ICE Uses Celebrity Loophole to Hide Deportation Flights

Summary

For years, the country’s rich and famous have used a little-known Federal Aviation Administration program to shield their private jets’ flight records from public view — among them Taylor Swift, Oprah Winfrey, and Steven Spielberg. Now this decades-old program has a new client: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency carrying out President Donald Trump’s mass deportations. To obscure its planes, which ship immigrants out of the country on deportation flights, ICE is taking advantage of a longstanding program created by the private jet lobby, The Lever can confirm. For years, the scheme has allowed celebrities and Wall Street CEOs to partially block their flight data from public view. Its use by the Trump administration’s immigration enforcers is part of a mounting effort by ICE and its contracted private charter airlines to keep the planes’ flight paths hidden from the public. CNN first reported on the trend, noting that ICE’s charter airlines were requesting some of the planes in their fleets be scrubbed from public flight tracking sites. Deportation flights — like Swift’s private jet, whose enormous carbon footprint has stoked public outcry — can still be tracked in real time using other public data. But ICE’s use of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)’s private jet blacklist underscores how a growing push for privacy by the corporate jet lobby is being deployed to limit public oversight of ICE’s draconian immigration crackdown. Activists and journalists have for many years tracked ICE’s secretive deportation flights, which critics say subject passengers to cruel and inhumane conditions. People being flown out of the country by ICE are frequently shackled for the duration of the journey, and advocates have documented a pattern of medical neglect on the planes. As one ICE Air flight attendant told ProPublica this spring, a disaster on one of the flights is likely “only a matter of time.” The charter airlines to whom ICE pays enormous sums for de...