July 22, 2025 • 43 mins
James is joined once again by Gillian Brockell to discuss the use of private jets to rendition migrants to Africa, safety on ICE Air flights, and commercial airlines who fly for ICE.
Sources/Links:
https://hardghistory.ghost.io/exclusive-ice-may-have-secretly-done-more-third-country-removals-than-previously-known/
https://hardghistory.ghost.io/new-ices-eswatini-flight-went-through-us-base-in-djibouti-americans-stationed-there-are-angry/
https://hardghistory.ghost.io/a-call-to-action-for-airline-workers-to-stop-ices-deportation-machine/
https://thedawn.com.ss/2025/07/10/govt-places-8-u-s-deportees-behind-bars-in-juba/
witnessattheborder.org
https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-ice-air-deportation-flights
https://www.pogo.org/investigations/meet-the-ice-contractor-running-deportation-flights
https://capitalandmain.com/a-drunk-mechanic-shackled-immigrants-a-crash-landing-the-dangers-of-ice-flights
https://alexplank.substack.com/p/photos-shackled-migrant-escorted
https://globe.adsbexchange.com/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, Hi everyone, and welcome to it could happen here.
We are joined once again by Gillian Brockel, who is
once again going to talk to us about the terrible
actually world of deportation flights, how we can track them,
what we can learn from following them, and what it
(00:22):
tells us about the US's massive deportation regimes.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Welcome back, Thanks for joining.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
Us, Thank you for having me, James, I appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
You're welcome.
Speaker 4 (00:31):
All right, let's get going here this week, got a
lot to go and there's been a lot of planes supporting.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
People deporting and removing.
Speaker 5 (00:37):
So we've really stopped saying deporting because we don't know
who hasn't gotten due process and who does and does
not actually belong to the country they're being sent to.
Speaker 4 (00:50):
Yeah, in many cases, it's more like what we saw
in the Extraordinary Rendition, very much so kind of war
and terry. I think that's pretty a better way.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
To describe it. Yeah, let's start out. Suppose was Djibouti.
Speaker 5 (01:01):
Yeah, so the eight men that were sent to Djibouti,
that's the flight I first tracked on May twentieth. They
were taken on a gulf Stream five operated by journey
aviation from Harling in Texas to Shannon Airport in Ireland,
and I called the cops in Ireland to try and stop.
(01:22):
It didn't work, and then they went to a US
military base in Djibouti, where judge had ordered them to
remain while he considered their case. So those men are
now in South Sudan, where Trump wanted to send them.
They were held in Jibouti for six weeks. We know
from court filings that they were held inside a shipping
(01:44):
container in a far corner of the base, near a
burn pit where the trash for the base was burned,
and that smoke from this pit was getting into the
shipping container through the events and causing the men and
the ice Gars to cough and feel ill. There was
also an independent journalist named Alex Planck who got a
(02:08):
photo from a source on the base showing one of
the detainees shackled at the ankles and being escorted by
an ice guard to the restroom because the shipping container
did not have its own restroom. And he said that
most of the members of the military at the base
didn't even know that they were there. And you know
(02:29):
this base is generally considered like one of the worst
assignments to get when you're in the military. Plank said
he talked to a defense contractor who said that they
stopped sending their employees to that base.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
Because it was just too terrible.
Speaker 5 (02:46):
So during the six week period, I and other flight
trackers we tracked five trips by round trip trips by
Journey Aviation jets to and from their base in Miami
and Djibouti, all traveling through Shannon. Presumably these were flights
that were swapping out ICE guards, but we really don't
(03:07):
know because ICE does not provide any information about its
air operations. Everything we know is through court filings and
through open source intelligence like the ADSP Exchange. Then on
July third, the Supreme Court cleared the way for these
third country removals, and this one specifically to South Sudan.
(03:29):
All of US flight trekkers were watching the airspace really closely,
and we knew that one of Journey's jets was already
there on the ground in Jibooty, so that's what we
were looking for. But then on the evening of July fifth,
about two days later, DHS announced that it was done.
They had removed the detainees to Sausudan via a military
(03:50):
flight earlier that day. And I have gone over the
air traffic data for that region six times on adsp Exchange,
and I haven't been able to spot this military flight.
And granted, Djibouti is a real ADSB dead zone, but
Juba isn't. Juba actually has quite good coverage, and you know,
(04:11):
Addis Ababa also has very good coverage which they would
have had to fly over. So it's clear to me
that this military flight, if it happened as DHS claims,
probably flew the entire trip with its transponder turned off,
which is something that the military can do, but it's
not standard.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
I think people would be.
Speaker 5 (04:33):
Surprised how rare actually it is for military flights to
do that, unless they're going on a combat or spy mission.
Most military aircraft fly with their transponders on. So if
you think about the Iran air strikes a couple of
weeks ago, the week before the air strikes, there were
thirty two Globe Masters and Strata tankers that flew from
(04:55):
the US to bases in Europe in a single night. That,
like every av geek was like whoa you know, and
we knew that that happened because they flew with their
transponders on, even though it made it really obvious that
some kind of military operation was probably imminent.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
And then even during the.
Speaker 5 (05:13):
Air strikes, these aircraft would take off from Europe with
their transponders on, turn them off over the Mediterranean when
they were heading east, do whatever.
Speaker 3 (05:22):
They were doing, and then turn them back on when
they were headed back toward Europe.
Speaker 5 (05:27):
So even part of the combat mission, they still have
their transponders on. Yeah, So the fact that the flight
to Sasudan, which was not a combat or a spy mission,
appears to have flown the entire trip with its transponder
off is quite notable to me. And you know, I
see it as an extension of ISIS tactics on the
(05:48):
ground where they are covering their faces and refusing to
identify themselves. But I'm, you know, kind of surprised that
they got the military to go along with that.
Speaker 4 (05:58):
Yeah, if it was really a military flight, right, like
it could be something kind of military adjacent like some
DHS or other government aircraft.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
Right, I mean, we don't know.
Speaker 5 (06:12):
Yeah, they said it happened by a military flight on
this date, but we don't know.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
Yeah, So on July.
Speaker 5 (06:19):
Eighth, the spokesperson for the South Sudanese government told the
AP that the men were there and that they were
quote under the care of the relevant authorities who are
screening them and ensuring their safety and well being. We
have no idea what that means. Does that mean they're
in prison there? Does that mean that they are, you know,
going to be sent to their countries of origin as
(06:41):
they claimed at one point? We have no idea, yeah,
And then just a few minutes ago we're recording this.
On Beciel day, July fourteenth, the same plane that first
took these men to Djibouti was scheduled to take off
from El Paso for Shannon Airport in Ireland. Once again,
where it goes after that, Well, you might know by
(07:02):
the time you hear this, but right now it's anyone's guess.
Speaker 4 (07:05):
Yeah, it's baffling, like some of this stuff, like the
deportations to or no deportations, like rendition to South Sudan.
Right Like even Homan, who's the Trump's quote unquote borders
are or immigrations are, seems to be asserting that he
has no idea what happened to them once they've landed there,
Like right, at one point they suggested that they didn't
(07:26):
think they would be detained, but like do they just
let them out into the street in I mean, when
people are released from custody in the United States, that's
exactly what they do, right, they let them out into
the street. Like, Yeah, a lot of volunteers here in
San Diego have spent a lot of time, you know,
because often people are released without Sometimes they're released without
religious garments, which are very important to them. Often they're
(07:48):
released without any sort of orientation. Where are they How
do they get where they're going? Can they afford a flight?
You know, how do they book a flight? Do they
have the relevant documents to book a flight? It's a
complete clusterfug And that's it in the US.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Right, And I mean think about it.
Speaker 5 (08:04):
If you're like Laoshian or Vietnamese man in your fifties
or sixties, which a lot of these men are older gentlemen,
and you're what just like led out into the streets
of Juba, which is, you know, a big city.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
But there's a lot of instability in this country. Like
what are you gonna do? It's a big thinker like
what you know, Yeah, you're very vulnerable, very vulnerable, and you.
Speaker 4 (08:29):
Probably don't have any material resources. It's not that you
can get your credit card, take out much of money
and fly somewhere else. Nor do these people really have
in many cases anywhere to go, right, Like, the reason
that they're being taken to third countries is generally that
they have withholding of removal or convention against torture claims
that they can't.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
Be removed to their home countries.
Speaker 4 (08:49):
Since we recorded this, we have found out that people
in South Sudan are being detained. According to an outlet
called The Daily with your South Sudanese outlet, those people
are incarcerated in South Suda.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
Like the man for Me and Mar.
