An American Airlines flight from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Miami, Florida, was diverted to the Bahamas early last week, leaving passengers stranded overnight at a local airport with no accommodation options and forced to sleep on the floor.
In addition, the passengers temporarily became illegal immigrants on the island. “They specifically stressed that they were illegal immigrants at the moment and didn’t have much say. Even though we hadn’t chosen to be there,” Dimas Henriquez, a passenger on American Airlines Flight 2421, told Fox News Digital.
“We were literally locked in… We couldn’t get out,” he continued. “I was awake the whole time, but people were lying on the floor, in corners and stuff, all scattered around. It looked like we were camped inside.”
Henriquez said there were about 90 passengers on the Aug. 3 flight that was diverted because of the weather. The traveler said American Airlines staff told travelers that another crew was en route from Miami to fly them out because the original flight crew was “at capacity.”
“The crux of the whole problem with what happened to us was that we were there for 14 hours. But what happened during those 14 hours was the really crappy part, because we only spoke to two people the whole time until maybe the very last hour when everyone was awake, reporting to work and showing up at the airport,” Henriquez told Fox News Digital.
When they boarded the plane again the next day to fly to Miami, Henriquez said an employee told him he had been booked on a connecting flight to Raleigh instead of his original itinerary. However, when he arrived in Miami, he went to get his boarding pass and was told, “The plane is full, you were never on it.” Henriquez was told there would be no replacement flight for the next two days.
When Henriquez was asked if he could use a voucher to bridge the wait for his connecting flight, he was denied one. The passenger and his friends paid for a rental car themselves to drive home from Miami to North Carolina.
“Giving someone a refund just because they missed a leg of the trip is not enough when you have to put the person through as much distressing as this. I feel it would be polite to reach out and at least help me find an alternative way home,” Henriquez continued. “They only refunded me $120, but that doesn’t even cover what I had to do to get home and fix my own problem that was caused by this.”
Henriquez, a Colombian native who has lived in the United States since he was three, says he was “a little stressed” during his stay in the Bahamas.
“I’m a green card holder. I’m not supposed to be there. And I don’t want anything to show up on my citizenship application or for someone to say, ‘Hey, have you been somewhere you don’t belong?’ I’ve made it very clear that I don’t want to be there,” he said.
“I knew I couldn’t be there and it was never my intention to be there. I wouldn’t have gone there on my own, I wouldn’t have left the country on my own,” the traveler told Fox News Digital.
The renter from North Carolina was traveling to Puerto Rico with a group of friends to avoid the passport logistics and currency exchange process, a sentiment shared by other passengers, according to Henriquez.
The passenger posted a video on TikTok about being left behind at the airport by American Airlines, one on his personal account and another on the profile of a fellow passenger. The video was viewed millions of times and users in the comments were clicking their keyboards in disbelief when they saw the situation the passengers of Flight 2421 found themselves in.
One user wrote, “Talk to a lawyer ASAP,” while another commented, “American Airlines always does this,” and another profile wrote, “Forget a refund, I want legal compensation!”
American Airlines has not yet responded to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
Alba Cuebas-Fantauzzi is a freelance production assistant at Fox News Digital.
