By Ben Warren, bwarren@detroitnews.com
Charter flights out of the Willow Run Airport near Ypsilanti began carrying a new type of passenger in May: detained immigrants in ICE custody.
During the second half of 2025, charter flights operated by private Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contractors left Willow Run three times a week. Most of them sent detainees to deportation hubs in Texas and Louisiana, according to data shared with The Detroit News by Human Rights First, a nonprofit that advocates for refugee and immigrant rights.
Now, local activists are organizing a campaign to pressure the airport’s authority from allowing detained immigrants to fly out of the historic Wayne County airport, even though legal experts say the authority is powerless to stop the flights. Activists oppose the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and argue that Wayne County resources shouldn’t support the federal government’s goal of deporting 1 million people each year.
“Detroit and Wayne County have a long history of accepting immigrants from all over the world,” said George B. Washington, a Detroit-based immigration attorney.
He says a group of community members will demand that the Wayne County Airport Authority (WCAA) cancel the contracts of charter carriers that operate ICE flights at the WCAA board meeting on Wednesday.
“We want them to cancel these flights out of Willow Run,” Washington said.
The effort echoes a broader national strategy by immigration rights activists to target the airports and airlines that participate in ICE operations.
But Mark Schwartz, an attorney with the Troy-based law firm Driggers, Schultz & Herbst, said preventing ICE contractors from using the airport would amount to discriminating against carriers based on the purpose of the flights, which airports cannot do if they receive federal funding.
“As long as the charter operator is operating legally, the airport authority can’t stop the flights,” said Schwartz, who is a certified specialist in aviation law, as well as a pilot and flight instructor.
At least one pressure campaign against the operator of some of the charter flights has been successful. The budget carrier Avelo Airlines recently ended a contract with ICE after months of public backlash over its deportation flights out of an Arizona airport. Critics have organized protests at airports in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Connecticut, while state lawmakers in Connecticut and Delaware introduced legislation to block Avelo’s tax incentives in those states.
Avelo spokesperson Courtney Goff told The News that the ICE charter program “provided short-term benefits but ultimately did not deliver enough consistent and predictable revenue to overcome its operational complexity and costs.”
The three other airlines that operated ICE charter flights out of Willow Run in 2025 — GlobalX, Key Lime and Eastern Air Express — did not respond to emails or phone calls from The News.
Erica Donerson, the airport authority’s vice president of external affairs and communications, wrote in an email that the WCAA “does not have any involvement in agreements between airlines and their partners, including federal agencies, as long as those agreements meet legal and safety requirements.”
Donerson declined to address specific questions about the flights or confirm that ICE flights are taking place at Willow Run.
ICE’s Midwest and Washington, D.C.-based media offices did not respond to email requests for comment. The White House declined to comment and referred The News to ICE.
What the data shows
Human Rights First uses public flight-tracking data to build a database of deportation and domestic transfer flights, which it publishes in a monthly “ICE Flight Monitor” report.
Savi Arvey, director of research at Human Rights First, said her team uses patterns involving flight numbers, routes and operators to identify the flights. The process is built on the work of Tom Cartwright, a former Illinois-based banking executive who began tracking deportation flights in 2019.
Through the reports, the ICE Flight Monitor team tracks changing flight and deportation patterns that inform its advocacy work. The News also spot-checked individual flights in the ICE Flight Monitor data against records on the public flight-tracking website FlightAware. A News reporter and photographer also visually confirmed a Key Lime Air flight on the tarmac at Willow Run on Sunday.
Arvey said the federal government’s immigration crackdown in 2025 created a greater need for detention space and charter flights.
There are now nearly 70,000 immigrants in ICE custody, according to detention management data published on the agency’s website. And about 1,800 of those people are in Michigan’s five detention facilities on a given day, including 1,391 at North Lake Processing Center in Baldwin, the largest detention center in the state.
Arvey’s organization found that the number of ICE charter flights nationwide almost tripled between January and December 2025, increasing to more than 1,500 flights on 37 different planes.
“We’ve just seen this huge increase across the country of these shuffle flights given ramped-up interior enforcement,” said Savi Arvey, director of research at Human Rights First, which published the ICE flight data.
ICE Flight Monitor data showed that flights out of Willow Run began ramping up in June, the same month ICE reopened North Lake for immigration detention.
From July until the end of 2025, ICE charter flights departed Willow Run nearly every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday through the end of the year. The pattern continued into January 2026, with at least six ICE charter flights leaving Willow Run through the first two weeks of the new year.
Arvey said that all of the ICE flights from Willow Run in 2025 appeared to be domestic transfers, not deportation flights. “It doesn’t seem that people are being directly deported from that airport,” she said.
But Alexandria, La. and Harlingen, Texas — two of the largest deportation staging locations in the country — were common destinations. The data showed that 57 out of 88 ICE charter flights from Willow Run landed in Alexandria or Harlingen.
Information published by the Deportation Data Project, a group of lawyers and academics that uses Freedom of Information requests to obtain ICE data, further emphasized the relationship between the flights from Willow Run and deportations.
On Aug. 5, for example, a Boeing 737 operated by Eastern Air Express landed at Willow Run from Youngstown, Ohio. It picked up ICE detainees, then departed for Harlingen, Texas.
The plane landed at Harlingen’s Valley International Airport just after 1 p.m. Later that night, 44 people previously detained in Michigan were booked into ICE’s Port Isabel Service Processing Center, 30 miles from the Harlingen airport.
