The US has sent back 116 Chinese migrants in the first such “large charter flight” in five years, the Department of Homeland Security has said. “We will continue to enforce our immigration laws and remove individuals without a legal basis to remain in the United States,” homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement. The flight, which happened over the weekend, comes amid intense political debate ahead of the US presidential election over the issue of Chinese immigration. The department said it was working with China to “reduce and deter irregular migration and to disrupt illicit human smuggling through expanded law enforcement efforts”. It did not respond to questions about how long the migrants had been in the US. The department said it was working with China on more removal flights in the future but did not give a timeline for when the next one would happen. In recent years, the US has had a difficult time returning Chinese nationals who do not have the right to stay in America because China has resisted taking them back. Last year, the US saw a surge in the number of Chinese immigrants entering the country illegally from Mexico. US border officials arrested more than 37,000 Chinese nationals on the southern border in 2023, 10 times the number during the previous year. Chinese migration has increasingly become a rallying cry for Republicans and former president Donald Trump who have raised suspicions about why Chinese migrants are coming to the US. Asian advocacy organisations are concerned the rhetoric could encourage harassment of Asians, while migrants themselves have said they’re coming to escape poverty and repression. Earlier this year, the US and China resumed cooperation on migration issues. The Chinese government has said it is firmly opposed to “all forms of illegal immigration”. In a statement in May, China’s US embassy said the country’s law enforcement was cracking down “hard on crimes that harm the tranquility of national border, and maintained a high pressure against all kinds of smuggling organisations and offenders”. Earlier this year, a charter flight carried a small but unknown number of deportees to the north-eastern Chinese city of Shenyang, according to Thomas Cartwright of Witness at the Border, an advocacy group that tracks deportation flights. Homeland security officials did not say how many people were on that 30 March flight, but the Gulfstream V aircraft typically has a seating capacity of 14. It also made a stop in South Korea before heading back to the US, Cartwright said. The announcement of the weekend’s large charter flight comes amid efforts elsewhere to shut down key routes used by Chinese migrants to get to the western hemisphere. On Monday, the US announced that it would cover the costs of repatriating migrants who enter Panama illegally, under a deal agreed with the Central American country’s new president who has vowed to shut down the treacherous Darién Gap used by people travelling north to the US. Also, as of 1 July Ecuador in effect reinstated visas for Chinese nationals after the South American country said it had seen a worrying increase in irregular migration. Ecuador was one of only two mainland countries in the Americas to offer visa-free entry to Chinese nationals and had become a popular starting point for Chinese migrants to then trek north to the US.