Contrarian Senior Editor Tim Dickinson is joined by independent journalist Gillian Brockell to discuss her reporting on “ICE Air” operations — the web of charter airlines that cruelly transport migrants within and outside of the United States.
During this interview, Brockell describes the inhumane and dangerous conditions “designed to wear [migrants] down so that they'll give up on their cases” and effectively self-deport. Tune in to hear this heartbreaking, but critical discussion.
To keep up with Brockell’s reporting, check out her website and her new podcast, Worst Airline Ever.
Gillian Brockell is a multimedia journalist and essayist currently reporting on ICE flights. In her decade at the Washington Post, she was a staff writer, video editor, and live producer. She has written for Rolling Stone, Zeteo, the American Prospect, Cosmopolitan and Fodors Travel, and has appeared on MSNBC, NPR, and many many podcasts.
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The following transcript has been edited for formatting purposes.
Tim Dickinson
Hi, this is Tim Dickinson for The Contrarian. Our guest today is a reporter and podcaster, Gillian Brockell, who is carving out a beat exposing a really dark facet of the detention and deportation machinery. In the Trump era. Gillian, welcome to The Contrarian.
Gillian Brockell
Thank you so much.
Tim Dickinson
So tell us about what is ICE Air?
Gillian Brockell
ICE Air comprises about 8 charter airlines that transport migrants in ICE custody, so right now, that’s about 50 to 80 flights every single day. All adult migrants and some children are shackled at the wrists and ankles, attached to a chain around their waist, which, you know, is extremely dangerous for a number of reasons. Aviation safety, I used to be a flight attendant. There’s a lot of medical risks. And, you know, just basic human dignity. And they’re generally like, 10 to 15 of those flights every day will be deportations or removals. So most of the flights are domestic. I think that’s something that people really don’t understand.
So there are, like, these roundup flights where they’re taking newly captured people and bringing them down south, mostly, to, like, the big ICE detention center hubs, the big gulags. And then there are also a ton of shuffle flights between all of the ICE hubs. And, you know, ICE uses these to deny people due process. You know, as soon as someone is captured, they want to get them down to the south as quickly as they can to these detention centers, because they have less sympathetic judges there. They also have to get brand new attorneys. They’re separated from their families. They might be separated from documents that could help them with their cases. And then we’ve—
Tim Dickinson
So basically, just to slow this down just a little bit, so you have—
Gillian Brockell
Yeah, sorry.
Tim Dickinson
No, it’s just… it’s so fascinating, and I think sort of not understood. So, and it makes sense, right? In the grand scheme of things, DHS needs to move detainees around, it needs to ultimately deport some of them. There’s a function here that, like, makes sense governmentally, but of course, as we’ve seen the Trump administration make everything cruel by design. They have taken what is an existing, not very great, apparatus for moving people around, deporting them, and just turned it up to 11, 12, 15.
And so to back up, what you’re saying is that there’s a rush to get people who are detained in facilities, perhaps like Broadview where they are closer to their families, and they have access to their documents, and they want to get them down to maybe New Orleans, where they’ve got a different circuit court, fewer rights, and have to begin a whole new process navigating a very different legal environment?
Gillian Brockell
Yeah, exactly. And then we’ve also seen that once people are in the system, are in one of the hubs, right before a court case, or if they complain about conditions and they wanna, you know, the guards wanna retaliate against them or something, they’ll be shuffled to another one across the country.
And so we’ve heard… I mean, it happens all the time that, you know, someone complains, or their court data’s coming up, and they’ll be shuffled 5 times in a week. you know, they’ll go from El Paso to Harlingen, Texas to Alexandria. They’ll go to, you know, the Florida Everglades concentration camp, which is maybe closing this week, maybe isn’t, we don’t really know. And then Mesa, Arizona is another one of the big hubs. And people will just be tossed around. And, you know, basically the idea is, this is what, you know, human rights groups and immigration attorneys and the immigrants themselves have told me, is that this whole process is just designed to wear them down so that they’ll give up on their cases and sign a voluntary removal order to agree to be deported, which, you know, it’s not much of an agreement. It’s, you know, basically submitting to torture.
Tim Dickinson
Right. And so each of these flights is… I mean, the detention facilities, which we’ve reported on quite a lot, wormy food, very poor sanitation, but you’re saying that these people are loaded onto these airplanes, and they’re in shackles. Tell us about that.
