A private jet to hell

On Tuesday afternoon, when news broke that at least two immigrants in DHS custody were being deported to South Sudan, I hopped onto the flightradar24 app to see if I could find the plane. I am a former flight attendant, a journalist, and a bit of an av geek (I'll tell you about my A320 tattoo another time).

First, I looked at the departures out of San Antonio airports, since that was the departure point earlier this month when these people were supposed to be sent to Libya. Once I'd realized they had been transferred to Port Isabel, I looked at departures out of Harlingen, the nearest airport. It's a little one, about 10 departures a day, usually regional planes to other cities in Texas.

I noticed a flight on Monday afternoon from Harlingen to Miami operated by GlobalX, which is one of the airlines that does deportation flights. (It's the one that got hacked recently.) Thinking the immigrants might have been on that flight and then transferred to another GlobalX aircraft, I spent way too much time checking Miami departures, then a little more time checking arrivals to Juba. Nothing jumped out. And JJ, a fellow avgeek on Bluesky who was also looking for the plane and wants to remain anonymous, pointed out that GlobalX's equipment (the kinds of planes it flies) doesn't have the fuel capacity for trans-Atlantic travel.

Flightradar24 is somewhat limited in the information it provides, so I figured I'd fire up ADS-B Exchange after I picked up my kid from school and cooked him dinner, because Tuesday is my spouse's open mic night. ADS-B Exchange is a giant pool of all aviation feeder data run by aviation enthusiasts. It'll give you a way more complete picture of airline traffic, including private and military aircraft, and it is more searchable than Flightradar24.

It also can be pretty buggy and hard to use, like I don't know how to search for all the departures from an airport on ADS-B Exchange the way on do on Flightradar24. But since I'd already seen publicly available info, I set the exchange's live map to show me only the less-publicly available info, the LADD-designated aircraft. LADD stands for limited aviation data displayed. It's a program that allows aircraft owners to withhold some information, and it's often used by celebrities and the ultrarich. (This is why some people, like Taylor Swift, hate ADS-B Exchange, because it disregards the layer of privacy LADD affords them.)

My plan was to scan LADD aircraft and then scan military aircraft, but I got lucky. The third plane heading east that I clicked on had taken off out of Harlingen. It was a Gulfstream V, an 18-seat private jet, and had taken off at 1657UTC (11:57 a.m. Texas time), which fit the time frame. It was registered to Tannjets Aerospace out of Florida, and it had no destination filed.

Then, honestly, I just googled the tail number, N588AT, and one of the first things to come up was an avgeek subreddit post from three years ago – and I realized I had seen this plane before. A lot of us probably have, because it's the private jet that carried Brittney Griner to safety when she was freed from Russia in a prisoner swap in 2022.

Okay, so this private jet has been used before for strange government shit? I thought. It also occurred to me that President Trump had spoken to Vladimir Putin for two hours a day earlier. These data points, plus the fact that it's weird as hell for a private jet to take off out of a small regional airport for an international trip, seemed like a strong indicator this was the plane.

I posted all this to Bluesky around 7:30 p.m. and @-ed JJ. He agreed this was the likeliest candidate, and we tracked it over the next few hours – while I played race cars with my kid and got him ready for bed IRL – and with more and more Bluesky users following what we were doing. Neither of us ever said, "This is definitely the plane." JJ was the first to guess, correctly, that it was headed for Shannon.

Shannon airport in Ireland has for many years been a refueling hub for the US military – something a lot of Irish people fucking hate, staging regular protests and tracking the US military's comings and goings on shannonwatch.org and The Ditch.

I thought we were just witnessing this flight, this cruel act committed by our government, but with the plane landing in Shannon, it seemed like a tiny window had opened to stopping the cruel act, or at least slowing it down. I sent messages to Shannon Watch, to a friend in Dublin, and to my favorite Irish history podcast host. But like, it was 3 a.m. over there, people were asleep.

How do I anonymously email the Irish government, or get someone else who's awake to call them? I thought. I've made my peace with never returning to "objective" journalism, but there's a difference between being an opinionated journalist and actually trying to influence the news. I gotta be honest, I worried for a minute about my future employment prospects as a columnist. But I've spent the last year and a half on this book project writing about vigilance committees and rescue mobs, people doing anything and everything to save one self-emancipated person from being kidnapped and reenslaved. To them, merely witnessing an injustice was a last resort, not the main objective.

