Many of the immigrants around deportee Henry Fuentes had never flown before. They looked out the windows anxiously, fumbled to get their seat belts fastened and gasped any time the plane hit turbulence. A few received Dramamine to quell their motion sickness.

Although there are regularly scheduled Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation flights every weekday to Central America, the U.S. government also has flown immigrants home to Nigeria, Cuba, Thailand, Cambodia and the Philippines. Tens of thousands of Mexicans are flown to the border and then walk back into their country.

The deportation flights' cost jumped from $96 million in the 2007 fiscal year to $135 million this fiscal year. That works out to slightly more than $600 per deportee.

Because detaining an immigrant costs nearly $100 a day, Michael Pitts, chief of the flight operations unit for the ICE, said, "it's more effective for us to expeditiously get them out of the country."