Speaker 5 (09:04):
You know, they're arguing that, you know, I suppose, oh,
we can't send him to me and Mar, But if
you're going to send him to another place where he's
likely to be tortured, is it really any different? And
also they are sending people to me and Mar. They
have reported people to Me and Marr in the last
few months, as you James have reported.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 4 (09:22):
They've sent more than a dozen people to Memr and
seem to be continuing, at least they have not said
they will stop. And most of those people were directly
detained by military intelligence and MEMMA when they landed, So
those people will have been tortured. And yeah, this this
other person who had withholding it from removal doesn't.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Mean that he will not be tortured.
Speaker 4 (09:44):
I mean, if we look at like migrants making the
journey to the United States are routinely kidnapped, tortured, ransom killed,
sexually assaulted. I've heard of all of these firsthand. I
don't suspect it will be any different. You know, once
they're outside the US again, extremely vulnerable. And we saw
this a lot in title forty two, when the Trump
administration and the Biden administration would just boot people back
(10:06):
over the border. Often they would do lateral transfers, so
you enter in the San Diego sector, they drop you
in the Laredo sector or somewhere further east. And those
people that have zero network right and often don't speak
Spanish and are extremely vulnerable. It's pretty much the worst
case outcome here.
Speaker 5 (10:25):
Well, unfortunately, in the next part, I'm about to tell
you about how all of that is about to increase exponentially.
Speaker 4 (10:31):
Yeah, talking of things that are increasing, actually increasing. We
still just have to do two advertisements every show, so
we'll get me one of them now, all right, we
are back.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
I hope you enjoyed those adverts here.
Speaker 4 (10:46):
We had some new ones for like a religiously sansient gold,
which I'm very exciting about. This is one thing Jesus loved.
It was money change. There's a lot of stuff in
the Bible about that.
Speaker 3 (10:58):
I think silvers actually, right.
Speaker 4 (11:01):
Yeah, I think big precious metals. Guy, love to see
currency speculation. Okay, let's talk about Djibouti, a place where
the United States has a big base that it is
using for housing people that it's renditioning to other countries.
Speaker 3 (11:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (11:19):
So when we first recorded this, we were just doing
a Djibouti update about the men who were renditioned to
South Sudan, and we knew at the time that there
was another Journey Aviation jet about to take off. And
now we know what happened with that flight. It landed
(11:39):
again in Djibouti, and two days later DHS announced that
it had renditioned five more people to the country of Swatini,
which I've been to. I reported there in twenty eleven,
I spoke to teachers who were starving because they hadn't
been paid for eight months by the king, who you
know is the last absolute monarch in Africa. And you know,
(12:03):
the teachers that I spoke to were terrified to disappear
into the prisons that these five men have now been
renditioned to. I worked with another independent journalist named Alex Plank,
and we published a story using OSIN to prove that
that journey flight to Djibouti was carrying the five men
(12:26):
and from there they were transported by a C seventeen
US military you know, huge aircraft that flew with its
transponders off from Djibouti to Swatini to deliver these men.
Speaker 4 (12:40):
Seems like that is the emerging standard for these military
deportation flights, right at least for the final leg.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
Yeah, so the last week has been pretty crazy.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (12:52):
An Omni seven sixty seven did a removal flight to
a couple places in Africa, and at least two and
perhaps three large military jets also did removal flights from
the United States, landing in Gemo just for fun, and
landing in different countries in Africa. Now, the interesting thing
(13:16):
about that and about journey is that until this past week,
Africa and Central Asia have really been the purview of
this other ice air operator that's really gone under the radar,
but I think it's possible might be doing some things
(13:38):
that are even more sinister than your usual ice air flights.
So this company is called Aircraft Transport Service. They are
Florida base, but they are now all of their aircraft
are based in Mesa, Arizona, which is an ICE hub,
and they're at the end of their five year contracting
(14:00):
these special high risk removals to dangerous areas or with
you know, allegedly dangerous migrant passengers. Their flights really began
to spike in mid February up until July fourth. They
have five private jets that they lease from their owners
(14:24):
to operate these flights. And I've looked at all of
their flights and it's not clear if they are doing
any flights that aren't ICE, but certainly at least most
of their business is ICE. And so I've tracked nineteen
(14:45):
different trips, different ice removal trips that they've done since
February eighteenth, and most of these have gone to countries
in Africa, and that really began to surge around April
twenty ninth, And what I've noticed is that on June
(15:07):
twenty six, New York Times published a story about, you know,
the Trump administration is pressuring all of these countries to
accept more of these third country removals, and there's a
lot of overlap between that list of countries and the
countries that ATS has been landing in for the last
(15:29):
four months. There is a pair of flights in particular
that I find pretty alarming. They went out within thirty
minutes of each other on May twentieth, which was the
same day that the flight to Djibouti, when the flight
that was supposed to go to Sausudan and these flights,
(15:54):
so these flights started doing their usual ice removal route,
which is, you know, MESA, maybe we stop in Fort
Worth to pick up more migrants, then you do a
fuel stop in San Juan, you do another fuel stop
in Senegal, and then you go wherever you're going to
go in West Africa. These flights, thirty minutes apart from
(16:16):
each other, flew directly from San Juan to Mauritanium and
we're on the ground for thirty minutes, and then from
there flew to Senegal. You know, I can't prove anything
because ICE does not communicate about its air operations at all,
(16:36):
you know, unless they feel like it because they want
to brag about it, or because you know, they're ordered
to bite courts. These flights to me seem particularly alarming
as possible flights where there could have been third country
removals that we don't even know about. And Marissa Cavas,
she's an independent reporter who has a site called the
(16:59):
Handbass Get. At the end of April, she reported that
there was a third country removal that hasn't gotten a
lot of attention, and I don't know why, because it's
really messed up. A third country removal of an Iraqi
man to Rwanda, which happened on April fourth, after he
legally migrated to the US. He was accused of murder
(17:20):
in Iraq. There's incontroversial evidence proving that he did not
commit this crime. He wasn't even in Iraq when it happened,
but the Biden administration continued with his removal. And because
he couldn't go back to Iraq because he would have
been executed, they had been looking for a safe third
(17:42):
country for him. They did not finish that when they
handed the keys over to the Trump administration. So on
April fourth, he was removed to Rwanda. And he has
a lot of media contacts and no one has heard
from him. I have not seen a report him, you know.
I tried to contact his family, was unsuccessful. I contacted
(18:05):
his attorney and didn't hear back. So ATS operated a flight.
It began at about eleven thirty on April second to
this Fort Worth Airport that's right next to an ICED
attention center San Juan, Senegal, and then landed in Nairobi.
(18:25):
Now Nairobi is not Kigali in Rwanda, but they're only
about an hour apart, and if you look at the
flight data, the aircraft at that point had been operating
for about twenty three hours straight, which is stretching the
boundaries of legality, even if you.
Speaker 3 (18:42):
Have two crews. So there's a lot of.
Speaker 5 (18:45):
Reasons why ICE might have taken him to Nairobi and
then done something else for the last leg I think
the most likely explanation is that the crew had to
rest and I decided that they didn't want to wait,
So they may have chartered a local puddle jumper to
(19:05):
take them, you know, over the lake to Kika.
Speaker 4 (19:09):
It's pretty common, I think to when I've flow into Kikali.
I think I've stopped in Kinshasa and Nairobi. I don't
know if it's a big planes can't land there. It's
just the kind of the way it works. Fewer people
are flying to Kigali directly from the USO Europe than
are going to places like King Shasta, Nairobi, so it
might just be that they don't do direct flights. But yeah,
I don't think I've ever done a direct big plane
(19:32):
flight right.
Speaker 5 (19:33):
It seems that the only aircraft going in and out
of there are going to Nairobi and Kampala, and from
there you connect somewhere else.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
It's a pretty small airport, so.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
So yeah, that's ATS.
Speaker 5 (19:45):
They've kind of flown under the radar because global x
is doing so much more in terms of numbers. But
I think it's quite possible that ATS's mission for the
past few months has been to sort of pilot program
small amounts of third country removals to these different countries,
(20:08):
just like omar Amin. Because after omar Amin was sent
to Rwanda, the State Department sent a cable that Mrsakabas
obtained saying, oh man, it totally worked. This is great.
Let's send ten more people.
Speaker 4 (20:21):
At a cost to one hundred thousand per head, right
right again, maybe suggesting carcerational one hundred grand is going
to cover more than your paperwork, you know.
Speaker 5 (20:32):
Right, And just to be clear about, you know, the
cost all of these military flights that have been flying
around Africa now doing isis dirty work.
Speaker 3 (20:42):
Those cost about.
Speaker 5 (20:43):
Twenty eight five hundred dollars an hour to operate, and
of course cost is the least important thing here. But
my god, you know, for an administration that claims to
care about government.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
Waste, yeah, this is ridiculous.
Speaker 4 (21:00):
We don't know how much they're paying people in South
Sudan or the monarchy of a Swatini. We don't know
what they're sort of bribing these people to accept. I
just checked with Mauritania. It's currently a Level three State
Department travel warning telling people to reconsider travel due to
terrorism and crime.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
That's why we're sending people.
