ICE charter Eastern Airlines lands in Cameroon & Ghana; third-country ‘deportation’ likely
It was the first apparent ICE charter flight to Africa for the Kansas City-based airline and also stopped in Ghana.
Note: This post has been updated with additional information about stops in Senegal and Ghana.
An Eastern Airlines jet landed in Cameroon and Ghana in the early hours of Thursday local time, a likely ICE charter carrying third-country nationals – migrants being removed to a country where they have no ties. It was the first known ICE flight to Africa for the Kansas City-based charter airline and the first known large-jet ICE flight to Africa not operated by Omni Air International, which has had a monopoly on ICE’s lucrative “high-risk” trips since at least 2017.
The aircraft, a Boeing 767, left the ICE detention hub of Harlingen, Texas, at 11:15 p.m. local time Tuesday night, using the same callsign convention it uses for its other ICE flights. It stopped in Miami for three hours before flying eight hours across the Atlantic Ocean to Dakar, Senegal. Dakar is a frequent fuel stop for ICE charters to Africa, but the ICE Flight Monitor later confirmed this was also a removal stop.
The aircraft soon took off again, landing in Yaoundé, Cameroon, at 1:33 a.m. local time Thursday, or 7:33 p.m. Texas time Wednesday. This is the fourth time ICE charters have landed in Cameroon this year. The other three flights each held eight or nine third-country nationals.
The aircraft made one additional removal stop to Accra, Ghana, three hours later. It was at least the 15th time ICE flights have landed in Ghana since last fall. The first four of those flights held a total of 61 third-country nationals; the flights since then have not been confirmed as either holding third-country nationals or only Ghanaian nationals.
Representatives for Eastern did not respond to emails with a list of questions, including how many third-country nationals may have been onboard. Eastern does not have a phone number listed on its website, and numbers produced by web search were all disconnected.
It is unclear how many migrants may have been onboard the flight, since ICE does not release public information about its air operations. The aircraft is configured to seat 379 passengers, according to Eastern’s website, but ICE flights are rarely full. For example, an Omni 767 to Africa last week made only one ICE removal stop, expelling nine third-country nationals to Sierra Leone.
It is also unclear how much Eastern will profit from this flight. All ICE flights are chartered through its flight broker, Albuquerque-based CSI Aviation. An up-to-date price list has not been made public, but a 2023 price list shows CSI Aviation charging ICE $20,475 per flight hour, plus fuel and other expenses, for a 767 aircraft. However, all ICE charter flights to Asia and Africa charge an additional “special high-risk” fee. The current fee has not been made public, but for a 2019 high-risk flight, Omni charged ICE $33,500 per flight hour, plus fuel and other expenses, according to documents later obtained by Quartz.
In addition to Omni’s large jets, ICE also uses smaller business jets for removal flights to Africa, at a 2023 rate of $6,149-$8,619 per flight hour, not including the high-risk fee. Earlier on Wednesday, an ICE charter operated by Miami-based Journey Aviation on a Gulfstream V made removal stops to Guinea, Ivory Coast, and Burkina Faso.
Of the dozens of African nations the Trump administration has tried to press into accepting third-country nationals, 10 are known to have signed agreements: Cameroon, Dem. Rep. of Congo, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), Ghana, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, and Uganda. Only two, Burkina Faso and Nigeria, have publicly rejected the idea.
MORE: Third-Country Removal Tracker
Previous groups of migrants sent to Cameroon and Ghana all had protections from deportation to their countries of origin due to persecution they would face there, according to the New York Times. Some got those protections because they are queer; homosexuality is also illegal in Cameroon.
In Cameroon, the people are being held in a government facility and pressured to return to their countries of origin. In Ghana, they are held in either a hotel or an open-air prison camp before being forced to return to their countries of origin or forced to cross the border into Togo without identification, rendering them effectively stateless.
ICE charter flights have landed on the African continent at least 90 times in 25 countries total so far this year, according to my analysis of flight data.
All adults and some children on ICE flights are shackled at the wrists and ankles attached to a waist chain for the duration of the flight. Migrants departing in Ghana will have been shackled for at least 23 hours. Prolonged shackling can cause severe pain, nerve damage, mental injury, and life-threatening blood clots, medical experts have told me. It can also impede evacuation in the event of an emergency.
Eastern and its sister airline, Eastern Air Express, operated 501 ICE flights in April, about 29 percent of all ICE flights that month, according to an analysis of public flight data by Human Rights First.
The airlines’ parent company, Eastern Air Holdings, is privately held with about 40 shareholders, according to Department of Transportation documents. The largest shareholder, with a 42 percent stake, is its chairman Kenneth M. Woolley.
Woolley is a former Brigham Young University professor who struck it rich with Extra Space Storage, a publicly traded self-storage firm. Eastern Airlines and Eastern Air Express are conglomerations of several defunct airlines, including iAero/Swift Air, which also did ICE flights and had a terrible safety record. Other than buying the unused trademark, it is not associated in any way with the historic Eastern Air Lines, which shut down in 1991.
Thank you for reading. I am a former Washington Post staff writer, and as far as I know, I’m the only journalist in America covering ICE flights full time. I am committed to keeping this reporting non-paywalled, but if you are able, please sign up for a paid subscription or send me a one-time tip, so I can continue this important work. –Gillian
