ICE Flight Tracker, Aug. 16-22
This is ICE Flight Tracker, a weekly review of ICE flights, third-country removals, who's profiting, and what you can do.
“It’s a great day to deport illegal aliens. Good morning America!” DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin posted on Thursday morning. It was Day 4 of my new job, and just as I was digging into reporting on last month's ICE flight surge, ICE unleashed a new one. By day's end, I counted 84 ICE flights – at least six of them third-country removals – spread among 35 planes, all with shackled immigrants onboard.
One of those planes, a GlobalX A321, took off from ICE's hub airport in Alexandria, Louisiana, at 10:57 a.m. local time, climbed to an altitude of 12,000 feet, and then abruptly turned around and returned to Alexandria, just over half an hour after it left.
Let's be clear: The only reason a plane full of passengers would make a rapid return to its departure airport like this is an emergency. It may have been mechanical or security or weather related, a passenger or crew member may have had a serious medical problem – heck, maybe a judge ordered it to return, and ICE decided not to ignore the court this time. But something was so urgent that the pilots didn't even take the time to burn off some fuel.
In the world of commercial air travel, where passengers can post about the emergency return of the plane carrying them within seconds, you might get a statement from an airline's comms team with a brief explanation of the nature of the emergency and some expression of "safety is our number one priority." There might even be a short article in local news. At the very least, there'll be a post on avgeek forums speculating about it.
But in the world of ICE flights, with captive passengers unable to communicate with the outside world, and flight info blocked from the most popular flight-tracking apps, these kind of incidents – diversions, rejected takeoffs, decompressions, emergency landings, even emergency evacuations – go largely unnoticed, unreported and almost never explained.
And there are a lot of them. So many that the ICE flight-tracking activist who goes by "JJ in DC" has started calling them "the Daily Divert."
JJ in DC
Sometimes, the reason is obvious, like this Air Wisconsin ICE plane that went shooting down the runway in Dallas making a clunking sound, caught on video by local ICE-flight observers. Sometimes, there'll be a hint in the flight data or an air-traffic control recording.
Gillian Brockell
In rare cases, passengers or crewmembers have leaked info about mechanical problems, leading to hours-long delays during which the shackled immigrants may get no explanation, nor food or water.
More often than not, all you see is this: An ICE flight takes off, turns around quickly and lands where it started. When this happens in Alexandria, like it did with the GlobalX plane on Thursday, it's especially opaque, because AEX is one of the few civilian airports in the US where ATC recordings are not publicly available. So even if the pilots did tell the control tower what was wrong, we have no way of hearing it for ourselves.
Were the immigrant passengers afraid for their lives? How long did they have to sit on the plane after it landed? Were they sent to warehouse next to the tarmac, where shackled immigrants sometimes have to sleep on the concrete floor, waist chain digging into their sides? Did a mechanic work on the plane before it went back into service?
We have no way of knowing. ICE certainly isn't talking. And with so many unknowns, they are really hard to report on in traditional media. (The only reason we know about the evacuations between 2014 and 2019 is because of a court case in which ICE-contracted flight guards sued for their workplace injuries. There have likely been more since then that have not yet been subjected to discovery.)
Whatever went wrong on that GlobalX plane, we got another small, scary data point on Saturday, when once again it took from Alexandria. This time it climbed to only 2,900 feet before turning around and going back.
–Gillian
ICE Flights This Week
ICE Flight Data, Aug. 16-22
Total Flights Observed: 479
Total Removal Flights: 77
Third-Country Removal Flights
Confirmed: 8 (Cameroon, Costa Rica, Equatorial Guinea, Guatemala, Honduras, Liberia, Paraguay, Rwanda)
Likely: 3 (Ghana, Panama, Poland)
(All numbers are approximate and based on daily scans of flight data for about 80 aircraft in ICE's charter network for flights matching ICE's known flight characteristics.)
FAQ: What Is ICE Air?
Headlines
From Me
Liberia joins Trump's 'third-country deportation' network – The West African republic founded by formerly enslaved Black Americans became the 12th country on the continent to take third-country nationals. Twenty were expected Thursday, but...
From Everywhere
Migrants flown to Equatorial Guinea after resisting Liberia deportation under Trump deal, sources say | Reuters -- After resisting removal to Liberia, five people were allegedly told they would be returned to the United States but were instead take to Equatorial Guinea, one of the most corrupt countries on the planet, where third-country nationals are kept imprisoned in a hotel owned by EG's dictator. They are three Cuban men, one Brazilian man, and a Cameroonian woman, according to Reuters.
In the city where Haitian deportees are being sent, locals say they are not ready | CNN – A look at the city of Cap-Haitien, where 161 deportees were sent via a GlobalX ICE flight on Thursday.
Do Something
Some of you have asked about Rabbiatu Kuyateh, the woman I spoke about in my "On the Media" interview, who was taken to Ghana, and then beaten and forced back to her country of origin, Sierra Leone, where she had a withholding of removal order. This is a GoFundMe from her son to help with her legal and living expenses in the country to which she had fled.
Help Rabbiatu and her family HERE.
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. Please share this newsletter and consider subscribing, so I can continue this important work. –Gillian
