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AT SEATTLE’S BOEING FIELD, REAL-TIME VIDEO OFFERS A RARE GLIMPSE OF
AMERICA’S TROUBLED DEPORTATION FLIGHTS  
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McKenzie Funk
March 8, 2024
ProPublica
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_ Key details about what happens inside ICE Air would still be hidden
if not for a group of Washington activists and researchers, who are
now using a live video feed from the tarmac to document the flights. _


Immigrant advocates and University of Washington students observe a
live feed of a deportation flight boarding at King County
International Airport, also known as Boeing Field, in January. ,
Jovelle Tamayo, special to ProPublica

 

_ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign
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A closed-circuit video camera zoomed in on the tarmac of Seattle's
Boeing Field one recent afternoon, buffeted by 30-mile-an-hour gusts
as it captured the arrival of a charter jet. The jet rolled to a stop
alongside two buses. Behind their tinted windows, still invisible to
the camera, were people waiting to be deported from the United States.

"Windy," muttered a woman watching the video feed on a projector
screen. Struggling to make out the plane’s tail number from the
shaky image, she stood up for a closer look.

On the screen, a stairway was wheeled over, and a cluster of men in
bright yellow jackets descended from the plane. Another man stepped
out of an SUV that partly blocked the foot of the stairs from view.
Soon the group lugged over black bags, opened them, and laid out
something that looked like chains.

When detainees began emerging from the camera’s blind spot, their
ankles, waists and wrists appeared to be shackled together, and they
seemed unable to hold the handrails as they shuffled up the wet stairs
in the wind.

"So dangerous," said another woman watching the video feed. People
kept coming, and she and her partner kept count: "Seven ... eight ...
nine ... ten ... eleven ... twelve." One by one, the hunched figures
disappeared into the plane. After an hour, it was gone.

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.

In 2017, passengers on a deportation flight to Somalia said they were
left bound and shackled in their seats for 23 hours during a stopover,
some forced to soil themselves because they were denied bathroom
visits. A year later, the right landing gear collapsed as a plane
carrying detainees touched down at an airport in Louisiana, sparking a
fire on its wing, filling the cabin with the smell of burning rubber
and sending shackled passengers racing toward the three functioning
evacuation slides after another slide failed to deploy. The next year,
a detainee at the same Louisiana airport tumbled from the top of the
boarding stairs and was rushed to the hospital.

While news organizations have reported on some of
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incidents
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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 University of Washington Center for Human Rights has spent the
past six years trying to shed light on deportation operations, even as
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its contractors and
subcontractors have taken steps that shield their activities from
view. (ICE declined ProPublica’s requests for comment.) Now the
human rights center is in close contact with the observers at Boeing
Field, hoping their weekly vigil will yield new clues and drive
further research.

Every scrap of information is hard won.

As the recent dramatic influx of immigrants has prompted a push among
political leaders to accelerate expulsions, what Seattle's single
shaky tarmac camera really shows is how little the public is allowed
to know about the nation’s hidden deportation infrastructure.

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?’”

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.

In April 2019, the center published this trove of raw data and a pair
of reports cataloging a history of in-flight abuses and potential due
process violations.

The Washington human rights center reports also mapped the layers of
contractors and subcontractors that provide ICE with planes, security
guards, in-flight nurses and access to local airports. “Over the
past decade, the institutional infrastructure behind these flights has
shifted from a government operation run by the US Marshals Service on
government planes,” the researchers wrote
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sprawling, semi-secret network of flights on privately-owned
aircraft.” Their reports identified the charter companies by name.

A great majority of the deportation flights leaving Boeing Field were
bound not for destinations overseas but for domestic ICE Air hubs
closer to America’s southern border, over 1,000 miles away, where
detainees could be placed on connecting flights to countries of
origin. The Washington researchers showed that Boeing Field was a busy
part of the network, having hosted close to 500 ICE Air flights since
2010, collecting landing fees as the government shipped off at least
34,400 people for deportation.

