There is a group of people who monitor deportation flights out of Boeing Field, and other airports.

The observation room at Boeing Field offers what is arguably America’s best real-time window into our vast network of privately run deportation flights, a system that has generated troubling reports of passenger mistreatment and in-flight emergencies.
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While news organizations have reported on some of these incidents aboard what the government calls ICE Air, key details about how the system works would still be hidden were it not for a group of researchers who are now part of the work inside the observation room.

The people and organizations behind these flights have been playing dumb for years — they don’t want to talk about them. They drive busses loaded with people right up to the boarding stairs for these planes; they position jailers and vehicles to obscure any view of the people being herded into the planes. They don’t want us to know about them.

The Washington human rights center’s investigation of ICE Air began in 2018 with a modest goal: to prove that deportation operations took place at King County International Airport, as Boeing Field is officially known. Liberal local officials had enacted various “sanctuary” policies to insulate their residents from then-President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigrants, but they were unaware (or could at least claim to be unaware) of ICE flights at the county-owned airport. “They all played dumb,” said Maru Mora Villalpando of the immigrant rights group La Resistencia. “All of them were like, ‘Wait, what, there are deportations happening here?’”

Yes, we know they are, thanks to dedicated defenders of civil liberties who try to monitor these flights.

The center began gathering documents that proved it, and also hinted at the worldwide breadth of ICE Air’s network. Their investigation grew. Through records requests to ICE, and after interventions by Washington’s congressional delegation, researchers obtained an ICE Air database spanning eight years of global operations: 1.73 million passenger records from nearly 15,000 flights to and from 88 U.S. airports — Boeing Field indeed among them — and to 134 international airports in 119 countries around the world.

Those dang liberals in Western Washington state began shutting off support to these flights, and ICE began getting even more secretive about them.

A game of cat and mouse had begun, pitting the Trump administration — and later the Biden administration — against local sanctuary advocates.

First, ICE switched locations. It began charter operations out of a municipal airport in the small city of Yakima, located in the farming region about three hours east of Seattle.

But activists began showing up at the Yakima airfield, recording tail numbers and keeping count of people being deported.

Second, ICE changed its flight numbering system. The human rights center had disclosed in its 2019 report that it used the federally assigned prefix “RPN-” for “repatriate” to plug information into free flight-tracking websites and obtain a plane’s tail number and ownership. So ICE dropped the “RPN-” and adopted the call signs of its various charter companies.

Wait a minute…if these flights are perfectly legal, why is ICE trying to hide them?

I repeat: WHY ANY SECRECY AT ALL?

And why does ICE only release strongly edited, even blurred, images of detainees on flights? It’s almost as if they think we might see some brutality.

The 97 videos ProPublica examined, ranging in length from 22 seconds to almost 3 minutes, show signs of careful framing and editing. While detainees are commonly shown climbing the steps in handcuffs and the waist chains that secure them, the videos often cut to a new shot before leg shackles can make an appearance. When leg shackles are visible, they are typically out of focus, discernible only if you know to look for them.

It is common on ICE Air to place passengers in five-point restraints — wrists, ankles, and waists in chains — even as the agency’s own statistics show that less than half of the people deported in 2023 had any kind of criminal conviction, let alone for serious felonies that could suggest a possible risk to others on board.

What ICE’s online videos don’t show is revealing in its own right. In spring 2023, the center obtained a series of ICE Air incident reports detailing various accidents during charter operations, including the one in which a detainee in Alexandria, Louisiana, tumbled down the boarding stairs. Agency investigators recommended that contractors and subcontractors avoid such accidents in the future by placing a guard midway up the stairs to help detainees board and to catch any who lose their balance.

You will not be surprised that ICE has not bothered to place those guards, thanks to the diligent work of outside observers, documenting everything despite the best efforts of ICE to conceal them.

The flights continue. They will increase in numbers, if Republicans get their way.

But, you say, I am a native born American. I’m not at risk of deportation. Consider this: “A relatively overlooked set of companies whose shares have also seen stellar surges are the controversial American private prison firms. “

The immediate reading of the prison stock rally is that the Republicans have positioned themselves as ‘tough on crime’ – though former President Bill Clinton did much to bring the Democratic party to the game as well – meaning that the number of incarcerated persons under the Trump administration is likely to increase.

There are already about 1.9 million people in American prisons – about 0.5% of the U.S. population, estimated at 345 million in 2024 – per the data from the Prison Policy Initiative.

It is worth pointing out that the figure is comparable to incarceration rates in the USSR at the height of the infamous GULAG System. Adam Gopnik even wrote in 2012 that the U.S. has more people under ‘correctional supervision’ than the Soviet Union ever did.

(By the way, screw Bill Clinton, too.)

I think a clear sign of an expanding fascist state is the police hiding their activities, as well as an eager industry looking forward to building even more prisons.