There is a 16-seater jet that routinely flies out of Mesa Gateway Airport that is key to the Trump administration’s deportation efforts. In 2024, it flew 20 deportation flights to Latin America. And this year, it’s on track to surpass that — this time, to Africa.
It’s part of the federal government’s ramping up aerial deportation efforts. And the immigrants on board are often not even from the continent they’re heading to.
Jerod MacDonald-Evoy tracked the flights and reported the story for the Arizona Mirror, and he joined The Show to talk more about it.
Full conversation
LAUREN GILGER: OK. So first, tell us about these flights to Africa. How did you track this to begin with?
JEROD MACDONALD-EVOY: Yeah. So, you know, first of all, there's groups of people who are on online, whether those are members of groups like Human Rights First or just, you know, social media users who are trying to keep track of where these flights are going that are deporting people across, across the world. And there's some people who have been tracking them and posting about them.
And I had seen some people posting about some aircraft that they felt were making suspicious flights out of different airports, including some in Phoenix, to places like Africa. And that led me to start, you know, investigating these aircraft myself.
GILGER: Right. So Mesa Gateway Airport here in the Valley in particular, you found, is pretty central to this effort. It's basically headquartered there. They call this ICE Air.
MACDONALD-EVOY: Yeah, ICE Air is kind of the colloquial name for ICE's operations, for their kind of deportation operations, as well as their, their operations to move immigrant detainees to different facilities across the nation, whether that be to different holding facilities or to, to different jails in different parts of the country. And ICE Air is based, their operational headquarters is based, out of the Mesa Gateway Airport.
GILGER: You say these aircraft, though, are well disguised. What does that mean? How.
MACDONALD-EVOY: Yeah, so since the beginning of the Trump administration, the second Trump administration, we've seen kind of an effort to mask these aircraft, whether that be specifically. One of the first things we saw them do is Avelo Airlines, one of the subcontractors the ICE uses. They've painted all their aircraft completely white, so you can't tell that they are an Avelo aircraft.
They also take part in this federal program that allows their, their flight tracking data to be blocked from certain flight tracking websites. And they've also hidden some of the registration information behind LLCs, such as like front companies or other people, or they're subleasing them from one subcontractor to another to kind of disguise what contractor has which plane.
GILGER: A bit of a web to untangle there. But it sounds like you were able to get around those efforts and confirm that they were in fact deportation flights. Where are they going? You mentioned Africa. Where else?
MACDONALD-EVOY: Well, this particular plane that I looked into for this story was, was heading to the continent of Africa and hitting a number of, of countries along the Ivory Coast area. But we've seen aircraft going to places like Greenland or the UK even. We've seen them going to Spain, we've seen them going to the large number of them are going to Latin American countries, El Salvador, you know, the countries that have been making the news for, whether that's human rights violations or for the agreements that the Trump administration has been entering into with these countries to deport people to them.
GILGER: Yeah. So let's talk about the flights to Africa. They're becoming more common, as you're reporting here. And, and you also report that some of the folks going to Africa on these planes are not from Africa.
MACDONALD-EVOY: Correct. That that's what makes some of these flights a bit more controversial is that they're part of these, what are called third country deportations, where the Trump administration is deporting people to Africa as part of a program where their home country has allegedly not accepted them. So they're going to deport them to a third country.
In some instances, that original country that said the Trump administration said was not accepting them, had actually said they would accept them. I believe there was an instance of a Jamaican national who was deported to an African country who, the country Jamaica said we would accept this person, but they ended up being deported, I believe, to Ghana.
There's been multiple people from Asian countries that have been deported to African countries as well, such as Ghana and Estwatini, I believe. And it's, it's something that the Trump administration is now facing court challenges on from immigrant rights groups.
GILGER: Right. There are lawsuits, allegations of abuse involved in this. I want to ask you more, Jerod, about the aircraft being used. Like, these are basically charter planes that have kind of interesting background sometimes that are now being used in the deportation business. How much, do we know, does this cost the government to carry out?
MACDONALD-EVOY: Yeah, that is something that is still sometimes a bit of a mystery. What I was able to find is that with this particular company, with this particular aircraft, these are, these are not cheap aircraft. They're expensive to fly. They're making 16-hour flights at times. And that can cost a lot of money, sometimes up into the $10,000 range a flight.
And so one of the companies I found that does these flight that this particular aircraft was this particular aircraft belongs to has about a $50 million contract with the federal government, with ICE in particular, to do these flights. There's other charter companies that are getting $128 million contracts and even larger contracts. So it's a big money business for the charter industry, which was already making quite a bit of money in the private sector.
But the government sector seems to be kind of a new big business boom for a lot of these group airlines like Avelo and other smaller charters, who were having some financial struggles in the lead up to the Trump administration and have been kind of grasping onto this as a new way for revenue.
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