Speaker 4 (21:18):
I have explained the many and varied human rights abuses
that have happened in Mauritania on the show before, so
you can go back and listen to other episodes. Do
you want to want to hear about those hundreds of Mauritanians,
if not thousands, entered the United States in the tail
end of the Bid administration. I'm thinking like it was
(21:40):
late summer of twenty twenty three when I recall seeing
many of them. Just in my workdown at the border,
we often get very hot, like September's octobers in southern California,
and a few times I've come across Mauritanian people who
were in really bad shape just during those sort of
hot months, and it's sort of stuck with me that,
like some of the stories they had were horrific treat
(22:03):
and I'm sure that it's some of those people who
are now being sent back and just the fact that
they tried to leave will have made things even worse
for them.
Speaker 5 (22:11):
So yeah, I mean, these flights going to Mauritania, which
includes one of the military flights last week, you know,
slavery still exists in Mauritania. There's a minimum of ninety
thousand people there who are still enslaved. That's the low
end of the estimates. And you know, it's been illegal
(22:32):
since nineteen eighty one, but the practice is really protected
by a culture of secrecy, not just among Mauritanian elites,
but the multinational corporations who are embedded there and will
just kind of look the other way while they're you know,
extract natural resources with people in the minds that like
(22:53):
they're not really going to check if they're enslaved or not. So,
you know, maybe we're doing third country deportations and removals there.
Maybe we're just sending Mauretanians back to a really horrible place.
Speaker 4 (23:07):
Yeah, and it doesn't humanly matter, right, We're sending people
back to a place where they are very likely to
be tortured, to be as you say, like faust, to
unfree labor, to be incarcerated without having committed a crime.
Doesn't really matter whether people want.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
It's fucked.
Speaker 4 (23:23):
The embassy doesn't let us people drive around Mauritania at night,
have to be in the capital, They can only walk
in certain places. Give an idea of like how this
double standard is applied. Talking of multinational corporations, I would.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Love to hear from. So let's do that now.
Speaker 4 (23:45):
All right, we are back and we were talking about
the safety of private jets. Some of these flights have
some pretty horrific safety practices, right, and this, like when
you mentioned this, it instantly reminded me of a thing
that I have had no luck trying to sell stories
on for four years. It is standard practice for I
(24:07):
and CVP to transport children, children in their custody without
proper child seats or other restraints, right, which is you know,
to my knowledge, you can get a ticket for that
in some states. Right, Like if you're driving a child,
like you put a little two year old in the
seat without a like a child seat that they have
to have, Like, rightfully, you're endangering that person's life. But
(24:31):
apparently our government's doing it every day.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
Yeah, I mean the law doesn't apply to the upholders
of the law, right, right.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
Yeah, many such cases.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
Many such cases which I'm about to explain more.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Yeah, let's learn some more.
Speaker 5 (24:43):
So these ice flights, you know, most of these are
happening on larger jets A three twenties, owing seven thirty
sevens inside the cabin. REPUBLICA has done some really good
reporting on this from April. There's another outlet called Capitol
and Maine that also did a terrific story in twenty
twenty one, and the University of Washington also has a
(25:05):
lot of research and information on what it's like inside
the cabin of these planes. And you know, as a
former flight attendant, I find it fucking disgusting and really unsafe.
Flight attendants on these flights are not allowed to look
at or speak to migrant passengers. They aren't allowed to
(25:25):
serve them food or water. All of the migrants on
these flights are shackled wrist to ankles, and some of them,
if they're allowed or distressed or just annoying, the ice
guards are wrapped in restraint blankets and harnesses and have
hoods put over their faces. Just this morning, JJ and DC,
(25:46):
one of the ice air trackers on Blue Sky, posted
a video of a migrant passenger in a hood being
loaded onto Avello Jet in Seattle and he's being pushed
by three ice guards and falls to the ground face
first and then they just sort of man handle him
back up the stairs.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (26:06):
So, you know, as a former flight attendant, I just
want to say, in the event of an emergency, how
the fuck is a flight attendant supposed to evacuate the
passengers in ninety seconds when their seat belts are getting
tangled in their handcuffs? And all they can do is
shuffle down the aisle when they can't see because they
have a hood over their head. If the cabin loses pressure,
(26:29):
how can they reach up for their oxygen masks when
their handcuffs are attached by a chain to their leg irons.
How are they going to get the mask on themselves
if they're wearing a hood? How are they going to
get their life fests on when they can't reach back
to wrap the strap around their waists? And these emergencies
are not theoretical. We know from court filings that between
(26:53):
twenty fourteen and twenty twenty one there were six emergency
evacuations of Ice air flights. Of those incidents, the evacuation
times of only two are known, and they took two
and a half minutes and seven minutes. And to be clear,
we only know about those evacuations because of lawsuits. So
there may very well have been more evacuations since twenty
(27:15):
twenty one and we just don't know about it.
Speaker 4 (27:17):
Yeah, I mean it's likely right, like the Biden administration
did it, especially when they were deporting Haitian people, like
huge numbers of flights.
Speaker 5 (27:26):
Right until May and June September twenty one, when Biden
did the Haitian mass deportation. That was the highest amount
of deportations that witness at the border has recorded.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (27:39):
That was also the last time I was able to
write about Biden's administration policy NBC. I think I crossed
the line saying something mean about Uncle Joe.
Speaker 3 (27:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (27:52):
Yeah, but we should be very clip. This has been
a bipartisan thing.
Speaker 3 (27:56):
Oh yes, oh yes.
Speaker 5 (27:57):
So on each of these flights there is generally one
or two ICE officials and at least fifteen ICE contracted guards.
Migrant passengers have reported being verbally, physically, and sexually abused
by these guards, and flight attendants on board have no
power to stop them. In twenty seventeen, ninety two migrant
(28:19):
passengers traveling from the US to Ethiopia were left shackled
on a plane in the car Senegal for twenty three
hours because the crew timed out. They were kicked, dragged,
tied up, threatened by ICE guards, and when the labs
filled up, they soiled themselves. Flight attendants report that the
(28:42):
guards on these flights regularly ignore their safety commands and
will even you know, try and narc on them. They'll
complain to the flight attendant's supervisors at their airlines when
they're asking people to follow federal aviation regulations, it's like
everyone else in America has to do. But when flight
(29:03):
attendants have complained to the FAA about this, the FAA
defers to ice. You know, this is not just a
matter of like it's disrespectful, two dangerous flight attendants. You know,
this is extremely dangerous. And one of the most important
parts of aviation safety is something called Crew resource management
(29:24):
or CRM. This is something that all pilots and flight
attendants are trained in every year and have to retrain
every year, and basically CRM boils down to pilots need
to listen to the flight attendants about safety, and flight
attendants are trained to be assertive with the pilots about safety.
This was developed after a notorious incident in the nineteen
(29:46):
seventies where a plane was on the ground, it was
filling up with smoke, and the pilot ignored flight attendants
please to evacuate, you know, just for some like garden
variety sexism probably, and everyone on board died of smoke inhalation,
two hundred and eighty people. So after that, crews are
trained every year to really flatten the hierarchies. You know,
(30:08):
I think people think like, oh, the captain has four
epaulets and the first officer has three, and you know,
oh hierarchy. No air crews are actually very like the
hierarchies are flattened intentionally on purpose. They train to flatten
it across job titles, across gender, education, racial cultural divides,
(30:28):
because it is safer to fly that way. When everyone
feels that, you know, they have a stake in safety
and they'll be heard if they say something about safety,
everyone else is safer. So if you've got these ICE
guards stepping into the middle of that, throwing their weight around,
(30:50):
overruling flight attendants and pilots, and the FAA isn't backing
them up, you have confusion about who's in power on board,
you have a total breakdow on a CRM, and so
beyond just like people physically being able to get off
of the planes, this is so unsafe to have this
kind of environment with these guards. So the last incident
(31:14):
I want to talk about was in June seventeen. To me,
this is the scariest one of all of the safety incidents.
There was an ice Air emergency. This flight landed it
was filling up with smoke. This is almost just like
the plane in the seventies the flight attendants told the
pilots to evacuate, and the pilots ignored them. A bunch
(31:35):
of people on board were hospitalized. We don't know how
many or who, but frankly, everyone on board could have
died from smoke inhalation very easily. And I really think
you can point to the presence of the ICE guards
here as a big factor in the failure to evacuate.
That is not how pilots are trained. So again, yeah,
(31:58):
if you're a flight attendant for pilot and you do
not want your airline to contract with ICE, now is
the time to tell them. Tell your union help flight
attendants for Global X and the Vello get jobs somewhere else. Ye,
you know, do whatever you can to slow this down,
because it is all about to increase if they get
their way.
