EXCLUSIVE: ICE may have secretly done more third-country removals than previously known

May 20th was a big day for ICE Air, the loose network of commercial, charter and military aircraft that remove migrants from the United States. 

First, the daily average for removal flights began to spike, from about four per day to seven per day – a spike that continues to rise.

Second, a private jet operated by Journey Aviation took off from the ICE Air hub of Harlingen, TX, carrying eight migrants the Trump administration wanted to remove to South Sudan, despite only one of the migrants being a citizen of that country. This sparked international outcry and a court-ordered delay that lasted six weeks. The mission was accomplished on July 4th. 

The third big thing to happen on May 20th was that Aircraft Transport Service, another charter operator of private jets, began using ICE’s designated callsign, “TYSON,” announcing publicly what it had previously kept under the radar: ATS has been a primary operator of ICE’s “special high-risk” removals for years, and business was booming. 

That day, two ATS jets left Mesa, AZ, only 35 minutes apart, bearing the callsigns “TYS61” and “TYSON62.” They made their first fuel stop in San Juan, but skipped their usual second fuel stop in Senegal. The jets landed the next morning in Mauritania – one of the countries that, according to the New York Times, the Trump administration has targeted to take so-called third-country nationals. 

In fact, since mid-February, ICE removal trips operated by ATS have landed in 13 of the 58 countries the Times reported as third-country targets, suggesting the possibility that more third-country nationals have been removed from the United States than previously known.

Of the targeted countries where ATS operated an ICE flight, only Nigeria has publicly rejected the idea.

In April, ATS operated an ICE Air trip likely carrying an Iraqi man as he was being removed to Rwanda. His removal, for a payment of $100,000, was first reported weeks later by the Handbasket, who obtained State Department cables saying it “proved the concept” for “Rwanda’s subsequent agreement to accept additional third-country nationals.” 

This report is the result of two months of research using flight data on ADS-B Exchange and flightradar24, government contract records, reports from activist flight trackers, and other publicly available information. 

Representatives for ATS, ICE, and the governments of Mauritania and Senegal have not responded to requests for comment. If any of them do, this story will be updated. 

ATS doesn’t own the five Gulfstream jets in its fleet. It leases them from trusts and shell companies set up by their owners – people rich enough to buy a private jet but not so rich that they use them frequently or want to shell out cash for maintenance and crew. ATS pays to use their jets on off-days; in exchange, private jet owners get cheaper maintenance, access to crew, and a crooked-as-hell tax break enacted by Trump in his first term. 

One of ATS’s jets is registered to the wife of a shipping and logistics CEO in Utah, another to a Tennessee businessman who appears to attend a lot of galas. A third jet is at the center of an active lawsuit between former business partners in Los Angeles.

On its website, ATS boasts of its fleet’s amenities: leather seats, wood paneling and “a full gourmet galley.” The images of luxury bely the reality of the flights contracted by its most frequent customer. 

On all ICE Air flights, migrants are shackled wrists to ankles, including minors and pregnant people. Some have hoods put over their heads or are wrapped in full-body restraints. As ProPublica reported in April, federally required flight attendants are instructed not to look at, speak to or feed migrant passengers, who are given sandwiches and water by ICE guards. Over the years, migrants have reported being physically, verbally and sexually abused by the guards during flights. There have been botched emergency evacuations and at least one instance of migrant passengers being left shackled on a hot plane for 23 hours. 

In this clip captured July 12 by a volunteer flight tracker watching Seattle’s airport live feed, men who appear to be ICE-contracted guards push a hooded and shackled migrant until he falls head first to the ground. They then carry him up the air stairs onto an Avelo Airlines charter flight.

 Most of the carriers flying for ICE are subcontracted through flight broker CSI Aviation, whose leadership are very vocal in their support of President Trump. But ATS has a separate five-year contract, which expires in September and was recently raised to $67.8 million. As of July 15, about $60 million of it had been used.

ATS president John Scotto keeps a low public profile, but in 2024, he made two donations totaling $1,977 toward Trump’s reelection.

It’s unclear how much of ATS’s business, if any, isn’t coming from ICE. Most days, none of the five jets appear in flight records. Domestic trips and some of its international trips are difficult to parse as either clearly ICE or clearly not, and at least some of those flights are the jets’ private owners, not ATS. 

