The government carried out its tenth deportation flight of 2026 this Saturday, October 10. It carried 56 foreign nationals bound for Colombia, Bolivia and Ecuador, bringing the official total to 1,874 people deported so far this year.
According to La Tercera, the Andes Línea Aérea charter flight departed at 1:25 a.m. from Arturo Merino Benítez Airport in Santiago. It stopped in Iquique before continuing to the three destination countries.
The group consisted of 21 Colombians, 20 Bolivians and 15 Ecuadorians. Of these, 45 left the country under an administrative deportation order issued by the immigration authorities, and 11 under a court ruling. The sources do not specify which laws provided the grounds for each case.
The most common ground was entry through unauthorized crossings, which applied to 31 of the 56 people deported. The record also includes six cases of robbery with intimidation, five involving drug laws, four involving receiving stolen motor vehicles and two involving robbery with violence.
The national head of Immigration and International Police at the Investigative Police (PDI), Inspector Prefect Ernesto León, said those deported included five "persons of interest" with criminal records for drug trafficking and rape. He added that one of the Colombians has an outstanding arrest warrant in his country for aggravated theft.
Undersecretary of the Interior Máximo Pavez estimated that this year's deportations amount to around 200 procedures a month and seven a day. He also said the frequency of flights is triple the previous government's monthly average, adding that it had not carried out any at this point in its first year.
The government also presented border control figures. Between January and September, 301 reports were filed directly at the border, compared with 4,515 in the same period of 2025, a decline of 93.3% according to the PDI.
Media outlets differ in their figures for reports of entry through unauthorized crossings. La Tercera reports that they fell from 16,603 to 13,626. Emol reports 13,927 entries and a decline of 33% compared with 2025.
Immigration inspection procedures increased by 24.7%, from 1,407 to 1,755, while the number of foreign nationals checked rose from 28,085 to 41,171, an increase of 46.6%. The director of the National Migration Service (Sermig), Frank Sauerbaum, attributed that increase to greater enforcement at the northern border. He said those checks had made it possible to identify people who entered irregularly years ago and now live in the Metropolitan Region.
Between January 3 and October 4, the PDI recorded 10,345 voluntary departures by foreign nationals who had entered through unauthorized crossings and left through police checkpoints without being deported. According to La Tercera, 79.7% of those departures, or 8,243, involved Venezuelans. Emol applies that same percentage to the total number of departures.
Combining voluntary departures and deportations, the government reports 12,219 departures during 2026. Pavez placed these figures within President José Antonio Kast's Migration Management Plan.
Sauerbaum outlined the next step: "We will continue the inspections we are carrying out at companies that have hired people with irregular status". He added that the process of fining those employers would continue.