Speaker 4 (32:19):
Yeah, jeez, that is fucking bleak. Yeah, yeah, you said
it's going to get bigger. Like let's talk about that,
Like can you kind of zoom out and explain Ice
Air to us, and like we've talked about these small
flights a lot, but like that's not the bulk of
the flights they do right right.
Speaker 5 (32:36):
So ice Air right now has twelve large jets, you know,
a three twenty seven thirty sevens chartered from different airlines
that they're using for their deportations, and then these private
jets are you know, used less for these smaller, high
risk deportations. They're running like thirty thirty five flights a
day at this point. So May twentieth turned out to
(32:59):
be like kind of a big day for is air
because that was the Djibouti flight. That was when ATS
started using the Tyson callsign. It's also the day that
the larger operation really just searched in activity. And you know,
the other flight trackers tell me that ice Air used
to take weekends and holidays off and they don't do
(33:20):
that anymore. They were deporting people on juneteenth and July fourth.
In May, ice operated a record number of flights, which
was at least one thousand and eighty three flights that
flight trackers recorded, one hundred and ninety of which were
removal flights and then the rest are like these internal
(33:40):
shuffle flights between different ice attention centers and return trips.
And then in June they set a record again with
one hundred and eighty seven flights, of which two hundred
and nine were removal flights. All of this data is
a witness at the border dot org and it's kept
by Tom Cartwright, who is a real hero. He has
(34:02):
been tracking flights basically by himself for five and a
half years and he publishes very detailed monthly reports. And yeah,
as you said earlier, you know he's been tracking this
through the Biden administration too, which is how we know that,
you know, the Trump deportation machine from the first term,
(34:23):
you know, Biden didn't really slow it down that much,
and now Trump is picking up the reins again and
surging it again. So the airlines right now that are
flying these larger removal flights are Global X also called
Global Crossing Airlines, a Vellow Airlines, Eastern Air and on
(34:44):
the international and except for ATS, who you know I
talked about earlier, has their own contract, all of these
carriers who fly for ICE are subcontracted through a flight
broker called CSI Aviation. CSI Aviation signed a five year
contract with the Biden administration last year that has been
(35:07):
paused because of a lawsuit from a rival flight broker
that wanted that contract. So since late February, CSI has
been brokering these flights on a six month no bid
contract that started at one hundred and twenty eight million
dollars and was quickly doubled and then went up to
two hundred and seventy four million, and then just a
(35:28):
couple of days ago, I don't think anyone else has
reported this, it was raised again to three hundred and
thirty nine million dollars.
Speaker 3 (35:34):
So they've got about sixty.
Speaker 5 (35:35):
Million dollars left on this contract for the next six weeks,
and that's before the huge windfall and funding that I
just got from Trump's big beautiful bill. The administration has
said it once to triple deportations, and right now they
just don't have the aircraft for that. And DHS On
(35:57):
Twitter and Instagram a couple of days ago they post
I said this really ghoulish meme that said fire up
the deportation planes, and there was like a skeleton lifting
weights with a caption that said my body is a
machine that turns ICE funding into mass deportations.
Speaker 3 (36:16):
So that's gross.
Speaker 4 (36:18):
Yeah, that was really weird. They've been doing a lot
of this like post stuff.
Speaker 5 (36:23):
Right, Like I said, they only have twelve jets right now.
Then they're flying those capacity, so they can't triple deportations
unless they start bringing in more airlines.
Speaker 3 (36:34):
So the other day.
Speaker 5 (36:35):
I posted a call to action to flight attendants and
to flight attendant unions saying, you know, if you don't
want your airline to do these flights, now is the
time to tell them.
Speaker 4 (36:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (36:46):
CSI Aviation is.
Speaker 5 (36:47):
Run by a man named Alan Way and his daughter,
Deborah Mastis. Alan Way is the former chair of the
New Mexico Republican Party. He's hosted a bunch of Trump
rallies over the years. He ran unsuccessfully for Senate and
governor of New Mexico in the past on an anti
immigrant platform, which local media at the time pointed out,
(37:11):
you know, well, you're mostly doing deportation flights, so that
would really be enriching yourself. His daughter, Deborah Masis, was
one of the fake electors in New Mexico during the.
Speaker 3 (37:22):
Twenty twenty election.
Speaker 2 (37:23):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (37:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (37:25):
She was subpoenut by the House committee investigating the January
sixth insurrection, and the New Mexico State Attorney General's office
investigated her. Eventually, they're not press charges because she and
the other fake electors claimed they didn't know they're fake
certifications were going to be used for anything illegal. And
(37:46):
the Project on Government Oversight has some pretty good reporting
on CSI aviation if you want to see.
Speaker 4 (37:51):
That, Yeah, yeah, we'll put it in the show notes.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
Like, yeah, insane.
Speaker 4 (37:57):
This whole thing is just like completely I would watch
or look at some of the footage from inside deportation
flights because it is inhumane.
Speaker 3 (38:06):
It's yeah.
Speaker 5 (38:08):
I mean, I hope that any flight attendants who are
forced to work these flights can find a way to quit.
But if they can't quit for financial reasons, because all
of these people are, you know, very underpaid, you know,
I hope that they can provide us with more information
(38:28):
about what is going on inside these flights.
Speaker 4 (38:31):
Yeah, definitely that will be at least give people a
chance to see what their tax dollars are being spent on.
Speaker 3 (38:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (38:37):
I mean, one of the things that I've been thinking about,
you know, terrorism is like a really loaded word that
gets misused a lot against black and brown people, But
I think that's the right word for all of these
removals because they're random, they're violent, they're targeting civilians for
political purpose, and their design to frighten the larger population
(39:02):
potential victims. Right, the Trump administration is trying to scare
all undocumented immigrants and anyone adjacent to them, since you know,
a lot of citizens are being arrested too.
Speaker 4 (39:15):
Yeah, or green cardholders, people with buckets of documents are
being deported a rendition right now.
Speaker 5 (39:21):
And they're saying, you know, they're trying to make them
so scared that if they don't self deport they could
end up in South Sudan, they could end up in Mauritania.
You know, that's what this policy is designed to do,
is to terrorize the people of this country.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
Yeah. Absolutely, it's pretty bleak.
Speaker 4 (39:42):
We have an encrypted email address, so if you are
I guess a deportation flight attendant and you would like
to talk to someone, I can pass it on to
give you. In two you might have your an encrypted
email address and you can plug.
Speaker 2 (39:56):
It if you do.
Speaker 3 (39:57):
Yeah, you can definitely leak to me on signal.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
Okay, yeah. Nice.
Speaker 4 (40:00):
We have cool zone tips at ProtonMail dot com or
cool zone tips at proton dot me. I believe they
both work. It's only encrypted if the address that it's
sent from is also encrypted, So in the symptance. You
would need a proton mail or you can cook up
your own encryption. Yeah, that would be the way to
get in touch if you want to get in touch this. Yeah,
(40:24):
this just fucking sucks, like and there's going to be
so much more of it in the next couple of
years with this budget, Like, this is going to become
what it already isn't everyday thing.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
This is going to become even more common.
Speaker 6 (40:36):
I know.
Speaker 4 (40:36):
They're also like they're doing some weird shuffle to avoid
sanctions with Venezuelan airlines.
Speaker 5 (40:41):
Right, yeah, they fly I believe it is, to Honduras
and then Venezuela flies their own plane to Honduras to
pick them up.
Speaker 4 (40:51):
Right, yeah cool, I'm sure that's you have a great
time when they get better Venezuela and Venezuela is also
offering humanitarian flights for its citizens stuck in Mexico right now. So, like,
if people want to do something about this, what can
they do?
Speaker 5 (41:06):
The first thing you can do is boycott Avello Airlines.
They are commercial airlines, so don't fly with them. You
can write to the airlines you use regularly right now
and tell them that if they are considering contracting with
Ice not to that you will boycott them too. You
can complain to the FAA about the safety issues on
(41:27):
these flights. I doubt that they'll do anything, but I
think there's value in saying something anyway. If you have
contacts in aviation or in any of the countries that
these people are being sent to, and you find something out,
you can leak to me on signal. And if you
work in aviation, tell your airline and your union right
now that you are not going to operate these flights.
(41:50):
And if you want to get started tracking flights yourself.
We need a lot of help, especially in the overnight hours.
A good first step is to go to Globe dot
adsb exchange dot com and in the general search window
type Tyson.
Speaker 4 (42:07):
You've been doing really, really great reporting on this, and
I'm sure people want to continue to follow it. It
is a shame that other outlets are not running it.
Speaker 3 (42:16):
But God bless them.
Speaker 2 (42:17):
Yeah, just try.
Speaker 5 (42:21):
Out there if you want to know what James is
talking about. There's a brief explanation at the end of
one of my stories that I've written recently at hard
g History dot ghost dot io. I have a couple
stories there about the recent flights to Africa, and you
can read the bottom and you'll find out what James
is talking about.