Ten of the detainees transferred from Michigan were deported within two days. Over the next two weeks, ICE removed all but one of them from the country.
How ‘ICE Air’ works
ICE Air Operations has two main components, according to its website: Air Charter Operations, which transports ICE detainees on chartered flights, and Commercial Air Operations, which escorts detainees on commercial flights. The charter wing of IAO is commonly called “ICE Air.”
“Air Charter Operations transports detained aliens ordered removed from the United States to their countries of origin, and transfers detained aliens domestically throughout the United States to various ICE-managed detention facilities and staging areas via charter aircraft,” a statement on ICE’s website says.
Despite that name, ICE doesn’t directly book flights with charter carriers. That job belongs to CSI Aviation Inc., an airline broker based in Killeen, Texas.
The company, which currently holds an annual contract worth $600 million, manages the portfolio of companies that operate the flights, according to USASpending.com, a federal government website that tracks spending. The language in the delivery order says the purpose of the contract is “to provide daily scheduled large aircraft & special risk charter flights to facilitate ICE’s enforcement and removal operations of illegal aliens.”
“In practice, what that entails is detained migrants are transported between detention centers in the U.S….on privately chartered planes at a cost of billions of dollars,” explained Phil Neff, a research coordinator at the University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights.
“There’s also an important role of commercial flights, particularly for deportations to places that are essentially not in Latin America,” he said.
The ICE Flight Monitor data does not include information about commercial flights, though in one recent case, two Detroit residents in ICE custody were taken to a detention center in Texas on a Southwest Airlines flight, according to Washington, the immigration lawyer.
But charter flights are “the central infrastructure of the detention-deportation pipeline,” according to Neff.
Four main air charter companies operated domestic transfer and deportation flights in 2025, according to the December ICE Flight Monitor report: Global Crossings Airlines (known as GlobalX), Eastern Air Express, Avelo Airlines and Key Lime Air, though Avelo announced earlier this month that it would stop operating flights for ICE.
GlobalX was the most active ICE charter operator last year, according to the ICE Flight Monitor report, responsible for 47% of all ICE charter flights nationwide.
But the Kansas City, Mo.-based Eastern Air Express flew most frequently out of Willow Run, operating 57 flights mostly to locations in Louisiana, Texas, New Jersey, Virginia and Ohio.
Key Lime, based in Colorado, was the second most active ICE charter carrier out of Willow Run, flying to Alexandria, La., 17 times. GlobalX flew 10 times from Willow Run to Louisiana, Texas and New Jersey; and Avelo flew just four times to Louisiana, Arizona and Florida.
Local activists want flights canceled
A group called Detroit Committee to Stop ICE is organizing Wayne County residents to voice their opposition to the ICE charter flights at the WCAA board meeting, said Heather Miller, a member of the group and longtime Detroit resident.
“We’re going to demand that they revoke all ICE contracts,” Miller said.
She told The News that the anti-ICE group “decided that this is a really good point to try to stop Trump’s deportation scheme.”
The WCAA is managed by an independent, seven-member board, currently chaired by Dennis Archer Jr., a Detroit investor and son of ex-Mayor Dennis Archer.
Archer Jr. did not respond to a phone call requesting a comment.
The board’s vice chair, Michael Ajami, a Michigan assistant attorney general, directed questions to Donerson, the WCAA spokesperson, who wrote in an email, “(t)ypically, we don’t facilitate interviews with our WCAA Board Members.”
Airport authority wields limited power
Calls for the airport authority to stop ICE contractors from operating charter flights out of Willow Run will likely go nowhere, according to Schwartz, the Troy attorney.
“My initial thoughts are that it’s going to be extremely difficult to discriminate on the purpose of those charter flights that are leaving the airport,” he said.
Schwartz said that even though the flights are operated by private companies, the ultimate customer is the federal government. For an airport like Willow Run, which receives much of its funding through grants from the Federal Aviation Administration and other federal agencies, preventing the flights could be problematic.
Willow Run opened a new taxiway earlier this month, funded by $54.6 million in FAA grants, plus $8.7 million from the State of Michigan.
“This is a granular attack on what they (activists) don’t like, which are deportation flights. But the airport authority has no power to stop it,” Schwartz said.
Even county-level action to stop ICE flights can run into tricky legal issues, according to Neff, the Washington-based human rights researcher.
Neff explained that a 2019 ordinance banning ICE charter flights in King County, Washington, was overturned after the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit. For a few years, he said, ICE flights moved to Yakima, in eastern Washington, instead. But in 2023, a federal court ruled against the county, deciding that a county ordinance could not block the flights.
The court decision hinged on the fact that the county originally leased the airport property from the federal government, meaning the feds had the final say.
Willow Run was briefly owned by the federal government during the 1940s, but the University of Michigan purchased it in 1947 and sold the airport to Wayne County in 1977 for $1.
State Sen. Darrin Camilleri, D-Trenton, whose district includes Willow Run Airport, agreed that it was unlikely the airport authority could stop the ICE charter flights, but said the flights were “horrible.”
He added: “It’s obviously not something I’m proud of or that our community is proud of … I don’t like that our airports are being used as facilitators for this type of movement.”
But others see the federal government’s immigration crackdown as the execution of a plan promised on the campaign trail.
“The American people support this,” said state Sen. Jim Runestad, a Republican from White Lake, noting that immigration was, in his view, the main issue that got President Donald Trump elected in 2024.
“There’s a strong will that first and foremost we get out the criminal element that came over the border,” Runestad said.