Confronted with these findings, King County Executive Dow Constantine
issued an order designed to eventually make it impossible for ICE Air
to get any ground support, such as refueling, at Boeing Field. The
company providing these ground services to ICE, which had also been
named in the center’s reports, decided to stop rather than wait
until its contract came up for renewal. The flights suddenly ended.
(The company, Clay Lacy Aviation, and its successor in Seattle, Modern
Aviation, did not respond to requests for comment.)

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.

Activists became more sophisticated. Thomas Cartwright, a retired
financial executive in Ohio turned refugee advocate, figured out how
to identify ICE Air missions by analyzing flight patterns, operators
and airport pairs. He began to track charter planes by the dozens,
enabling the human rights center to issue a 2022 report linking
specific deportation flights to the sports teams and musical acts that
chartered the same planes.

“I'm retired, and I really do need to retire," Cartwright said. "I
don't know who's going to do it after me.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Justice proceeded with a lawsuit
against Constantine, the King County executive, to restart ICE flights
at Boeing Field. Announcing the suit in February 2020, then-Attorney
General William Barr had called it “a significant escalation in the
federal government’s efforts to confront the resistance of
'sanctuary cities.'"

A judge ruled against the county in March 2023, and ICE made
preparations to return.

Signature Aviation, a ground-support company at Boeing Field with an
$11.5 million new terminal building for its executive clients, agreed
to service ICE Air out on a hard-to-see part of the tarmac. Two
charter companies, iAero Airways and GlobalX, would do the flying.
(None of the companies responded to ProPublica’s requests for
comment.)

La Resistencia, the local immigrant rights group, responded by
pressuring King County officials to set up a viewing area. The county
hastily opened a conference room and closed-circuit video feed for
observers.

On May 2, according to a spreadsheet kept by the observers, a white
Boeing 737 with the tail number N802TJ arrived from Phoenix. The plane
was known as the Straight Talk Express when used on Sen. John McCain's
2008 presidential campaign, photos and news reports from the time
show. On this day iAero was using it for a deportation flight. ICE Air
was back.

Volunteers now observe deportation flights every week at Boeing Field,
usually on Tuesday mornings.

Coordinating their efforts along with La Resistencia’s Maru Mora
Villalpando is Stan Shikuma, a 70-year-old retired nurse and the
co-president of the civil liberties group Tsuru for Solidarity.

“Tsuru” means “crane” in Japanese. The group consists of
Japanese American survivors of U.S. incarceration camps during World
War II and their descendants. They first organized to protest what
they saw as similar mass camps for immigrant families during the Trump
administration. One, in Dilley, Texas, was just 45 minutes down the
road from Crystal City, Texas, the site of an infamous camp that
housed Japanese American families. In 2019, the group that would
become Tsuru led a large rally outside the Dilley detention center,
giving speeches and playing taiko drums and stringing tens of
thousands of origami paper cranes along the fence. The cranes became
their symbol. They rallied under the cry “Stop Repeating History!”

At Boeing Field, the volunteers record tail numbers and keep a count
of how many people get on and off each plane. The observations can
serve as “a check on ICE in case they do put out numbers,” Shikuma
says. “If they say, ‘We’ve only deported 25 people in the last
two months,’ we can say, ‘Well, we counted 85 in the last two
weeks.’”

The second goal, Shikuma says, is to "let the people on the plane know
that we're out here and that someone cares." In this effort, the
groups, hidden away as they are in the observation room, have been
less successful.

When Shikuma is on duty, he sits with one or two other observers in
the conference room and stares intently at the closed-circuit video
screen on the wall. He sips coffee and checks FlightAware, a popular
plane tracking app, on his phone. He watches the buses roll in from
the 1,575-bed Northwest ICE Processing Center in nearby Tacoma, run by
private-prison contractor The Geo Group.

After the ICE Air flight arrives, usually from Phoenix but sometimes
Las Vegas, San Antonio or El Paso, Shikuma marks in his notebook the
time, the plane’s tail number, how many detainees exit and how many
board.