Speaker 4 (42:40):
Yeah, it's a little teaser for you, right, go get
the t Yeah.
Speaker 2 (42:48):
Okay, thank you for joining us. I'm sure we'll hear
from you again soon.
Speaker 3 (42:52):
Thank you, James.
Speaker 6 (42:56):
It Could Happen Here is a production of pool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from pools Zon Media, visit our website
foolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
now find sources for It Could Happen Here, listed directly
in episode descriptions.
Speaker 3 (43:12):
Thanks for listening.
Also media, Hi everyone, and welcome to it could happen here.
We are joined once again by Gillian Brockel, who is
once again going to talk to us about the terrible
actually world of deportation flights, how we can track them,
what we can learn from following them, and what it
(00:22):
tells us about the US's massive deportation regimes.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Welcome back, Thanks for joining.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
Us, Thank you for having me, James, I appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
You're welcome.
Speaker 4 (00:31):
All right, let's get going here this week, got a
lot to go and there's been a lot of planes supporting.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
People deporting and removing.
Speaker 5 (00:37):
So we've really stopped saying deporting because we don't know
who hasn't gotten due process and who does and does
not actually belong to the country they're being sent to.
Speaker 4 (00:50):
Yeah, in many cases, it's more like what we saw
in the Extraordinary Rendition, very much so kind of war
and terry. I think that's pretty a better way.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
To describe it. Yeah, let's start out. Suppose was Djibouti.
Speaker 5 (01:01):
Yeah, so the eight men that were sent to Djibouti,
that's the flight I first tracked on May twentieth. They
were taken on a gulf Stream five operated by journey
aviation from Harling in Texas to Shannon Airport in Ireland,
and I called the cops in Ireland to try and stop.
(01:22):
It didn't work, and then they went to a US
military base in Djibouti, where judge had ordered them to
remain while he considered their case. So those men are
now in South Sudan, where Trump wanted to send them.
They were held in Jibouti for six weeks. We know
from court filings that they were held inside a shipping
(01:44):
container in a far corner of the base, near a
burn pit where the trash for the base was burned,
and that smoke from this pit was getting into the
shipping container through the events and causing the men and
the ice Gars to cough and feel ill. There was
also an independent journalist named Alex Planck who got a
(02:08):
photo from a source on the base showing one of
the detainees shackled at the ankles and being escorted by
an ice guard to the restroom because the shipping container
did not have its own restroom. And he said that
most of the members of the military at the base
didn't even know that they were there. And you know
(02:29):
this base is generally considered like one of the worst
assignments to get when you're in the military. Plank said
he talked to a defense contractor who said that they
stopped sending their employees to that base.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
Because it was just too terrible.
Speaker 5 (02:46):
So during the six week period, I and other flight
trackers we tracked five trips by round trip trips by
Journey Aviation jets to and from their base in Miami
and Djibouti, all traveling through Shannon. Presumably these were flights
that were swapping out ICE guards, but we really don't
(03:07):
know because ICE does not provide any information about its
air operations. Everything we know is through court filings and
through open source intelligence like the ADSP Exchange. Then on
July third, the Supreme Court cleared the way for these
third country removals, and this one specifically to South Sudan.
(03:29):
All of US flight trekkers were watching the airspace really closely,
and we knew that one of Journey's jets was already
there on the ground in Jibooty, so that's what we
were looking for. But then on the evening of July fifth,
about two days later, DHS announced that it was done.
They had removed the detainees to Sausudan via a military
(03:50):
flight earlier that day. And I have gone over the
air traffic data for that region six times on adsp Exchange,
and I haven't been able to spot this military flight.
And granted, Djibouti is a real ADSB dead zone, but
Juba isn't. Juba actually has quite good coverage, and you know,
(04:11):
Addis Ababa also has very good coverage which they would
have had to fly over. So it's clear to me
that this military flight, if it happened as DHS claims,
probably flew the entire trip with its transponder turned off,
which is something that the military can do, but it's
not standard.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
I think people would be.
Speaker 5 (04:33):
Surprised how rare actually it is for military flights to
do that, unless they're going on a combat or spy mission.
Most military aircraft fly with their transponders on. So if
you think about the Iran air strikes a couple of
weeks ago, the week before the air strikes, there were
thirty two Globe Masters and Strata tankers that flew from
(04:55):
the US to bases in Europe in a single night. That,
like every av geek was like whoa you know, and
we knew that that happened because they flew with their
transponders on, even though it made it really obvious that
some kind of military operation was probably imminent.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
And then even during the.
Speaker 5 (05:13):
Air strikes, these aircraft would take off from Europe with
their transponders on, turn them off over the Mediterranean when
they were heading east, do whatever.
Speaker 3 (05:22):
They were doing, and then turn them back on when
they were headed back toward Europe.
Speaker 5 (05:27):
So even part of the combat mission, they still have
their transponders on. Yeah, So the fact that the flight
to Sasudan, which was not a combat or a spy mission,
appears to have flown the entire trip with its transponder
off is quite notable to me. And you know, I
see it as an extension of ISIS tactics on the
(05:48):
ground where they are covering their faces and refusing to
identify themselves. But I'm, you know, kind of surprised that
they got the military to go along with that.
Speaker 4 (05:58):
Yeah, if it was really a military flight, right, like
it could be something kind of military adjacent like some
DHS or other government aircraft.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
Right, I mean, we don't know.
Speaker 5 (06:12):
Yeah, they said it happened by a military flight on
this date, but we don't know.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
Yeah, So on July.
Speaker 5 (06:19):
Eighth, the spokesperson for the South Sudanese government told the
AP that the men were there and that they were
quote under the care of the relevant authorities who are
screening them and ensuring their safety and well being. We
have no idea what that means. Does that mean they're
in prison there? Does that mean that they are, you know,
going to be sent to their countries of origin as
(06:41):
they claimed at one point? We have no idea, yeah,
And then just a few minutes ago we're recording this.
On Beciel day, July fourteenth, the same plane that first
took these men to Djibouti was scheduled to take off
from El Paso for Shannon Airport in Ireland. Once again,
where it goes after that, Well, you might know by
(07:02):
the time you hear this, but right now it's anyone's guess.
Speaker 4 (07:05):
Yeah, it's baffling, like some of this stuff, like the
deportations to or no deportations, like rendition to South Sudan.
Right Like even Homan, who's the Trump's quote unquote borders
are or immigrations are, seems to be asserting that he
has no idea what happened to them once they've landed there,
Like right, at one point they suggested that they didn't
(07:26):
think they would be detained, but like do they just
let them out into the street in I mean, when
people are released from custody in the United States, that's
exactly what they do, right, they let them out into
the street. Like, Yeah, a lot of volunteers here in
San Diego have spent a lot of time, you know,
because often people are released without Sometimes they're released without
religious garments, which are very important to them. Often they're
(07:48):
released without any sort of orientation. Where are they How
do they get where they're going? Can they afford a flight?
You know, how do they book a flight? Do they
have the relevant documents to book a flight? It's a
complete clusterfug And that's it in the US.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Right, And I mean think about it.
Speaker 5 (08:04):
If you're like Laoshian or Vietnamese man in your fifties
or sixties, which a lot of these men are older gentlemen,
and you're what just like led out into the streets
of Juba, which is, you know, a big city.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
But there's a lot of instability in this country. Like
what are you gonna do? It's a big thinker like
what you know, Yeah, you're very vulnerable, very vulnerable, and you.
Speaker 4 (08:29):
Probably don't have any material resources. It's not that you
can get your credit card, take out much of money
and fly somewhere else. Nor do these people really have
in many cases anywhere to go, right, Like, the reason
that they're being taken to third countries is generally that
they have withholding of removal or convention against torture claims
that they can't.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
Be removed to their home countries.
Speaker 4 (08:49):
Since we recorded this, we have found out that people
in South Sudan are being detained. According to an outlet
called The Daily with your South Sudanese outlet, those people
are incarcerated in South Suda.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
Like the man for Me and Mar.
Speaker 5 (09:04):
You know, they're arguing that, you know, I suppose, oh,
we can't send him to me and Mar, But if
you're going to send him to another place where he's
likely to be tortured, is it really any different? And
also they are sending people to me and Mar. They
have reported people to Me and Marr in the last
few months, as you James have reported.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 4 (09:22):
They've sent more than a dozen people to Memr and
seem to be continuing, at least they have not said
they will stop. And most of those people were directly
detained by military intelligence and MEMMA when they landed, So
those people will have been tortured. And yeah, this this
other person who had withholding it from removal doesn't.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Mean that he will not be tortured.