Gillian Brockell
So they’re shackled at the wrists and ankles, attached to a waist chain. All adults, it, you know, this started under Obama shackling did, and from what I understand, it used to just be men with criminal records who were shackled. Then it was all men traveling without their families, like any single men. were shackled. During the first Trump administration, it was all adults, and then for Obama, it was all… it was just men. And now it’s all adults, and you can read the ICE Air handbook yourself, it’s online. You know, with some children, too. If there’s someone between 12 and 18 that they think is giving them trouble, they’ll shackle them, too.
You know, just as a flight attendant, or as a former flight attendant, you know, every flight attendant’s obsession is keeping the aisle clear and the passengers unencumbered so that they can evacuate within 90 seconds in the event of an emergency. And you can’t do that if someone is shackled. It’s just not possible. Icer doesn’t share any information about their flight operations. We know that there have been at least 5 evacuations. Between 2014 and 2019. We only know that because of discovery in a court case. And the evacuation times for two of those, are known, and they were two and a half minutes and 7 minutes. And there was also, there was also an emergency where they should have evacuated and didn’t, and I mean, they’re very lucky that everyone on board didn’t die, though a lot of people were injured.
Another thing is, if the oxygen masks fall, you can’t reach them, because the waste chain prevents your wrists from going above your shoulders. So, I did a story for American Prospect about Avello when they were doing ice flights, and while I was reporting it, I was able to find out that there was a cabin depressurization. on one of these flights, the oxygen mask deployed, but 6 people were injured with sinus injuries, which aren’t… serious or deadly, but they’re very painful, and that indicates that people couldn’t reach their masks.
And that’s just the aviation safety. I’m not even getting into the medical of, you know. the extended shacklings on these really long deportations, I spoke to someone who was shackled for 72 hours while he was being deported to Laos. I have flight records that indicate people were shackled for 82 hours on another one in December. People are regularly shackled for 30, 40 hours every week on these long deportations. And, I mean, just… I have a clotting disorder, like, 20% of America, or the world does, and most people don’t know it. And, you know, when you have a clotting disorder, or if you’re worried about clots, you’re supposed to stand up and stretch during flights, right? Right. They’re not allowed to stand up. If they can even use the restroom, it’s just up to if the guards are in a good mood. and let them, so people soil themselves in their seats all the time. You can’t even raise your arms above your head to stretch. And so, think about being in that position for 72 hours. I mean, the blood clot risk alone is insane. You’re not even talking about the nerve damage. Cuts and bruises, the mental injury of being confined like that.
Tim Dickinson
But no, it sounds like something out of Abu Ghraib, right?
Gillian Brockell
Yeah. Absolutely, and, you know, while we’re on the subject, there’s also a thing called the WRAP. So there’s something like, you know, 5 to 40 Geo Group guards on every single ICE flight. There will be, like, one or two federal agents, but they kind of sit up in first class. This is what flight attendants have told me to handle the paperwork and don’t really do anything. It’s the guards that are watching, intimidating, having all of the contact with the migrants on these planes. And if you, you know, as they see it, if you’re uncompliant in any way, which you know, they consider asking to speak to your lawyer to be uncompliant. They’ll put you in this thing called the WRAP, which is like a full-body straitjacket. They lay the wrap and all the straps on the ground on the tarmac, in front of the stairs during boarding as, like, a threat. Of, like, you better behave, or you’re gonna get the wrap. I’ve only heard of the wrap actually being used on removal flights to Africa, which, you know, really indicates the… You know, racist caliber of these guys.
Tim Dickinson: hearts.
Well, tell us, I mean, so we’ve talked about these internal flights and the shuffling that happens, and once people have these deportation orders, whether they’ve been coerced or whatever, they are then put on flights, and sometimes they’re not flown back to their home country, they’re flown through a third country altogether, and sometimes these are really dangerous regimes that they’re headed to. South Sudan, maybe Equatorial Guinea, some stuff to the Congo. Can you talk about What that’s about, and the question of distance, and the question of safety on the other end.
Gillian Brockell
Yeah, so, before Trump’s second term, there was this thing called the Safe Third Country Program, and it was if the U.S. wanted to deport someone for whatever reason, and they couldn’t be deported back to their home country, they could be sent to a safe third country that would offer them resettlement. It was, you know, very rarely used, and basically in the past, year and a half that we’ve been in the second term, Trump has been misusing and abusing this program to, I don’t even say deport, I just say remove or expel about 18,000 people, we think, to about 25 different countries, and only one of them, Costa Rica, is even offering the opportunity for people to resettle there, and could be construed as safe.