Planes meet buses behind a large hangar, almost entirely out of view
from a perimeter road. There are often three buses, but only two of
them, Shikuma said, ever unload passengers. The third parks along a
fence line, blocking any remaining view from the road. While the
county's closed-circuit camera can still capture the boarding process,
the positioning of the SUV and two passenger buses means that
detainees are generally visible on the camera only for the seconds it
takes them to ascend the stairs.

Twice in recent months volunteers witnessed what they considered
unusual activity during boardings on the tarmac, prompting the human
rights center to request records of internal ICE documentation on
those two flights under the Freedom of Information Act.

Activists say that King County, despite its left-leaning reputation,
has been a more reluctant partner in keeping tabs on deportation
flights than was Yakima, which had regularly shared passenger tallies.

But Cameron Satterfield, a county spokesperson, said officials are
doing what they can within a limited set of options. “We have a
federal judge saying, ‘No, this is a public airport,’” he told
ProPublica.

The county logs ICE Air’s arrivals and departures on its website,
though the page was missing for weeks this winter after an update.
Local officials have been unable to obtain passenger data from ICE,
not even a head count. “They have told us: You can send a FOIA
request,” Satterfield said.

This means that the only practical way to get numbers is the
volunteers’ flight-by-flight paper tally. In 2022, ICE's average
processing time for what it deems "complex" requests hit a record
high: 186 days. At the end of that year, it had a backlog of 16,902
unresolved cases, a fourfold jump from 2021.

ProPublica’s review of deportation videos posted online by ICE
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shows what a difference the unvarnished view from Boeing Field can
make. The agency began routinely posting the productions in May.

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
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felonies that could suggest a possible risk to others on board.

Carrier names and tail numbers are blurred or absent in the videos,
consistent with tail-number redactions in documents the Washington
human rights center has gradually received from ICE in the years after
its 2019 reports. The agency cites an exemption to the Freedom of
Information Act protecting records that would reveal "techniques and
procedures for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions" or
"could reasonably be expected to risk circumvention of the law."

The agency did not respond when asked by ProPublica how disclosing
tail numbers could pose such risks, nor when asked to explain the use
of five-point restraints. When the California news organization
Capital & Main wrote in 2021 about ICE flights that went badly, it
quoted a spokesperson saying the agency required safety reports from
flight brokers and that “ICE retains the ability to hold the vendor
accountable if there are performance issues.”

The spokesperson also told Capital & Main that the agency “utilizes
restraints only when necessary for the safety and security of the
detainee passengers, flight crew, and the aircraft.”

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.

Yet in most of the ICE Air videos, including 32 of the 33 shot over
the last year at the Louisiana airport where the man fell, ICE's
contractors did not heed the investigators’ suggestion.

At Boeing Field, observers have documented the same practices. Week
after week, rain or shine, including the recent gusty day when the
tarmac camera shook in 30-mile-an-hour winds, chained detainees
continue to climb aboard the planes alone.

On a calmer day this winter, Shikuma shared the observation room with
Mora Villalpando and with fellow Tsuru volunteer Margaret Sekijima.
FlightAware showed an inbound Airbus A320 operated by the ICE Air
subcontractor GlobalX. Buses from the detention center, which normally
arrive well in advance, had yet to appear on the screen. “Very
unusual,” Shikuma said. “I wonder if they've changed up the
protocol."

A few weeks prior, Mora Villalpando had led a group of protestors who
intercepted the buses outside the gates of the airport, waving at the
detainees inside and unfurling a banner that read "You are not alone"
in three languages spoken by recent groups of Northwest detainees:
English, Spanish and Punjabi.

Minutes later, two buses traversed the video frame from left to right.
A young woman burst into the room. “They changed the entrance and
came from the north!” she said. She was a student from the
University of Washington, there to lead a demonstration in front of
Signature Aviation’s gleaming terminal building. “I’m going to
go round up the troops.”

The Airbus landed. The observers took down its tail number. They
counted 29 detainees getting on, zero getting off.

Shikuma and Mora Villalpando went outside to join the protesters.
Sekijima stayed in the conference room, her expression tight, her eyes
on the screen until the plane left for El Paso, its next destination
in ICE Air’s endless loop of deportation flights.

* Immigration
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* Deportation
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* immigrant rights
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