44,000 immigrants, 1,700 flights, 100 days: a Guardian investigation of leaked flight data and government detention data reveals the inhuman
Maanvi Singh and Will Craft at The Guardian:
The Trump administration is shuttling immigrants around the US in irregular and unprecedented ways, according to the findings of a Guardian investigation, in effect vanishing people into a “purgatory” that denies them constitutionally – protected rights. A review of leaked flight records and passenger manifests from Global Crossing Airlines (GlobalX), the charter company that operates the majority of deportation flights for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), has provided a rare look at the winding journeys of more than 44,000 immigrants detained or deported by the Trump administration. The leaked data was provided to the Guardian, which has verified its authenticity. It encompasses about 100 days from late January to early May.
The Guardian reviewed GlobalX deportation flights as well as government detention data and interviewed attorneys, advocates, former officials and immigrants who have been through the system. The analysis has revealed that:
GlobalX carried out more than 1,700 flights for Ice, the vast majority of them between domestic US airports. The airline transported nearly 1,000 children, including nearly 500 children under the age of 10, and 22 infants.
For many immigrants, the flight paths were long, with multiple legs and layovers. Nearly 3,600 people were moved around repeatedly, forced to board five or more GlobalX flights.
Immigrants were also moved between detention facilities more than before. The average number of transfers per person has markedly increased in the past six months, and some detained immigrants have been moved as many as 10 or 20 times.
Detainees were moved around the US without notice, to locations far from their families, communities and legal counsel – leading to apparent violations of constitutional due process rights.
Along their journeys, immigrants say they were repeatedly kept in the dark about where they were going. Some say they were threatened by immigration agents with long-distance transfers and separation from their families if they did not accept voluntary deportation.
“It just seems so fundamentally inhumane,” said Sirine Shebaya, executive director of the National Immigration Project, a non-profit legal advocacy group. “The administration is using the system to make it as prohibitively cruel as it possibly can for the people going through.” Immigrants are being moved around via chartered flights operated by various private contractors, as well as by commercial airlines, buses and cars. But perhaps more so than any other transportation company, GlobalX, a Miami-based charter airline, has become a crucial tool of the US deportation machine – operating more than half of Ice deportation flights in 2024 and 2025. The company, which had initially marketed itself to sports teams and rock bands seeking to travel in luxury, now earns most of its revenue from its Ice contract. It was the airline the Trump administration tapped to move hundreds of Venezuelan men to El Salvador, despite a judicial order blocking the flight. It was also the operator of a now infamous deportation flight to Brazil during which multiple passengers fainted from heat exhaustion.
GlobalX did not respond to a request for comment. The leaked GlobalX flight manifests provide one of the most detailed views available of the scale and scope of Trump’s mass deportation scheme.
The US has always moved immigrants around – most commonly, when a detention center reaches capacity, officials transfer detainees to facilities with more available beds. But the Trump administration is now shuffling immigrants around more frequently than before.
The Guardian reports on how the Trump Regime’s mass deportation program causes immigrants to be in legal purgatory.
Read the full story at The Guardian.
