Eighty-five Brazilian nationals are back home. Four of them are minors. The flight landed in Belo Horizonte, and it was the 39th U.S. deportation flight to Brazil under the current mass removal drive. Thirty-nine flights. One aircraft at a time, one manifest at a time. The runway count keeps climbing.

The MSN report keeps the details thin, which is normal for these charter movements. ICE doesn't advertise manifest contents in advance, and there's a good reason for that. What the source gives us: 85 passengers, four of them minors, one aircraft, one destination. That's the confirmed count, and I don't pad confirmed counts.

I've watched the open-borders crowd scoff at these flights my whole career. They call them "family separation by airbus" or whatever the slogan of the week is. My plain answer: the separation happened when somebody put a child on a multi-thousand-mile journey with a smuggler. The flight home is the reunion. Nobody made these folks board a plane north in violation of our sovereignty.

The count matters here, so be careful with what it can and can't tell you. Thirty-nine flights is the confirmed figure. Total passengers across those flights? The source doesn't say, so neither will I. Brazil has been one of the quieter stories in the removal effort. The big numbers grab headlines: the Haitians, the Somalis, the big-city sweeps. The South America airbridge just grinds along, flight after flight. I'll take the steady grind over the splashy operations. Anybody can mount a six-day surge. Doing it 39 times is logistics.

Charter removal flights cost money, and the usual suspects squeal about the per-seat price. Fine. Run the math the other direction. Every seat filled on that plane is one fewer illegal alien in the interior, one fewer name in the non-detained docket, one fewer overstay lead sitting in a file cabinet while some NGO writes a press release about it. The cheapest illegal alien to deal with is the one already on the plane.

Flight 40 is coming. I won't put a date on it, because the source doesn't give me a rhythm to measure. But 39 didn't happen by accident, and the count doesn't take holidays.

The scoreboard: 39 flights under the drive, 85 more gone this trip, four minors returned home with their families. Keep it rolling.