Here is what I have discovered. LR is on my SSD boot drive but most of my photos are on an external drive. When I Remove/Delete, the deleted photos go to limbo: they disappear from the external drive, but do not appear in the trash. If I restart the computer, the photos appear in the trash. If I Remove/Delete photos on my boot drive, the go to the trash. The external drive is properly formatted for Mac: Mac OS Extended Journaled. So be it.