Avelo Airlines has entered into a controversial agreement with US immigration authorities to operate deportation flights, sparking protests from coast to coast. Activists, legal organizations, and local communities are mobilizing against the carrier’s role in deportations. The controversy reflects a broader reckoning with the US’s long and bipartisan history of immigration enforcement.

Ultra-low budget airline flies gamblers, Hillary Clinton, and now deportees

Avelo Airlines started off flying gamblers in 1989 as Casino Express. Rebranded in 2005 as Xtra Airlines, it provided air transport for the Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign among other ventures. Current CEO and former United Airlines CFO Andrew Levy acquired the carrier in 2021, renamed it Avelo, and expanded from charter flights to low-cost commercial operations.

Following its California launch on a Burbank-Santa Rosa route, Avelo developed a hub at Tweed New Haven Airport in Connecticut. Avelo continued to expand destinations, most notably with its recent agreement to make federal deportation flightsfrom Arizona starting in May. The “long-term charter” arrangement for the budget airline headquartered in Houston, TX, is with the US Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration Control and Enforcement Agency (ICE).

Chilling realities of ICE deportation flights

Research by the advocacy group Witness at the Border tracks ICE flights. Costly military deportation flights have largely been discontinued, leaving the dirty work to charter carriers such as Avelo.

An exposé by ProPublica revealed appalling conditions on ICE deportation flights by a similar charter carrier, GlobalX. The report states: “Flight attendants received training in how to evacuate passengers but said they weren’t told how to usher out detainees whose hands and legs were bound by shackles.

Leaving aside the issue of human decency, the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) “90-second” rule for accomplishing a full evacuation from an aircraft is impossible to achieve with passengers in chains.

Private security guards and an ICE officer accompany these ICE Air flights and are the only ones allowed to interact with the deportees, including even talking to them. But only the professional flight attendants, who are FAA certified, are trained in how to evacuate passengers in an emergency.

So if a plane crashes on the runway, ProPublica cautions, the rules are for the flight attendants to leave the aircraft for safety and abandon the shackled prisoners. Unfortunately, this grim scenario is  not hypothetical.

Snoopy’s airport

On April 26, protesters lined the entrance to what locals affectionately call Snoopy’s airport. The Charles M. Schulz Sonoma County Airport, named after the late cartoonist who lived in Sonoma County, is an Avelo Airlines hub. The Democratic Party-aligned Indivisible called the “profiting from pain” protest at the California wine country airport against Avelo’s plan to carry out deportation flights.

One protester flew an upside-down US flag, a signal of “dire distress in instances of extreme danger,” according to the US Flag Code. A sign proclaimed: “planes to El Salvador are just like trains to Auschwitz – a prison without due process is a concentration camp.”

“Boycott Avelo,” was the message on one young woman’s sign that implored, “travel should bring families together, not tear them apart.”

An Immigrant Legal Resource Center activist passed out wallet-sized “red cards” at the demonstration. She reported that nearly a thousand northern Californians have taken their training in recent weeks to defend their friends and neighbors who, regardless of immigration status, have certain rights and protections under the US Constitution.

At the grassroots level, communities are organizing and resisting. The North Bay Rapid Response Network hotline for reporting immigration enforcement activities dispatches trained legal observers and provides legal defense and support to affected individuals and families. Other resources include VIDAS, Immigration Institute of the Bay Area, Legal Aid of Sonoma County, and Sonoma Immigrant Services.

New Haven no-fly zone

Blowback against the nativist anti-immigrant wind was also evident across the continent in New Haven, CT. This Avelo Airlines hub city along with the state capital, Hartford, are both designated  sanctuary cities. The state of Connecticut itself has also enacted measures  limiting cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.

These politics reflect the demographics of urban Connecticut, which are now largely Latino and African American. Non-Hispanic whites, using Census Bureau terminology, are an urban minority.

According to local organizer Henry Lowendorf with the US Peace Council, the vast majority in New Haven are “adamantly opposed to the airline massively violating human rights with no judicial process and dumping people in a concentration camp in El Salvador.”

Over 200 protested Avelo Airlines on April 17 for the second Tuesday in a row, responding to a call by  Unidad Latina en Acción, the Semilla Collective, and others. Led by immigrant rights activists, speakers included local and state officials. Even US Senator Richard Blumenthal spoke out against Trump’s immigration outrages.

Avelo currently benefits from a Connecticut state exemption from fuel taxes, which subsidizes its hub operations in New Haven. The pressure is on for Avelo to either cancel the deportations or pay the fuel levy.

The state Attorney General William Tong demanded that Avelo confirm that they will not operate deportation flights from Connecticut. But the airline has refused the AG’s request to make public their secret contract with the Homeland Security.

The continuity of US deportation policy  

Aside from the heated rhetoric, The New York Times reports “deportations haven’t surged under Trump” although he has taken “new and unusual measures.” These have included deporting people to third countries far from their origins and invoking the eighteenth century wartime Alien Enemies Act.

The NYT concludes that deportations “fall short” from being the threatened mass exodus and, in fact, “look largely similar” to what was accomplished by Joe Biden. Despite all the drama and an initial surge of arrests, the pace of deportations under Trump has been slower than under Biden.

Barack Obama still retains the title of “deporter in chief” with 3.2 million individuals expelled. And Joe Biden still holds the record for the most expulsions by a US president in a single year if migrant removals under the Title 42 Covid-era public health provision are included (technically “expulsions” but not “deportations”).

Going forward, however, we can rest assured that Trump will try to beat those records. Lost in the  mainstream discourse on the migrant controversy is the reality that US policy, such as sanctions, are a major factor driving migration to the US. This takes place in the context of the  largest immigration surge into the US ever, eclipsing the “great immigration boom” of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Protests expand to other Avelo cities

A petition is circulating with some 35,000 signatures to-date demanding cessation of the Avelo deportation flights. According to the petition, a leaked memo discloses that Avelo’s decision to enter the deportation business was financially motivated to offset other losses.

Boycott Avelo protests have expanded to other destinations served by the airline, including Rochester NY, Burbank CA, Daytona Beach FL, Eugene OR, and Wilmington DE. The campaign against Avelo is growing – locally, regionally, and nationally.

As the sign at the boycott Avelo protest in Santa Rosa reminds us: “immigration makes America great!”

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