There is a group of people who monitor deportation flights out of Boeing Field, and other airports.
Heroes witness fascists
The observation room at Boeing Field offers what is arguably America’s best real-time window into our vast network of privately run deportation flights, a system that has generated troubling reports of passenger mistreatment and in-flight emergencies.
…
While news organizations have reported on some of these incidents aboard what the government calls ICE Air, key details about how the system works would still be hidden were it not for a group of researchers who are now part of the work inside the observation room.
The people and organizations behind these flights have been playing dumb for years — they don’t want to talk about them. They drive busses loaded with people right up to the boarding stairs for these planes; they position jailers and vehicles to obscure any view of the people being herded into the planes. They don’t want us to know about them.
The Washington human rights center’s investigation of ICE Air began in 2018 with a modest goal: to prove that deportation operations took place at King County International Airport, as Boeing Field is officially known. Liberal local officials had enacted various “sanctuary” policies to insulate their residents from then-President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigrants, but they were unaware (or could at least claim to be unaware) of ICE flights at the county-owned airport. “They all played dumb,” said Maru Mora Villalpando of the immigrant rights group La Resistencia. “All of them were like, ‘Wait, what, there are deportations happening here?’”
Yes, we know they are, thanks to dedicated defenders of civil liberties who try to monitor these flights.
The center began gathering documents that proved it, and also hinted at the worldwide breadth of ICE Air’s network. Their investigation grew. Through records requests to ICE, and after interventions by Washington’s congressional delegation, researchers obtained an ICE Air database spanning eight years of global operations: 1.73 million passenger records from nearly 15,000 flights to and from 88 U.S. airports — Boeing Field indeed among them — and to 134 international airports in 119 countries around the world.
Those dang liberals in Western Washington state began shutting off support to these flights, and ICE began getting even more secretive about them.
A game of cat and mouse had begun, pitting the Trump administration — and later the Biden administration — against local sanctuary advocates.
First, ICE switched locations. It began charter operations out of a municipal airport in the small city of Yakima, located in the farming region about three hours east of Seattle.
But activists began showing up at the Yakima airfield, recording tail numbers and keeping count of people being deported.
Second, ICE changed its flight numbering system. The human rights center had disclosed in its 2019 report that it used the federally assigned prefix “RPN-” for “repatriate” to plug information into free flight-tracking websites and obtain a plane’s tail number and ownership. So ICE dropped the “RPN-” and adopted the call signs of its various charter companies.
Wait a minute…if these flights are perfectly legal, why is ICE trying to hide them?
I repeat: WHY ANY SECRECY AT ALL?
And why does ICE only release strongly edited, even blurred, images of detainees on flights? It’s almost as if they think we might see some brutality.
The 97 videos ProPublica examined, ranging in length from 22 seconds to almost 3 minutes, show signs of careful framing and editing. While detainees are commonly shown climbing the steps in handcuffs and the waist chains that secure them, the videos often cut to a new shot before leg shackles can make an appearance. When leg shackles are visible, they are typically out of focus, discernible only if you know to look for them.
It is common on ICE Air to place passengers in five-point restraints — wrists, ankles, and waists in chains — even as the agency’s own statistics show that less than half of the people deported in 2023 had any kind of criminal conviction, let alone for serious felonies that could suggest a possible risk to others on board.
What ICE’s online videos don’t show is revealing in its own right. In spring 2023, the center obtained a series of ICE Air incident reports detailing various accidents during charter operations, including the one in which a detainee in Alexandria, Louisiana, tumbled down the boarding stairs. Agency investigators recommended that contractors and subcontractors avoid such accidents in the future by placing a guard midway up the stairs to help detainees board and to catch any who lose their balance.
You will not be surprised that ICE has not bothered to place those guards, thanks to the diligent work of outside observers, documenting everything despite the best efforts of ICE to conceal them.
The flights continue. They will increase in numbers, if Republicans get their way.
But, you say, I am a native born American. I’m not at risk of deportation. Consider this: “A relatively overlooked set of companies whose shares have also seen stellar surges are the controversial American private prison firms. “
The immediate reading of the prison stock rally is that the Republicans have positioned themselves as ‘tough on crime’ – though former President Bill Clinton did much to bring the Democratic party to the game as well – meaning that the number of incarcerated persons under the Trump administration is likely to increase.
There are already about 1.9 million people in American prisons – about 0.5% of the U.S. population, estimated at 345 million in 2024 – per the data from the Prison Policy Initiative.
It is worth pointing out that the figure is comparable to incarceration rates in the USSR at the height of the infamous GULAG System. Adam Gopnik even wrote in 2012 that the U.S. has more people under ‘correctional supervision’ than the Soviet Union ever did.
(By the way, screw Bill Clinton, too.)
I think a clear sign of an expanding fascist state is the police hiding their activities, as well as an eager industry looking forward to building even more prisons.
