Open Letter to the Denver City Council

Note: On Monday morning, I emailed this letter to the 13 members of the Denver City Council, ahead of a vote reported by local media relating to ICE charter Key Lime Air/Denver Air Connection. I am publishing it in full here, because I am committed to transparency with you, the reader, any time my ICE flight work diverges from "traditional" journalism.

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Gillian Brockell

Prince George's County, Md.

June 8, 2026

Dear members of the Denver City Council,

I am a former Washington Post staff writer who has been covering ICE flights since May of last year. My ICE flight stories have appeared in Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, Zeteo, and American Prospect. I am also a former flight attendant. I am not a resident of Denver, but I was raised in Fort Collins (FCHS '98), and members of my immediate family currently live in Denver.

I am writing you today ahead of your vote about Key Lime Air/Denver Air Connection because I want to make sure you have the most accurate information before making your decision. While I am thrilled to see local media covering this, some appear to be reporting old and incomplete flight data and, in doing so, may have created the false impression that Key Lime's involvement in ICE flights is minimal or has ended. Neither is accurate.

Key Lime did at least 1,522 ICE flights between Sept. 1, 2025 and April 30, 2026, according to flight data collected by the ICE Flight Monitor at Human Rights First (page 24 of this report).

From May 1 to June 7, Key Lime has done an additional 246 ICE flights, according to my analysis of flight data (see attached chart and methodology below). Six of those flights landed in Denver and appear to have taken captured migrants to the ICE detention hub of Mesa, Ariz. One of those flights occurred just yesterday, June 7.

Why does this matter? Because every single ICE flight is unsafe to fly. All adults and some children on ICE flights are shackled at the wrists and ankles attached to a chain around their waists (see ICE Air Operations Handbook).

Shackling impedes safe evacuation in an emergency. Flight attendants are trained to evacuate an aircraft within 90 seconds with only half of the exits working. Of the six known* evacuations of ICE flights, only two of the evacuation times are known – 2 1/2 minutes and 7 minutes. Employees for ICE's charter airlines have told me in recent months that in the event of an emergency they have been instructed to save themselves and leave migrant passengers to die. Others said this to ProPublica last year.

Migrants passengers were also hospitalized for smoke inhalation during another ICE flight emergency that should have evacuated but didn't; they very easily could have died. The waist chain may also prevent migrant passengers from reaching oxygen masks in the event of a depressurization. I reported on one such depressurization aboard an Avelo ICE flight on Nov. 13, 2025, in which six people endured serious sinus injuries.

Charter crews have reported guards and federal agents pressuring them to cut corners on or refusing to comply with federal aviation regulations. One flight attendant told ProPublica a deadly disaster is "only a matter of time."

Prolonged shackling is excruciatingly painful, can cause permanent nerve damage, and increases the likelihood of developing blood clots that can become deadly, according to a medical expert I spoke with for this Mother Jones story.

Contract guards, usually from the GEO Group, onboard ICE flights have been widely reported as threatening, insulting, beating, and strait-jacketing migrant passengers. Guards also regularly prevent them from using the lavatory, to the point that many soil themselves in their seats, according to migrants and airline employees I have interviewed.  

Immigration attorneys and human rights groups have reported that ICE uses its charter network to take migrants away from their families and their attorneys, to take them to federal districts with less sympathetic judges, and to deny them due process. Additionally, they are known to frequently move people cross country – sometimes five times in a week – to retaliate against complaints about their treatment, or ahead of important court dates. These "shuffle" flights between detention centers have skyrocketed in Trump's second term, with the objective of wearing migrants down so they will give up on their cases and agree to be "voluntarily" deported.

The vast majority of the people in ICE custody have no criminal convictions, and many of them are legally here under our asylum, green card or other visa processes. ICE does not care.

It is hard to know how much Key Lime is making off of all this misery, since all ICE flights are scheduled through a flight broker, but it is safe to say it is a lot.

ICE's flight broker, CSI Aviation, is run by MAGA election deniers (see Project on Government Oversight). Its current 12-month contract for up to $1.2 billion dollars is ICE's largest contract. CSI's current price list has not been made public, but in 2023, they were charging $8,300 per flight hour plus fuel expenses for Embraer 145s, the type of aircraft Key Lime uses for its ICE flights. It is likely a higher rate now.

Since they started doing ICE flights, Key Lime Air's holding company, CBG LLC, has purchased five more Embraer 145s and appear to be trying to purchase four more (see FAA Registry for CBG LLC). They only owned four E145s before they started doing ICE flights.

As I'm sure you know, public-use airports cannot deny landing or aircraft servicing to federally contracted flights. But that doesn't mean you can't do anything. You can cancel contracts with ICE collaborators, and you can also set up cameras and require ICE flights to unload and load on a public livestream, as they have been doing in Seattle since 2023. These cameras discourage ICE agents and GEO Group flight security guards from the worst abuses, and they provide invaluable information to immigration attorneys, captured immigrants' family members, and human rights groups.

Every single ICE flight that lands in Denver may violate local health and safety laws. I urge the council to do anything and everything it can to monitor these flights, even if it can't prevent them, and to hold accountable ICE's collaborators, including Key Lime Air/Denver Air Connection.

I realize it is unusual for a journalist, even an opinion journalist like myself, to send a letter like this, but in these times my conscience requires me to diverge from the usual and make absolutely sure this information gets to the people who have the power to do something.

Please feel free to contact me with any questions you may have; I will not report anything about our conversations without your permission. My phone number is [redacted] and my Signal is gbrockell.44.

Respectfully,

Gillian Brockell

*The known evacuations between 2014 and 2019 were revealed during discovery in a court case. ICE does not report air emergencies publicly, and flight data and air traffic control recordings collected by activists suggest there have been many more unreported emergencies and evacuations.

Attached: Chart showing Key Lime Air's ICE flights between May 1, 2026 and June 7, 2026. (Readers: You can see the chart here.)

Methodology: This chart was created by checking publicly available flight data on ADS-B Exchange for the registration numbers of CBG LLC's Embraer 145 fleet and isolating flights that: 1) Use known ICE charter callsigns (which are different from their sports charter callsigns); 2) Travel to or from ICE detention hub airports, and 3) Are not ticketed routes offered on Key Lime/Denver Air's website.

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