Speaker 4 (09:44):
I mean, if we look at like migrants making the
journey to the United States are routinely kidnapped, tortured, ransom killed,
sexually assaulted. I've heard of all of these firsthand. I
don't suspect it will be any different. You know, once
they're outside the US again, extremely vulnerable. And we saw
this a lot in title forty two, when the Trump
administration and the Biden administration would just boot people back
(10:06):
over the border. Often they would do lateral transfers, so
you enter in the San Diego sector, they drop you
in the Laredo sector or somewhere further east. And those
people that have zero network right and often don't speak
Spanish and are extremely vulnerable. It's pretty much the worst
case outcome here.
Speaker 5 (10:25):
Well, unfortunately, in the next part, I'm about to tell
you about how all of that is about to increase exponentially.
Speaker 4 (10:31):
Yeah, talking of things that are increasing, actually increasing. We
still just have to do two advertisements every show, so
we'll get me one of them now, all right, we
are back.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
I hope you enjoyed those adverts here.
Speaker 4 (10:46):
We had some new ones for like a religiously sansient gold,
which I'm very exciting about. This is one thing Jesus loved.
It was money change. There's a lot of stuff in
the Bible about that.
Speaker 3 (10:58):
I think silvers actually, right.
Speaker 4 (11:01):
Yeah, I think big precious metals. Guy, love to see
currency speculation. Okay, let's talk about Djibouti, a place where
the United States has a big base that it is
using for housing people that it's renditioning to other countries.
Speaker 3 (11:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (11:19):
So when we first recorded this, we were just doing
a Djibouti update about the men who were renditioned to
South Sudan, and we knew at the time that there
was another Journey Aviation jet about to take off. And
now we know what happened with that flight. It landed
(11:39):
again in Djibouti, and two days later DHS announced that
it had renditioned five more people to the country of Swatini,
which I've been to. I reported there in twenty eleven,
I spoke to teachers who were starving because they hadn't
been paid for eight months by the king, who you
know is the last absolute monarch in Africa. And you know,
(12:03):
the teachers that I spoke to were terrified to disappear
into the prisons that these five men have now been
renditioned to. I worked with another independent journalist named Alex Plank,
and we published a story using OSIN to prove that
that journey flight to Djibouti was carrying the five men
(12:26):
and from there they were transported by a C seventeen
US military you know, huge aircraft that flew with its
transponders off from Djibouti to Swatini to deliver these men.
Speaker 4 (12:40):
Seems like that is the emerging standard for these military
deportation flights, right at least for the final leg.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
Yeah, so the last week has been pretty crazy.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (12:52):
An Omni seven sixty seven did a removal flight to
a couple places in Africa, and at least two and
perhaps three large military jets also did removal flights from
the United States, landing in Gemo just for fun, and
landing in different countries in Africa. Now, the interesting thing
(13:16):
about that and about journey is that until this past week,
Africa and Central Asia have really been the purview of
this other ice air operator that's really gone under the radar,
but I think it's possible might be doing some things
(13:38):
that are even more sinister than your usual ice air flights.
So this company is called Aircraft Transport Service. They are
Florida base, but they are now all of their aircraft
are based in Mesa, Arizona, which is an ICE hub,
and they're at the end of their five year contracting
(14:00):
these special high risk removals to dangerous areas or with
you know, allegedly dangerous migrant passengers. Their flights really began
to spike in mid February up until July fourth. They
have five private jets that they lease from their owners
(14:24):
to operate these flights. And I've looked at all of
their flights and it's not clear if they are doing
any flights that aren't ICE, but certainly at least most
of their business is ICE. And so I've tracked nineteen
(14:45):
different trips, different ice removal trips that they've done since
February eighteenth, and most of these have gone to countries
in Africa, and that really began to surge around April
twenty ninth, And what I've noticed is that on June
(15:07):
twenty six, New York Times published a story about, you know,
the Trump administration is pressuring all of these countries to
accept more of these third country removals, and there's a
lot of overlap between that list of countries and the
countries that ATS has been landing in for the last
(15:29):
four months. There is a pair of flights in particular
that I find pretty alarming. They went out within thirty
minutes of each other on May twentieth, which was the
same day that the flight to Djibouti, when the flight
that was supposed to go to Sausudan and these flights,
(15:54):
so these flights started doing their usual ice removal route,
which is, you know, MESA, maybe we stop in Fort
Worth to pick up more migrants, then you do a
fuel stop in San Juan, you do another fuel stop
in Senegal, and then you go wherever you're going to
go in West Africa. These flights, thirty minutes apart from
(16:16):
each other, flew directly from San Juan to Mauritanium and
we're on the ground for thirty minutes, and then from
there flew to Senegal. You know, I can't prove anything
because ICE does not communicate about its air operations at all,
(16:36):
you know, unless they feel like it because they want
to brag about it, or because you know, they're ordered
to bite courts. These flights to me seem particularly alarming
as possible flights where there could have been third country
removals that we don't even know about. And Marissa Cavas,
she's an independent reporter who has a site called the
(16:59):
Handbass Get. At the end of April, she reported that
there was a third country removal that hasn't gotten a
lot of attention, and I don't know why, because it's
really messed up. A third country removal of an Iraqi
man to Rwanda, which happened on April fourth, after he
legally migrated to the US. He was accused of murder
(17:20):
in Iraq. There's incontroversial evidence proving that he did not
commit this crime. He wasn't even in Iraq when it happened,
but the Biden administration continued with his removal. And because
he couldn't go back to Iraq because he would have
been executed, they had been looking for a safe third
(17:42):
country for him. They did not finish that when they
handed the keys over to the Trump administration. So on
April fourth, he was removed to Rwanda. And he has
a lot of media contacts and no one has heard
from him. I have not seen a report him, you know.
I tried to contact his family, was unsuccessful. I contacted
(18:05):
his attorney and didn't hear back. So ATS operated a flight.
It began at about eleven thirty on April second to
this Fort Worth Airport that's right next to an ICED
attention center San Juan, Senegal, and then landed in Nairobi.
(18:25):
Now Nairobi is not Kigali in Rwanda, but they're only
about an hour apart, and if you look at the
flight data, the aircraft at that point had been operating
for about twenty three hours straight, which is stretching the
boundaries of legality, even if you.
Speaker 3 (18:42):
Have two crews. So there's a lot of.
Speaker 5 (18:45):
Reasons why ICE might have taken him to Nairobi and
then done something else for the last leg I think
the most likely explanation is that the crew had to
rest and I decided that they didn't want to wait,
So they may have chartered a local puddle jumper to
(19:05):
take them, you know, over the lake to Kika.
Speaker 4 (19:09):
It's pretty common, I think to when I've flow into Kikali.
I think I've stopped in Kinshasa and Nairobi. I don't
know if it's a big planes can't land there. It's
just the kind of the way it works. Fewer people
are flying to Kigali directly from the USO Europe than
are going to places like King Shasta, Nairobi, so it
might just be that they don't do direct flights. But yeah,
I don't think I've ever done a direct big plane
(19:32):
flight right.
Speaker 5 (19:33):
It seems that the only aircraft going in and out
of there are going to Nairobi and Kampala, and from
there you connect somewhere else.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
It's a pretty small airport, so.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
So yeah, that's ATS.
Speaker 5 (19:45):
They've kind of flown under the radar because global x
is doing so much more in terms of numbers. But
I think it's quite possible that ATS's mission for the
past few months has been to sort of pilot program
small amounts of third country removals to these different countries,
(20:08):
just like omar Amin. Because after omar Amin was sent
to Rwanda, the State Department sent a cable that Mrsakabas
obtained saying, oh man, it totally worked. This is great.
Let's send ten more people.
Speaker 4 (20:21):
At a cost to one hundred thousand per head, right
right again, maybe suggesting carcerational one hundred grand is going
to cover more than your paperwork, you know.
Speaker 5 (20:32):
Right, And just to be clear about, you know, the
cost all of these military flights that have been flying
around Africa now doing isis dirty work.
Speaker 3 (20:42):
Those cost about.
Speaker 5 (20:43):
Twenty eight five hundred dollars an hour to operate, and
of course cost is the least important thing here. But
my god, you know, for an administration that claims to
care about government.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
Waste, yeah, this is ridiculous.
Speaker 4 (21:00):
We don't know how much they're paying people in South
Sudan or the monarchy of a Swatini. We don't know
what they're sort of bribing these people to accept. I
just checked with Mauritania. It's currently a Level three State
Department travel warning telling people to reconsider travel due to
terrorism and crime.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
That's why we're sending people.
Speaker 4 (21:18):
I have explained the many and varied human rights abuses
that have happened in Mauritania on the show before, so
you can go back and listen to other episodes. Do
you want to want to hear about those hundreds of Mauritanians,
if not thousands, entered the United States in the tail
end of the Bid administration. I'm thinking like it was
(21:40):
late summer of twenty twenty three when I recall seeing
many of them. Just in my workdown at the border,
we often get very hot, like September's octobers in southern California,
and a few times I've come across Mauritanian people who
were in really bad shape just during those sort of
hot months, and it's sort of stuck with me that,
like some of the stories they had were horrific treat
(22:03):
and I'm sure that it's some of those people who
are now being sent back and just the fact that
they tried to leave will have made things even worse
for them.