Now I'm no conductor on the Underground Railroad, I'm just a nosy avgeek with ADHD and a computer. But I decided, Fuck it, let's try to interfere.

So I cold-called the Shannon Garda (the police). I didn't record the call, but the police did, so if you're Irish and you know how your public information laws work, maybe try to get the recording? I spoke to a male officer first – "This is going to sound crazy but I'm very serious..." – who soon forwarded me to a woman, who sounded very serious and alarmed. I told her what I knew, and what I didn't know. I emphasized that this was a civilian aircraft, not military, that these immigrants were not from South Sudan and had not consented to being transported to South Sudan, that American judges had ordered them not to be removed. I think I invoked "human rights" or "humanity" at some point.

"I have no idea what your probable cause laws are like in Ireland," I recall saying, "but it seems like it might be worth checking if these people are onboard, and if it's legal to remove them from your country?" She agreed, not emphatically, but agreement just the same. She said she was trying to send someone to check.

I have no idea what happened at Shannon, if anything. Did she hang up and laugh at the crank caller? Could the garda not board because, as JJ suggested later, the plane stayed in the international transit area? Were they unable to contact authorities who could enter this area? Did gardaí board and find the immigrants but were unable to save them under Irish law? If they saw the immigrants, what did they see? Were they distraught, exhausted, chained, quiet? I just don't know.

The plane was on the ground for about two hours, at one point taxiing to what appeared to be a parking stamp near the terminal. But around midnight my time, it took off again, headed southeast.

I slept for a few hours. When I woke up at 5:45 a.m., I had a lot of messages from horrified Irish people, and the plane was over Saudi Arabia. I had expected a plane headed to South Sudan to fly through Egypt past Sudan's airspace, since the latter is a conflict zone, before hanging a right over the Red Sea. But it had gone well past that.

As the plane flew over Oman – and as I got my kid dressed and drove him to the dentist – it made a sharp right turn toward east Africa. By this time, JJ's and my posts were blowing up, a bunch of journalists were sharing them, and more avgeeks were tracking it and, importantly, ruling out any other aircraft as possibly holding them.

The plane landed in Djibouti, not South Sudan, just before 10 a.m. A large U.S. military base is located at the end of the runway. Not long afterward, at a hearing in Boston about the removal of these immigrants, the government said their location was classified, but that the plane was on the ground and they were still in U.S. custody. At 4 p.m., the New York Times published a story with "two people familiar with the matter" confirming the immigrants were in Djibouti. The story included details of the aircraft and the flights that I had been posting since the night before. I was not credited for first flagging this aircraft, which, yeah, that's pretty standard behavior for NYT.

So where does this all stand now?

Journalist Jacqueline Sweet dug up a ton of info about the Gulfstream's owners. Avgeeks, especially Jag, have been watching the Djibouti airport all day. As I publish this, only two flights have gone out, neither seem likely to have been holding these immigrants. Legally, the Gulfstream would have had two pilot crews, one for each leg of the trip from Harlingen. It is unlikely their was a third crew onboard, because there simply wasn't room for them. It's even less likely there was a fresh crew certified to operate this equipment waiting in Djibouti. Meaning the pilots who flew it there are probably flying it out, and they legally they cannot operate the aircraft again until they've had at least 10 hours of crew rest on the ground.

The 10-hour clock started about 9:50 a.m. ET, so the Gulfstream is unlikely to move until 7:50 p.m. What happens after that is anyone's guess.

DHS officials held a hasty presser this morning, revealing the immigrants' names, nationalities and crimes they've committed. Unlike the men sent to CECOT in March, these men have been duly convicted in court of serious crimes, and served their prison sentences. The government had the right to remove them from the U.S. after their release.

South Sudan is on the brink of civil war. It has drifted along the fuzzy line between struggling and failed state since it gained independence in 2011. It is one of the hardest places in the world to live even when you're free, when you speak the language, when you're surrounded by family and friends – advantages these immigrants will not have. Conditions in its prisons are described by our own State Department as "life-threatening." People are packed into shipping containers with little ventilation. They are tortured.

As journalist James Stout wrote, "it doesn’t matter what these men did, U.S. law does not provide for 'rendition to South Sudan' as a punishment for any crime, nor is it ever morally acceptable."

Note: A previous version of this post incorrectly characterized the international transit area of Shannon airport and has been amended.