Most of these countries are not safe. And the reason that they use this is because a lot of people have withholding of removal orders, but they’re not necessarily, but they don’t have a pathway to a green card or a visa because they came, you know, undocumented, or they came as refugees but lost their refugee status because of a conviction. And then also, if you’re just in the legal asylum process, but it… you’re… you’re… You haven’t had your hearing? yet, to decide whether you can be granted asylum or not. If they grab you, they can just remove you this way.
Tim Dickinson
I see, so maybe there’s a block of sending them back to their home country, but they can use this third country as sort of a loophole to get them out of the U.S. and into somebody else’s hands.
Gillian Brockell
Yeah, so in some cases, in most cases, I would say, they’re sending people to these other countries, and then you know, either they’re not even allowed to leave the airport, the security forces of those countries will immediately put them on a plane back to their home countries, so we’ve seen that. a lot with, Russians, who are in the asylum process being sent to Egypt. And then Egyptian authorities immediately put them on an Egypt air a charter plane to Moscow. Wow. And some… we know that dissidents have disappeared, that they’ve been arrested by Russian authorities and disappeared as soon as those flights arrive. And then, Kuwait and Qatar… Qatar only did one, and after that it was Kuwait.
They’re doing that with Iranians. So before the war, stopped now, before the war, we deported a couple hundred Iranians that way, via Kuwait. Now, other places, Ghana, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea. the Democratic Republic of Congo, they’ll put people, like, in a hotel or a detention center near the airport, and they’re not really free to go, and they kind of just say, well, you can’t stay here, so let us know when you want to go back to your home country, but you can’t stay here, and just kind of pressure them to leave.
And then, you know, the sort of worst-case scenario that has happened to a couple hundred people is that they’re just put in a prison in the other country, and that’s it. So, there were 7 people sent to South Sudan that way in May of 2025. That was kind of the first one. I mean, I’m counting CECOT as a separate thing.
There have been about 19 people sent to Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland, that way on 3 different flights, and only three of the people sent to those places have been repatriated to their home countries, one man to Cambodia, one man to Jamaica. and one man to Mexico who was sent to South Sudan. And all of those people, they had been convicted of serious crimes, but they’d finished their sentences, sometimes, you know, 10, 13 years ago. Wow. couldn’t be sent back to their home countries for whatever reason, and so they had been living… I mean, they had families, they were married, they had jobs. And then, last spring, ICE picked them up, and it seems like picked them up for this specific purpose, to sort of pilot these prison programs.
So when they’re sent to South Sudan or Eswatini, they haven’t been convicted of a new crime. There’s no reason, there’s no legal reason to detain them. And frankly, there’s no reason to even be doing this, because there’s a thing called chain reflowment, which is, you can’t deport someone to another country if they’re just gonna deport them to their home country where they won’t be safe. Like, that’s already against U.S. and international law, and there are a lot of court cases, you know, DVD versus DHS, I think, is the biggest one, where they’re saying. this is obviously wrong, and a federal judge in Boston agreed, tried to enforce it. And the Supreme Court said, well, we’re gonna weigh in on this case, and in the meantime, the Trump administration can keep doing it, and they just haven’t released their opinion yet. It’s been a year now. So, while we’re waiting for their opinion about whether our own laws against chain refilement are even, valid anymore. this continues, and I mean, it’s just… it’s going into hyperdrive. There were… 5 possible or confirmed, chain refilements or third country removals yesterday, alone.
Tim Dickinson
This is why I wanted to have you on, because this is really hard to listen to. And there’s an element to this that’s quite perverse, is that some people are making a lot of money on this. And so, I wanna dig in on that, particularly because of the giant extension of DHS funding that was just passed. And so, these are private or contract airlines. Who are the carriers here? And are they making quite a lot of money moving all these people around?
Gillian Brockell
Yeah, so ICE’s flight broker, they’re the ones that actually assign all of the flights to the charter airlines. They’re called CSI Aviation. They’re ICE’s biggest contractor. There are, like, the private prisons, that contract with ICE. They’re smaller contracts than CSI Aviation. They’re about 7 months into a 12-month contract that’s worth up to $1.5 billion. They’ve already received $800 million of that. And so, and that guy, the, like, father-daughter duo that owned that company. They’re, like, super MAGA, they’ve been anti-immigration Republican donors for a very long time. The daughter was an election denier, one of the, one of the, false electors in New Mexico. she was investigated and wasn’t charged for some reason. And then the charter airlines, you know, there’s GlobalX is the biggest one, they do the most. There’s, Air Wisconsin, which was bought by CSI, so CSI’s kind of double-dipping that way, they’re paying themselves. There’s Eastern Airlines, Eastern Air Express. Key Lime Air, Denver Air Connection, and then, like, the one that I did the big story on in Mother Jones in January is called Omni Air International. They’ve been around for a long time. They mostly do military charters, but they’ve also done… they do all of the large jet removals to Asia and Africa, and it’s been that way for a really long time, although just last week, Eastern Airlines started doing them, too.