But even without the “TYSON” callsign, there are telltale signs of ICE Air's long-haul missions: 1) departure from an ICE hub city; 2) sometimes a stop at a small airport near another ICE detention center; 3) a last-chance refueling stop on American soil – San Juan, Portsmouth, NH, more rarely Honolulu or Dillingham, AK; 4) usually an international refueling stop, like Albania or Senegal. 5) The jets will make stop continuously for about 16 hours – indicating there are two crews onboard – and traveling in one direction. 6) Layovers last only as long as crew rest rules require. And 7) they do out-and-back routes, retracing their flight paths and refueling stops the same way they came. 

A month after Inauguration Day, ATS operated its first identifiable ICE mission under Trump II, leaving Mesa on February 18, stopping at a small Fort Worth airport near an ICE detention center, then stopping in Portsmouth before making a single international stop: the kingdom of Jordan. 

The next week, ATS ran the route with several stops between Albania and Nepal. The week after that, it let off an Albanian national that ICE wanted to brag about. In Nepal, local media covered the arrival of the Nepali nationals. Coverage of later ICE flights to Nepal included photos of the ATS jet, Himalayas in the background.

Between February 18 and May 7, ATS operated seven removal missions to countries on the Asian continent plus Egypt. On the last mission, it landed in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Egypt – all countries on Trump’s third-country target list. 

That may sound early in the administration for the third-country removal plan, but remember: By early May it had already removed an Iraqi man to Rwanda and hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador. That same week it also attempted to remove the men who ended up in South Sudan – to Libya. 

Omar Abdulsattar Ameen came to the United States legally. In 2018, he was accused of committing a murder in Iraq six years earlier. Despite evidence an American judge called “decisive” in proving Ameen was not in Iraq at the time of the murder, the Biden administration proceeded with Ameen's removal to a “safe third country,” since he was likely to be executed if he was deported to Iraq. Biden’s ICE had not completed this task when it handed over the reins to the Trump team. 

Around 11 p.m. on April 2, an ATS jet left Mesa headed east. It stopped at the small Fort Worth airport, taking off again at about 3:30 a.m. local time. After brief stops in San Juan and Senegal, it landed in Nairobi on at 5 a.m. on April 4th. 

Now, Kenya is not Rwanda. But it is close, and none of the other aircraft to which ICE has access could have delivered Ameen closer to Rwanda than this one, arriving the day the confidential State Department cable leaked to the Handbasket says Ameen arrived. There are a lot of reasons why ATS might not have finished the last leg of the trip. When the jet landed in Kenya, 23 hours had passed without on-the-ground crew rest, stretching the limits of what is legal. ICE guards may have decided to charter a local aircraft for the last hour of flight rather than wait for the pilots to rest. 

Though Ameen had many media contacts, he has not been heard from publicly since his arrival in Rwanda. His family could not be reached for comment; his attorney did not respond to a request for comment. 

Starting April 29, ATS began a near-weekly burst of ICE removals to West African countries. On the fourth week, it used the ICE Air callsign for the first time, for three jets – the two that went to Mauritania together, and a third that took off on May 22 as “TYSON63,” which returned to Mesa 50 minutes later for unknown reasons. 

(Why ICE Air began using “TYSON” a few months ago is unclear, but it may be related to a practice first noted publicly in 2008, when President-elect Barack Obama’s charter plane was designated “TYSON08.” The private plane of the most recent president-elect, Trump, was designated “TYSON1.”)

Altogether, ATS operated at least 19 ICE missions since Inauguration Day, landing abroad 46 times in 25 countries. In the same period last year, it operated 10 missions, landing abroad 24 times in 21 countries, according to flight records.

Countries on the NYT list to which ATS operated ICE flights from Inauguration Day: () indicates the number of times ATS landed in a country

Angola (1), Benin (1), Egypt (2), Equatorial Guinea (1), Ghana (1), Ivory Coast (1), Liberia (2), Mauritania (2), Nigeria* (1), Senegal (11), Tajikistan (1), Togo (1), Uzbekistan (1)

*Nigeria has since publicly declined to accept third-country nationals.

