The brutal realities of ICE Air

In Donald Trump’s second term, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has escalated its enforcement operations in extremely public ways, conducting surprise raids, arresting lawmakers, and launching a new Florida detention center with an alt-right media blitz.

But ICE is growing in less obvious ways, too. Since January, it has expanded the shadowy network of charter airlines that shuttles tens of thousands of detainees around the country and the world on deportation flights. This network’s official designation is the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Air Operations division. Many people just call it “ICE Air.”

ICE Air is no less brutal than the agency’s heavy-handed field operations. But its brutality comes in the form of scale, speed, and efficiency — attributes that you probably want in a commercial airline, but not in an increasingly weaponized tool of law enforcement.

When it was founded in 2003, ICE had no internal capacity to deport people. It relied on the US Marshals Service to operate deportation flights on the small fleet of Boeing 737s primarily used to transport federal inmates around the country.

Removal flights quickly became an important tool for ICE. They were an efficient way to deport large numbers of people without the public spectacle of using commercial airplanes or public airports. In 2005, the US Marshals flew almost 100,000 deportees on behalf of ICE, versus only 58,000 inmates for the Department of Justice. By the end of the decade, the Marshals were deporting more than 170,000 people every year but did not have the capacity to handle any more.

So, under Barack Obama’s administration, the agency turned to the private sector. In 2010, ICE began working with a company called Classic Air Charter to broker deportation flights directly from charter airlines. During the global war on terror, the company served as an intermediary for the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program, sourcing charter flights that shuttled terrorism suspects to CIA black sites around the world. Deportation would simply be an expansion of its government business.

And a far more lucrative one, too. Contracts for the CIA’s infrequent rendition flights rarely broke into seven-figure territory. In contrast, charter contracts from ICE would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars every year.

Since then, ICE Air has grown into an operation rivaling that of a small commercial airline. It operates a fleet of 12 large airplanes (currently a mix of Boeing 737s, MD-80s, and Airbus A320s) every day, plus a reserve fleet of more than 100 airplanes of various sizes that it can activate for one-off flights.

ICE does not make its routes, schedules, or even its flight statistics public. But a FOIA request from the University of Washington revealed that between 2010 and 2018, ICE Air flew 1.7 million people on 15,000 deportation flights. Using airplane-tracking databases such as the ADS-B Exchange, the immigration rights nonprofit Witness at the Border estimates that ICE Air has flown another 10,600 deportation flights between January 2020 and May 2025.

“There is no disclosure, there is no reporting, this is by design not transparent,” says Thomas Cartwright, who leads the tracking project for Witness at the Border. “People deserve to know what is happening.”

On board these flights, conditions are often dehumanizing and sometimes even dangerous.

The official “ICE Air Operations Handbook” requires that every deportee “be fully restrained by the use of handcuffs, waist chains, and leg irons” during their flight. They are denied access to contact lenses, prescription medicine, belts, and jackets. They receive a meal of a single dry sandwich and a granola bar (chips and condiments not allowed), but are not guaranteed access to a restroom.

Deportees allege that ICE Air personnel often make this experience even worse. There are hundreds of allegations of verbal, physical, and in some cases even sexual abuse of deportees since 2010.

Sometimes, this abuse borders on torture. In 2012, a woman who was pregnant with triplets began to bleed during a deportation flight to El Salvador, but the crew refused to declare an emergency or divert the airplane. She miscarried shortly after landing. In 2016, ICE officials allegedly used tasers to subdue deportees on a flight to Bangladesh. In 2020, multiple deportees on a flight to Cameroon accused ICE officers of placing them in a straitjacket-like emergency restraint called “the WRAP” for up to 12 hours at a time, resulting in bleeding, bruising, respiratory issues, and in some cases permanent injury afterward.

“In Cameroon, I had been beaten with a machete until my feet swelled and bled, and I was struck again and again with a metal belt buckle,” said one deportee in a legal complaint. “But the day I was put in the WRAP by ICE, I wanted to die. I have never felt such horrible pain.”

Officially, ICE says that reports of abuse are overblown, and that it “has the utmost confidence in the professionalism of [its] workforce and their adherence to … policy.”

But it has no real impetus to change. Public outrage so far has focused on enforcement and detention activities; ICE Air has been largely ignored. The Department of Homeland Security has never provided meaningful oversight for ICE or any of the department’s other agencies, including Customs and Border Protection and the Transportation Security Administration. And no president — Obama, Biden, or Trump — has intervened to stop it or even scale ICE Air back.

ICE Air has already played a key role in several high-profile deportation cases this year. It transported Mahmoud Khalil to a processing facility in Jena, Louisiana, within hours of his arrest in New York. Over three days, it took Kilmar Ábrego García to two facilities in Louisiana and Texas before deporting him to El Salvador’s infamous CECOT prison. The scale and speed of ICE Air allows the agency to move detainees faster than courts can react — even, or perhaps especially, in the case of wrongful deportations.

Now, the Trump administration wants to triple the volume of deportations to more than 1 million a year. To that end, the massive budget bill signed into law on July 4th will add $75 billion to ICE’s budget over the next four years, on top of the more than $11 billion it was already planning to spend next year. ICE will soon become the largest federal law enforcement agency in the country.

Its air division is growing to meet this new demand. Last year, the agency switched air brokers from Classic Air Charter to CSI Aviation, another company with long-standing ties to the Department of Defense. In May, CSI signed a lease for three aircraft from Avelo Airlines, a relatively new (and heavily debt-burdened) low-cost carrier. With its expanded fleet, ICE Air operated a record 1,089 flights in May and 1,187 flights in June, nearly double its flight volume from a year prior. And it now flies to a growing list of countries, from Saudi Arabia to South Sudan, that have agreed to accept ICE deportees regardless of nationality — an eerie echo of the “extraordinary rendition” CIA flights that served as the original pattern for ICE Air.

“Our infrastructure is going to be huge,” acting ICE Director Todd Lyons told Fox News after the budget bill’s passage. “Morale’s never been higher.”