(And screw Joe Biden and Democrats in general)
Is this on topic? The fact that the new meme is ‘Your body my choice?’ Look it up. Also one of my students was out shooting photos for a final project. Back roads outside Portland OR. Stopped on the PUBLIC ROAD. Shooting an old barn from the roadside. Her 1 year old baby asleep in the car. A woman came barreling out of the house next door and leveled a shotgun at this young student. Who threw up her arms and shouted don’t shoot! my baby is in the car! How common will this type of out of control escalation encounter become? She is reporting it, we are putting out the word at school as well. I am shaking with rage. Yeah, witness as if your life depends on it.
Today, it would not surprise me if this is also human trafficking instead of “mere” deportation.
It is also for sure that many of those who are deported will end up dead, sooner rather than later.
Why are they trying to get into the USA anyway?
Some of the younger ones who were brought to the USA as children, speak English and very little or none of the language of the countries they are being deported too.
This guy was brought to the USA at age 3 as an adopted child.
Because of paperwork errors, he ended up without US citizenship, deported to Korea where he knew no one and spoke no Korean, struggled in a foreign land, and committed suicide.
You see that a lot with young Mexican adults deported to Mexico.
They stand out as the ones speaking broken tourist level Spanish and not understanding the culture they get tossed into.
If US citizens think they are safe they need to open their eyes. Firstly Trump has promised to strip citizenship of those he doesn’t like so he can deport them. This is already happening in Australia. Naturalised Australian citizens who serve more than a year in prison are stripped of their citizenship and deported. A man in his 40’s who came to Australia as a two year old had that done to him. He was deported to a country where he had no family support and don’t speak the language and dumped there. It gets worse. A migrant to Australia who could not prove they were a citizen was deported to the Philippines. Before being deported she was recovering from a back injury. Without that treatment she is now confined to a wheelchair. Another Australian citizen who had mental problems was found wandering the streets speaking bad German. She was detained and sent to an immigration prison interstate despite missing person reports from her family. She spent nearly 18 months confined under brutal conditions including being stripped and hosed down to wash before other detainees were able to bring her case to the attention of migration advocates. Australia maintains two immigration gulags in Pacific Island nations. They are run under contract by private prison companies with a track record of negligence and brutality. In mates are denied basic medical care and have died from treatable illnesses. Others have been fatally beaten and female detainees have been raped. The island locations were chosen so the inmates can be denied access to lawyers. The media is barred and not even opposition politicians can get visas to travel there. It can a nd it will get much worse under Trump.
It’s gonna get a helluva lot worse.
@5– The absolutely worst thing about the Australian immigration detention system is it was invented by Kevin Rudd, a Labor prime minister, to preempt right-wing criticism for being soft on illegal immigrants. It has since been adapted for the UK under the previous Tory government which specifically referred to the success of the Australian system (not actually a success in any measurable way, in fact the Australian system is hugely expensive and has been used to corruptly siphon many millions of dollars to political donors).
When the food starts rotting in the fields next year, and it becomes hard to find anyone to repair your roof or replace your siding at a reasonable cost, the enthusiasm for mass deportations will start to wane significantly.
raven@4:
This doesn’t reflect well on the US, but neither does it reflect well on South Korean and Mexican culture, that they would not help these people get on their feet and instead just shrugged and told them they were on their own.
chrislawson@7:
Sounds like a success to me. Another way to corruptly siphon many millions of dollars is exactly what the Tories were shopping around for.
@9 ‘
This doesn’t reflect well on the US, but neither does it reflect well on South Korean and Mexican culture, that they would not help these people get on their feet’
When Pinochet was having people thrown out of helicopters into the ocean, the solution was never for the ocean to make itself more hospitable, even if it could have. And the fault for the deaths lay solely with Pinochet and his regime members.
Bekenstein Bound, Kevin Rudd was PM in 2007, became an MP in 1998.
Immigration detention became the policy in 1992.
Fact. Despite what someone else might write.
Greg Egan, 2002: https://www.gregegan.net/ESSAYS/RAZOR/RazorWire.html
That was chrislawson who wrote what you’re replying to.
But indeed, it’s long been highly popular in Australia to disappear asylum seekers into torture camps. Rudd is the only PM to try to shut a couple down, and he got turfed for it. Blaming him is bizarre. Definitely true that Labour goes for this stuff, just not Rudd.
Yep Rudd had nothing to do with the offshore detention policy, that was the Liberals.
Every time I hear about mass deportations, I think of Woodie Guthrie’s song, Deportee. Here’s a version by Joan Baez: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeBPZy0MGOU
@8 tacitus: This has happened a couple of times. Republican populists in southern states have on occasion gotten serious about enforcing laws against illegal workers. They have suddenly started arresting and deporting undocumented workers in large numbers. This results in various businesses not having the labor they need, followed by inflation. This results in complaints to the Republicans who quietly cut enforcement.
At a national level what is likely to happen under Trump is that there is be a splashy pile of arrests. The arrests will be large numbers but only a small fraction of the number of undocumented workers. The cases will get tangled in the courts. Shortly the number of arrests will have to be dialed back because the prisons will be full. New people will enter across the borders to replace the arrested ones. The whole thing will become a transfer of money to private prison companies without reducing undocumented workers on the ground.
@16
in other words just like before the only real question is how long will the “normal expected flip-flop take?
@15 I too think of that song when ever the subject of “illegals ” comes up many good versions for a song too bad it is still so relevant after these 76 years