This Week in ICE Flights, Nov. 1-7 Edition
ICE Air seemed to be slowing down at the beginning of the week, with fewer planes doing fewer flights each day, leading activist flight trackers and me to wonder if the government shutdown was finally catching up to the authoritarian state. After all, the federal contract for ICE flights appears to be maxed out on USAspending.gov, and it is unclear if it can be raised again – like it has been half a dozen times since March – without new funding.
Whatever caused the brief slowdown, it is clearly over. On Thursday, 25 aircraft did ICE flights, according to an activist who goes by Lalabote – close to the record for the most in one day. Also on Thursday, Omni began three long-range ICE removal trips to South America, Africa and Asia, and a Journey Aviation jet that had been sitting in Mesa, AZ, for a week finally took off. It landed in Liberia Friday morning.
Journey, you may remember, has played a role in most of the third-country removals to African prisons. Earlier this year, Journey carried the seven men who ended up in a South Sudan prison and the five men who ended up in an Eswatini prison to Djibouti, where military planes took them the final leg. It flew seven third-country nationals to Rwanda in August, where they remain semi-imprisoned, and an additional 10 to the Eswatini prison last month.
When this particular Journey jet arrived in Mesa on Oct. 28, the Trump administration was trying to send Kilmar Abrego Garcia to Liberia by Oct. 31, so lots of us were watching it very closely. Abrego got a court order barring his removal, but it appears ICE may have put some other migrants on the plane and completed the mission. To be clear: I am not suggesting Abrego was on that plane; I do not think ICE could have gotten him to Arizona without his lawyers noticing.
Also, the Omni ICE flight to Africa mentioned above landed in Ghana early this morning. The last two times Omni landed ICE flights in Ghana, they held third-country nationals, so this is another likely third-country removal. (There were 14 migrants on each plane, which hold 225+ passengers, and yes, this is incredibly expensive. Here's a story from 2022 about Omni price-gouging.)
Ghana has said it will only take migrants from other West African nations, and that seems to be true based on what we know about the passengers on previous removal flights. Their trajectories vary, but in general they are held in a prison camp near the airport for days or weeks, and then either returned to their countries of origin – which the US was barred from doing for a variety of humanitarian reasons – or forced across the border to Togo with no identification, essentially making them stateless.
Many are living in hiding in shared motel rooms and surviving on moneygrams sent by family in the US. A lawsuit on their behalf has been filed in Ghana by a Ghanaian human-rights lawyer.
I'll update the Third-Country Removal Tracker if/when Friday's possible third-country removals are confirmed. I'll also be adding a new section soon to include the compensation each host country has received.
Next week, we'll get the October report from ICE Flight Monitor at Human Rights First. Last month they cataloged a record number of ICE flights, up 62 percent from the same time last year. (If you don't know already, Tom Cartwright has been tracking ICE flights by himself since 2020, posting terrific monthly reports full of vital info frequently cited by the media. Tom is a retiree who has been doing this on his own time out of a duty to humanity, and the workload has significantly increased recently, so in August he handed over the reins to Human Rights First. You can see their other reports here.)
RECENT ICE FLIGHT HEADLINES
AZ Monitor: ICE deportation plane struck by stray bullet during Mesa police shootout
A bizarre nugget of a story from Jerod McDonald-Evoy about one of Avelo's dedicated ICE planes, which was inspected after the shooting and deemed safe to fly. The next day, it had to return to Mesa soon after takeoff and remained grounded for nearly a week. [Note: It went back into service Nov. 6, which hadn't happened when this story originally published.]
The Guardian US: Man deported to Laos despite US court order blocking his removal, attorneys say
Chanthila “Shawn” Souvannarath had never been to Laos until last week. He was born in a refugee camp in Thailand and came to the US as an infant. He has convictions from two decades ago, but his wife says he's now a quiet family man who doesn't even drink. DHS claims it didn't get the court order barring his removal until after he'd already been deported. DHS lies all the time.
Mirror Indy: ICE quietly launched detainee flights out of Indianapolis airport
Dozens of ICE flights operated by Eastern Air and GlobalX, and serviced by Million Air, have gone in and out of Indianapolis in the last few months. Local activists weren't aware, and they are angry. Great, thorough reporting from a nonprofit newsroom on the toll of constant domestic transfer flights on migrants in ICE detention.
COLLABORATORS: WHO HELPED ICE AIR THIS WEEK
Akima Global Services (inflight guards), Avelo Airlines, CSI Aviation (flight scheduling), Eastern Airlines/Eastern Air Express, GEO Group (ground transport, inflight guards), GlobalX Airlines, Journey Aviation, Key Lime Air/Denver Air Connection, Million Air (aircraft servicing), Omni Air International, Signature Aviation (aircraft servicing), the US Coast Guard.
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