Speaker 5 (22:11):
So yeah, I mean, these flights going to Mauritania, which
includes one of the military flights last week, you know,
slavery still exists in Mauritania. There's a minimum of ninety
thousand people there who are still enslaved. That's the low
end of the estimates. And you know, it's been illegal
(22:32):
since nineteen eighty one, but the practice is really protected
by a culture of secrecy, not just among Mauritanian elites,
but the multinational corporations who are embedded there and will
just kind of look the other way while they're you know,
extract natural resources with people in the minds that like
(22:53):
they're not really going to check if they're enslaved or not. So,
you know, maybe we're doing third country deportations and removals there.
Maybe we're just sending Mauretanians back to a really horrible place.
Speaker 4 (23:07):
Yeah, and it doesn't humanly matter, right, We're sending people
back to a place where they are very likely to
be tortured, to be as you say, like faust, to
unfree labor, to be incarcerated without having committed a crime.
Doesn't really matter whether people want.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
It's fucked.
Speaker 4 (23:23):
The embassy doesn't let us people drive around Mauritania at night,
have to be in the capital, They can only walk
in certain places. Give an idea of like how this
double standard is applied. Talking of multinational corporations, I would.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Love to hear from. So let's do that now.
Speaker 4 (23:45):
All right, we are back and we were talking about
the safety of private jets. Some of these flights have
some pretty horrific safety practices, right, and this, like when
you mentioned this, it instantly reminded me of a thing
that I have had no luck trying to sell stories
on for four years. It is standard practice for I
(24:07):
and CVP to transport children, children in their custody without
proper child seats or other restraints, right, which is you know,
to my knowledge, you can get a ticket for that
in some states. Right, Like if you're driving a child,
like you put a little two year old in the
seat without a like a child seat that they have
to have, Like, rightfully, you're endangering that person's life. But
(24:31):
apparently our government's doing it every day.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
Yeah, I mean the law doesn't apply to the upholders
of the law, right, right.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
Yeah, many such cases.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
Many such cases which I'm about to explain more.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Yeah, let's learn some more.
Speaker 5 (24:43):
So these ice flights, you know, most of these are
happening on larger jets A three twenties, owing seven thirty
sevens inside the cabin. REPUBLICA has done some really good
reporting on this from April. There's another outlet called Capitol
and Maine that also did a terrific story in twenty
twenty one, and the University of Washington also has a
(25:05):
lot of research and information on what it's like inside
the cabin of these planes. And you know, as a
former flight attendant, I find it fucking disgusting and really unsafe.
Flight attendants on these flights are not allowed to look
at or speak to migrant passengers. They aren't allowed to
(25:25):
serve them food or water. All of the migrants on
these flights are shackled wrist to ankles, and some of them,
if they're allowed or distressed or just annoying, the ice
guards are wrapped in restraint blankets and harnesses and have
hoods put over their faces. Just this morning, JJ and DC,
(25:46):
one of the ice air trackers on Blue Sky, posted
a video of a migrant passenger in a hood being
loaded onto Avello Jet in Seattle and he's being pushed
by three ice guards and falls to the ground face
first and then they just sort of man handle him
back up the stairs.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (26:06):
So, you know, as a former flight attendant, I just
want to say, in the event of an emergency, how
the fuck is a flight attendant supposed to evacuate the
passengers in ninety seconds when their seat belts are getting
tangled in their handcuffs? And all they can do is
shuffle down the aisle when they can't see because they
have a hood over their head. If the cabin loses pressure,
(26:29):
how can they reach up for their oxygen masks when
their handcuffs are attached by a chain to their leg irons.
How are they going to get the mask on themselves
if they're wearing a hood? How are they going to
get their life fests on when they can't reach back
to wrap the strap around their waists? And these emergencies
are not theoretical. We know from court filings that between
(26:53):
twenty fourteen and twenty twenty one there were six emergency
evacuations of Ice air flights. Of those incidents, the evacuation
times of only two are known, and they took two
and a half minutes and seven minutes. And to be clear,
we only know about those evacuations because of lawsuits. So
there may very well have been more evacuations since twenty
(27:15):
twenty one and we just don't know about it.
Speaker 4 (27:17):
Yeah, I mean it's likely right, like the Biden administration
did it, especially when they were deporting Haitian people, like
huge numbers of flights.
Speaker 5 (27:26):
Right until May and June September twenty one, when Biden
did the Haitian mass deportation. That was the highest amount
of deportations that witness at the border has recorded.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (27:39):
That was also the last time I was able to
write about Biden's administration policy NBC. I think I crossed
the line saying something mean about Uncle Joe.
Speaker 3 (27:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (27:52):
Yeah, but we should be very clip. This has been
a bipartisan thing.
Speaker 3 (27:56):
Oh yes, oh yes.
Speaker 5 (27:57):
So on each of these flights there is generally one
or two ICE officials and at least fifteen ICE contracted guards.
Migrant passengers have reported being verbally, physically, and sexually abused
by these guards, and flight attendants on board have no
power to stop them. In twenty seventeen, ninety two migrant
(28:19):
passengers traveling from the US to Ethiopia were left shackled
on a plane in the car Senegal for twenty three
hours because the crew timed out. They were kicked, dragged,
tied up, threatened by ICE guards, and when the labs
filled up, they soiled themselves. Flight attendants report that the
(28:42):
guards on these flights regularly ignore their safety commands and
will even you know, try and narc on them. They'll
complain to the flight attendant's supervisors at their airlines when
they're asking people to follow federal aviation regulations, it's like
everyone else in America has to do. But when flight
(29:03):
attendants have complained to the FAA about this, the FAA
defers to ice. You know, this is not just a
matter of like it's disrespectful, two dangerous flight attendants. You know,
this is extremely dangerous. And one of the most important
parts of aviation safety is something called Crew resource management
(29:24):
or CRM. This is something that all pilots and flight
attendants are trained in every year and have to retrain
every year, and basically CRM boils down to pilots need
to listen to the flight attendants about safety, and flight
attendants are trained to be assertive with the pilots about safety.
This was developed after a notorious incident in the nineteen
(29:46):
seventies where a plane was on the ground, it was
filling up with smoke, and the pilot ignored flight attendants
please to evacuate, you know, just for some like garden
variety sexism probably, and everyone on board died of smoke inhalation,
two hundred and eighty people. So after that, crews are
trained every year to really flatten the hierarchies. You know,
(30:08):
I think people think like, oh, the captain has four
epaulets and the first officer has three, and you know,
oh hierarchy. No air crews are actually very like the
hierarchies are flattened intentionally on purpose. They train to flatten
it across job titles, across gender, education, racial cultural divides,
(30:28):
because it is safer to fly that way. When everyone
feels that, you know, they have a stake in safety
and they'll be heard if they say something about safety,
everyone else is safer. So if you've got these ICE
guards stepping into the middle of that, throwing their weight around,
(30:50):
overruling flight attendants and pilots, and the FAA isn't backing
them up, you have confusion about who's in power on board,
you have a total breakdow on a CRM, and so
beyond just like people physically being able to get off
of the planes, this is so unsafe to have this
kind of environment with these guards. So the last incident
(31:14):
I want to talk about was in June seventeen. To me,
this is the scariest one of all of the safety incidents.
There was an ice Air emergency. This flight landed it
was filling up with smoke. This is almost just like
the plane in the seventies the flight attendants told the
pilots to evacuate, and the pilots ignored them. A bunch
(31:35):
of people on board were hospitalized. We don't know how
many or who, but frankly, everyone on board could have
died from smoke inhalation very easily. And I really think
you can point to the presence of the ICE guards
here as a big factor in the failure to evacuate.
That is not how pilots are trained. So again, yeah,
(31:58):
if you're a flight attendant for pilot and you do
not want your airline to contract with ICE, now is
the time to tell them. Tell your union help flight
attendants for Global X and the Vello get jobs somewhere else. Ye,
you know, do whatever you can to slow this down,
because it is all about to increase if they get
their way.
Speaker 4 (32:19):
Yeah, jeez, that is fucking bleak. Yeah, yeah, you said
it's going to get bigger. Like let's talk about that,
Like can you kind of zoom out and explain Ice
Air to us, and like we've talked about these small
flights a lot, but like that's not the bulk of
the flights they do right right.