And they were a publicly traded company, and then last April, April 2025, they were purchased. by private equity, by, Stone Peak, which is… was started by this guy, Michael Durrell, who is an immigrant, an Australian immigrant, who came here to do infrastructure investing, and, so… and then since, since Stone Peak bought Omni, they’re… their, ICE flights to Asia and Africa have just skyrocketed. I mean, they did, like, 4 in between January and April of 2025, and then they did, I think, 70 or 80 in the rest of the year. They do a couple a week now, they might be doing a third country removal of Syrians, Afghans, and Iranians to the Central African Republic tonight. The plane is staging in Alexandria right now. The New York.
And the, oh, the money. Sorry. We’re making the Asia one, the Asia and Africa ones, they all get a high-risk fee. We don’t know exactly what they’re making. The last available information from 2019 was, like, $32,000 per flight hour, plus expenses. So, if fuel prices go up like they are right now, like, we, the taxpayer, are paying it. And so, yeah, I mean, they’re… they’re making… I think the least amount is $9,000 for the small private jets per flight hour, and then the most that we know of, it could be more, is $32,000 per flight hour.
Tim Dickinson
And I know, obviously, the FAA regulates flights, and so there’s not a lot of, you know, that individual airports can do, but I saw that you had an open letter to the Denver municipality about… so what are some things that people can do? How can people engage on this to try and muck up the works a little bit?
Gillian Brockell
Yeah, I mean, I get people in my comments a lot saying, like. how are these airports even letting these planes land? And unfortunately, they can’t deny them clearance to land. Seattle tried to do this, in, I think, starting in 2019. And, you know, there was a federal court case, and eventually a federal judge ruled that… The charter airlines are doing work for the federal government. If you’re a public-use airport, you can’t deny access to the federal government. So that you can’t stop an ICE flight from landing at your airport, but you can cancel contracts for people who work with ICE. So, in Denver right now, one city council member, put forward a plan to… I’m not… to cancel a contract with, Key Lime Air, Denver Air Connection. They’re like a local charter airline there who started doing ICE flights, last September, and so they’re supposed to vote on it soon, and so I just wrote a letter to them, and then I published it to my website, just saying, you know, describing what I’m telling to you as concisely as I could.
And also, there seems to be, because most people don’t know how to track flights, there seem to be, Some, like, almost… I wouldn’t say misinformation, but really, like, a huge undercount or undertelling of Key Lime’s involvement in ICE flights, so local media was saying, like, yes, they did at least two ICE flights last year, and… I don’t think they were even aware, like, no, they do, like, 3 to 9 every day, so I just, you know… put up some numbers, you know, did some spreadsheets and looked at human rights first. They also track ICE flights and, you know, just told them, like, no, they’ve actually done, like, 1,700 ICE flights since September.
Tim Dickinson
So the idea is that you can perhaps look at the ancillary businesses of these charter flights, what other clients they have, and find pressure points there. Gillian, I’m conscious of our time, and I want to give you a chance to plug your new podcast, because I think people should hear more about this conversation.
Gillian Brockell
Yeah, so when I started doing this last year, I quickly was contacted by a guy who goes by JJNDC on Blue Sky, who… he had also begun, tracking ICE flights, just as an activist. And so I, you know, used him as a source for some of my freelance stories, and just, you know, over the months. as we both were getting deeper and deeper in this, we just started, like, sending signal chats to each other all day, like, did you see that plane? What do you think that one’s doing? You know, this sort of thing, because we’re both just tracking flights all day. And, you know, I think eventually we became friends, and yeah, about a month ago, we decided to start a podcast, so it’s going to be called Worst Airline Ever. It’ll be the first episode will be dropping in the next couple of days.
There’s a Patreon, JJ and I are… you know, I’m making a little bit of money on my website, doing my freelance work, but, you know, JJ’s been doing this for free. We’ve both been pulling from our retirement funds to… keep going with this, and you know, hopefully this will be a way where our work can be a little more sustainable, and we don’t have to go get jobs where we’re not doing this really meaningful work that we want to be doing.
Tim Dickinson
Well, thank you so much. You’re doing an invaluable public service, and I really enjoyed our conversation.
Gillian Brockell
Thank you.