Countries NOT on the NYT list to which ATS operated ICE flights: 

Albania (5), Armenia (1), Bangladesh (1), Chad (1), Georgia (1), Guinea (3), Guinea-Bissau (1)**, India (2), Jordan (1), Kenya (1), Nepal (2), Pakistan (1) 

**The Wall Street Journal has since reported Guinea-Bissau has also been asked to take third-country nationals. 

Of all the flights I’ve tracked, the ones with flashing red lights as possible third-country removals are the two that left Mesa on May 20th and landed in Mauritania. Slavery still exists in Mauritania, protected by a culture of secrecy among Mauritanian elites and the multinational corporations embedded there, who look the other way while extracting its natural resources. 

On July 4th, the day after the Supreme Court gave the Trump administration the go-ahead for unrestrained third-country removals, ATS’s ICE Air flights abruptly stopped. Maybe the crew was exhausted and needed a break. Maybe ICE has maxed out its contract. Maybe they are staging for the next surge. 

Or maybe ATS’s missions over the past few months “proved the concept” for “a subsequent agreement to accept additional third-country nationals” in more places than Rwanda. 

On July 9th, Trump met with the leaders of five African countries; ATS had recently operated ICE flights to four of them. The president of Mauritania was there, as was the newly elected president of Senegal, Bassirou Diomaye Faye, who ran on an anti-colonialist platform but encouraged Trump to build a golf course in Senegal, “for tourists.” 

Last week, a Boeing 767 operated by ICE subcontractor OMNI took off from Alexandria, LA, another ICE Air hub. After staging at GITMO and refueling in San Juan, it made two stops, Senegal and Kenya. And two large military aircraft left Harlingen on likely ICE Air missions, making stops in Ghana, Angola, Liberia and Mauritania.

Also last week, Journey began a trip from El Paso, where there is an ICE detention center, to Djibouti. DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin soon announced five migrants had been removed to Eswatini – a small kingdom ruled with an iron fist by Africa’s last absolute monarch – where they are now in prison. As Alex Plank and I first reported Saturday, these men were transferred from the Journey jet to a C-17, an enormous military aircraft, which flew to Eswatini with its transponder turned off. A source stationed at the base is angry, saying they are glad they aren’t home in America right now, or they might be scooped up by ICE themselves.

Journey has acquired more aircraft in the last two months, now making its fleet nearly three times the size of ATS’s. 

The evidence in this report does not prove incontrovertibly that ICE Air has been doing more third-country removal flights than previously known. Proof is hard to come by, because ICE does not share any information about its operations unless it feels like it or is compelled to do so by the courts.

Thank you for reading Hard-G History.

I am posting this story here because I was unable to find an outlet willing to carry it – not because there are any problems with my fact-finding, but because on May 20 I called Irish authorities to warn them that a jet refueling there may have been violating their human trafficking laws. It was carrying the eight migrants illegally removed from the US and bound for South Sudan. 

This phone call was a level of interference in a news event that many of my former colleagues in mainstream media find unacceptable. Because of how rapidly third-country removals are ramping up, I decided to publish this story here before I could find an outlet more comfortable with “activist” journalism. 

I want to be clear that I do not think I’m being treated unfairly. I fully understood when I made the call that I would become unhireable to the vast majority of media outlets. I figured it would be worth it if it helped stop the flight. I also want to be clear that I am not, nor do I wish to be, the focus of the story – the migrants being subjected to these inhumane removals are the focus. I am choosing to be transparent about the call rather than live in fear of being “caught” later; after all, there is a recording of it that is not under my control. 

Plus, I think it builds more trust with you, the reader, to tell you the truth, rather than, say, secretly passing on information, making secret deals with sources, or taking credit for the “impact” of accountability journalism after the fact – things “neutral” journalists at elite institutions do but don’t seem to think qualifies as interference.

If you appreciate the reporting – and yes, the advocacy – I have done around these flights, I would appreciate it if you would subscribe to this newsletter. It is free. There is also a pay-what-you-like option. I will continue to post about ICE Air and my usual beat (history!) as stories arise. 

If you would like to leak to me about ICE flights, third-country removals or the whereabouts of Omar Abdulsattar Ameen, please send me a Signal message at gbrockell.44.