Speaker 5 (32:36):
So ice Air right now has twelve large jets, you know,
a three twenty seven thirty sevens chartered from different airlines
that they're using for their deportations, and then these private
jets are you know, used less for these smaller, high
risk deportations. They're running like thirty thirty five flights a
day at this point. So May twentieth turned out to
(32:59):
be like kind of a big day for is air
because that was the Djibouti flight. That was when ATS
started using the Tyson callsign. It's also the day that
the larger operation really just searched in activity. And you know,
the other flight trackers tell me that ice Air used
to take weekends and holidays off and they don't do
(33:20):
that anymore. They were deporting people on juneteenth and July fourth.
In May, ice operated a record number of flights, which
was at least one thousand and eighty three flights that
flight trackers recorded, one hundred and ninety of which were
removal flights and then the rest are like these internal
(33:40):
shuffle flights between different ice attention centers and return trips.
And then in June they set a record again with
one hundred and eighty seven flights, of which two hundred
and nine were removal flights. All of this data is
a witness at the border dot org and it's kept
by Tom Cartwright, who is a real hero. He has
(34:02):
been tracking flights basically by himself for five and a
half years and he publishes very detailed monthly reports. And yeah,
as you said earlier, you know he's been tracking this
through the Biden administration too, which is how we know that,
you know, the Trump deportation machine from the first term,
(34:23):
you know, Biden didn't really slow it down that much,
and now Trump is picking up the reins again and
surging it again. So the airlines right now that are
flying these larger removal flights are Global X also called
Global Crossing Airlines, a Vellow Airlines, Eastern Air and on
(34:44):
the international and except for ATS, who you know I
talked about earlier, has their own contract, all of these
carriers who fly for ICE are subcontracted through a flight
broker called CSI Aviation. CSI Aviation signed a five year
contract with the Biden administration last year that has been
(35:07):
paused because of a lawsuit from a rival flight broker
that wanted that contract. So since late February, CSI has
been brokering these flights on a six month no bid
contract that started at one hundred and twenty eight million
dollars and was quickly doubled and then went up to
two hundred and seventy four million, and then just a
(35:28):
couple of days ago, I don't think anyone else has
reported this, it was raised again to three hundred and
thirty nine million dollars.
Speaker 3 (35:34):
So they've got about sixty.
Speaker 5 (35:35):
Million dollars left on this contract for the next six weeks,
and that's before the huge windfall and funding that I
just got from Trump's big beautiful bill. The administration has
said it once to triple deportations, and right now they
just don't have the aircraft for that. And DHS On
(35:57):
Twitter and Instagram a couple of days ago they post
I said this really ghoulish meme that said fire up
the deportation planes, and there was like a skeleton lifting
weights with a caption that said my body is a
machine that turns ICE funding into mass deportations.
Speaker 3 (36:16):
So that's gross.
Speaker 4 (36:18):
Yeah, that was really weird. They've been doing a lot
of this like post stuff.
Speaker 5 (36:23):
Right, Like I said, they only have twelve jets right now.
Then they're flying those capacity, so they can't triple deportations
unless they start bringing in more airlines.
Speaker 3 (36:34):
So the other day.
Speaker 5 (36:35):
I posted a call to action to flight attendants and
to flight attendant unions saying, you know, if you don't
want your airline to do these flights, now is the
time to tell them.
Speaker 4 (36:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (36:46):
CSI Aviation is.
Speaker 5 (36:47):
Run by a man named Alan Way and his daughter,
Deborah Mastis. Alan Way is the former chair of the
New Mexico Republican Party. He's hosted a bunch of Trump
rallies over the years. He ran unsuccessfully for Senate and
governor of New Mexico in the past on an anti
immigrant platform, which local media at the time pointed out,
(37:11):
you know, well, you're mostly doing deportation flights, so that
would really be enriching yourself. His daughter, Deborah Masis, was
one of the fake electors in New Mexico during the.
Speaker 3 (37:22):
Twenty twenty election.
Speaker 2 (37:23):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (37:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (37:25):
She was subpoenut by the House committee investigating the January
sixth insurrection, and the New Mexico State Attorney General's office
investigated her. Eventually, they're not press charges because she and
the other fake electors claimed they didn't know they're fake
certifications were going to be used for anything illegal. And
(37:46):
the Project on Government Oversight has some pretty good reporting
on CSI aviation if you want to see.
Speaker 4 (37:51):
That, Yeah, yeah, we'll put it in the show notes.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
Like, yeah, insane.
Speaker 4 (37:57):
This whole thing is just like completely I would watch
or look at some of the footage from inside deportation
flights because it is inhumane.
Speaker 3 (38:06):
It's yeah.
Speaker 5 (38:08):
I mean, I hope that any flight attendants who are
forced to work these flights can find a way to quit.
But if they can't quit for financial reasons, because all
of these people are, you know, very underpaid, you know,
I hope that they can provide us with more information
(38:28):
about what is going on inside these flights.
Speaker 4 (38:31):
Yeah, definitely that will be at least give people a
chance to see what their tax dollars are being spent on.
Speaker 3 (38:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (38:37):
I mean, one of the things that I've been thinking about,
you know, terrorism is like a really loaded word that
gets misused a lot against black and brown people, But
I think that's the right word for all of these
removals because they're random, they're violent, they're targeting civilians for
political purpose, and their design to frighten the larger population
(39:02):
potential victims. Right, the Trump administration is trying to scare
all undocumented immigrants and anyone adjacent to them, since you know,
a lot of citizens are being arrested too.
Speaker 4 (39:15):
Yeah, or green cardholders, people with buckets of documents are
being deported a rendition right now.
Speaker 5 (39:21):
And they're saying, you know, they're trying to make them
so scared that if they don't self deport they could
end up in South Sudan, they could end up in Mauritania.
You know, that's what this policy is designed to do,
is to terrorize the people of this country.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
Yeah. Absolutely, it's pretty bleak.
Speaker 4 (39:42):
We have an encrypted email address, so if you are
I guess a deportation flight attendant and you would like
to talk to someone, I can pass it on to
give you. In two you might have your an encrypted
email address and you can plug.
Speaker 2 (39:56):
It if you do.
Speaker 3 (39:57):
Yeah, you can definitely leak to me on signal.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
Okay, yeah. Nice.
Speaker 4 (40:00):
We have cool zone tips at ProtonMail dot com or
cool zone tips at proton dot me. I believe they
both work. It's only encrypted if the address that it's
sent from is also encrypted, So in the symptance. You
would need a proton mail or you can cook up
your own encryption. Yeah, that would be the way to
get in touch if you want to get in touch this. Yeah,
(40:24):
this just fucking sucks, like and there's going to be
so much more of it in the next couple of
years with this budget, Like, this is going to become
what it already isn't everyday thing.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
This is going to become even more common.
Speaker 6 (40:36):
I know.
Speaker 4 (40:36):
They're also like they're doing some weird shuffle to avoid
sanctions with Venezuelan airlines.
Speaker 5 (40:41):
Right, yeah, they fly I believe it is, to Honduras
and then Venezuela flies their own plane to Honduras to
pick them up.
Speaker 4 (40:51):
Right, yeah cool, I'm sure that's you have a great
time when they get better Venezuela and Venezuela is also
offering humanitarian flights for its citizens stuck in Mexico right now. So, like,
if people want to do something about this, what can
they do?
Speaker 5 (41:06):
The first thing you can do is boycott Avello Airlines.
They are commercial airlines, so don't fly with them. You
can write to the airlines you use regularly right now
and tell them that if they are considering contracting with
Ice not to that you will boycott them too. You
can complain to the FAA about the safety issues on
(41:27):
these flights. I doubt that they'll do anything, but I
think there's value in saying something anyway. If you have
contacts in aviation or in any of the countries that
these people are being sent to, and you find something out,
you can leak to me on signal. And if you
work in aviation, tell your airline and your union right
now that you are not going to operate these flights.
(41:50):
And if you want to get started tracking flights yourself.
We need a lot of help, especially in the overnight hours.
A good first step is to go to Globe dot
adsb exchange dot com and in the general search window
type Tyson.
Speaker 4 (42:07):
You've been doing really, really great reporting on this, and
I'm sure people want to continue to follow it. It
is a shame that other outlets are not running it.
Speaker 3 (42:16):
But God bless them.
Speaker 2 (42:17):
Yeah, just try.
Speaker 5 (42:21):
Out there if you want to know what James is
talking about. There's a brief explanation at the end of
one of my stories that I've written recently at hard
g History dot ghost dot io. I have a couple
stories there about the recent flights to Africa, and you
can read the bottom and you'll find out what James
is talking about.
Speaker 4 (42:40):
Yeah, it's a little teaser for you, right, go get
the t Yeah.
Speaker 2 (42:48):
Okay, thank you for joining us. I'm sure we'll hear
from you again soon.
Speaker 3 (42:52):
Thank you, James.
Speaker 6 (42:56):
It Could Happen Here is a production of pool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from pools Zon Media, visit our website
foolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
now find sources for It Could Happen Here, listed directly
in episode descriptions.
Speaker 3 (43:12):
Thanks for listening.
It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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