accepting removal flights, and said that there was one deportation flight to China “for the first time in a number of 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 Tuesday. “People should not believe the lies of smugglers.”

The department said it would continue to cooperate with Beijing for additional removal flights, adding that the two countries were “working to reduce and deter irregular migration and to disrupt illicit human smuggling through expanded law-enforcement efforts.”

Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for China’s Embassy in Washington, affirmed that Beijing would “continue to carry out pragmatic law enforcement cooperation with relevant national authorities.”

Without specifying the U.S., he said China’s National Immigration Administration had worked with immigration law-enforcement departments to repatriate the “planners and organizers of smuggling activities and illegal immigrants to their original places of residence, and pursued their legal responsibility in accordance with the law.”

Ecuador this month stopped waiving visas for Chinese citizens. The South American country was one of the few in the Americas to offer visa-free travel for Chinese nationals, providing an entry point for many Chinese migrants bound for the U.S.

The DHS said in its statement that the U.S. welcomed Ecuador’s move “given smugglers’ efforts to exploit that route.”

In China, a new hashtag—#zouxian, roughly translated as trek—started gaining popularity about two years ago, when some migrants posted footage of their journeys through Latin America on TikTok and its Chinese counterpart, Douyin. TikTok has banned the search term #zouxian in Chinese, citing violations of its guidelines. Searches of #zouxian on Douyin now yield few clips about migrants’ experiences.

Li Xiaosan, a Chinese migrant whose crossing of the southern U.S. border last year was chronicled by The Wall Street Journal, said rumors about the impending deportations started to make the rounds several days ago on Chinese chat groups, putting many Chinese who like him are applying for asylum in the U.S. on edge.

He said some migrants who have crossed the border in recent months have been reluctant to report their whereabouts to U.S. immigration authorities, as required by U.S. law, for fear of being repatriated.

Li, now based in New York, is set to appear in a final court hearing in a month deciding whether he will be allowed to stay in the U.S.

A critic of the Chinese government, Li is applying for asylum on the grounds that he was persecuted in China. “I’m afraid they will remove everyone indiscriminately,” he said. “What am I going to do if I get deported?”

Write to Jazper Lu at jazper.lu@wsj.com and Shen Lu at shen.lu@wsj.com